I dont think you would need a unique protocol. The user could just use a monti-carlo algorithm to search for the cheapest route between point a and b. It would then test the route and if one of those nodes was a troll or if the bandwidth or latency were to low it would simply test the next cheapest route untill it found a series of suitable nodes. The reason you shouldnt need a unique protocol is that you can imagine pulling out a physical map with the nodes marked on it and looking for the shortest distance then physically connect to the first node then going into the settings on that node to manually forward all of your traffic to the next node ect.. until you get to your destination. Since i could imagine how it could all be done manually the best way would probably just be to design some software for the end user (presumably an android app) that would mimic this process. The difficulty in designing protocols to efficiently transmit data in a mesh network should be solved by the price signals given off by each node.

Of course for the above mentioned to work a map of the network that is as accurate as possible would need to be maintained at all times. So imagine a firm coming into existence to service this market niche, the nodes would send data about nodes adjacent to them to this firm for free since it would be good advertisement and the end user could purchase the maps from this firm. For a new node first connecting to the network it could request a map from an adjacent node that would presumably be out of date but still good enough to find some sort of route (efficient or otherwise) to get that initial connection to the firm that sells more up to date network maps.

The beautiful thing about a market is that you shouldnt need to actually design this software. Each actor can play a very minor role and price signals will bring it all togather into a beautiful system. if you broadcast the wan than there will be an untapped resource just laying around, others should respond to this by designing software because it is in their interest to harass untapped resources. Similarly you shouldnt need to create the map server either since there will be as of yet unclaimed profit to be made in providing that service.

"if you build it they will come"

of course take all this for a grain of salt, im sure as hell not a networking expert im just a guy who loves interesting thought experiments.

i was thinking about it a little more and i realized the first really useful thing this service could do is to allow people to stay connected to their home internet with their smart phones/tablets even when they were out of their homes. This would be much cheaper and much faster than a data plan and consumers wouldnt have to pay extra for a phone with 3g functionality. In-order to cover the whole city area pay your friends a profit share in order to get them to allow you to place nodes in their homes.

as stated previously, if you build it i will buy it! (as long as it doesnt cost more than a few hundred dollars to fabricate)

Its a really great idea. You as the user would simply load the most resent map of the network and chose your preferred tradeoff between speed and price but on the macro level this would coordinate the flow of data in the most economically efficent manner for the network as a whole by virtue of adam smiths invisible hand. It would also quickly lead to truly pervasive worldwide internet (all though it would undoubtedly be pretty expensive in rural aferica for a while).

The other really great thing about your idea is that there is no need for any formal organizational structure, no one needs to create a project, build a factory or start a foundation, all that needs to happen is for one guy somewhere to broad cast a wide area network from his house and allow people to forward any sort of traffic they want through it for any reason for a small BTC fee and soon others would copy him. For a long time it would offer a totally different service than the internet but it would grow and then eventually we would wake up one morning realize that it had morphed into the internet 2.0 and no one would be quite sure when that had happened.

Another really great thing about this is no one needs to be charitable. Some enterprising entrepreneur could create the devise and sell it and he could make a profit, I would be willing to buy the devise from him because i could just plug it into the wall and start collecting btc and make a proft and my neighbors would be willing to pay me to use the service because it would allow them to play games and share files with irl friends who lived in the same city much more quickly and with much lower latency than could be achieved through the internet.

Simple, bitcoin isnt designed to be a store of value, infact by virtue of the fact that it will almost certainly return to its intrinsic value of 0 some day it is terrible as a store of value. bitcoin is designed to be the ultimate medium of exchange, nothing else. What this means for you is that you should price your items in something thats primary function is as a store of value like ounces of gold but require payment in something thats primary function is a medium of exchange like bitcoin.

This isnt insoluble. Build it into the protocol so that when someone rates a seller their rating is multiplied times the amount of coins used in the transaction. This way positive ratings for more expensive items would be waited proportionately. As a buyer you would only buy expensive items from sellers who gradually worked their way up to being able to sell high dollar items one step at a time. When a potential buyer does a search advanced filtering options could allow them to weed out sellers who had no reputation for consistency in selling high dollar items.


i think you may be missing the point a little here. No one would "own" this service any more than anyone "owns" the bitcoin service.


the moment it is no longer an organic anarchic solution i no longer have any interest, i may as well just use ebay.


perfectly understandable, but i feel differently, i personally do not need 100% assurance that my transaction will be smooth. i would be fine with knowing that there is a 1% chance that i will not receive my product in exchange for having a truly free market. Another way to look at it is that a company will always charge a commission even bitmit charges a very reasonable 2%. The system i describe would charge no commission so this would, atleast to some degree, offset the fact that transactions could not be insured.

The difficulty cannot increase or decrease by more than a factor of 4 in a single adjustment, specifically to avoid this problem. Note that even though this means confirmation times may be up to 4 times longer than normal for 8 weeks, each such confirmation will be 4 times as secure as a "normal" one, since 4 times the normal amount of processing power was required to produce it. It is the total difficulty of the blocks, not the sheer number of blocks, that is important (eg, in the event of conflicting blockchains, the one with the highest total difficulty, not the greatest number of blocks, is considered the correct one).
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Someone else was alluding to the idea that the government couldn't acquire processing power equivalent to 30,000 modern video cards but i would wager they probably can. This post however put my mind at ease. As long as the community understands what you just explained to me than i dont think we would loose our shit and cause a run over waiting 40 minutes to confirm transactions instead of 10. Satoshi(sp) is such a god damn genius, how he foresaw and planned for everything down to such minute detail i will never understand, but i guess thats because im not any where near as smart as he is.

what happens when computers become so powerful and the community so large that less than 10 minutes is required to calculate a hash value less than 2?

Also what happens if the government waits till after one of those two week difficulty readjustment phases and then starts mining with massive server farms. Two weeks later after the difficulty readjusts to compensate for increased mining this the government shuts off all of its server farms causing the problems to become unrealistically difficult to solve. So for example if they could afford to double the computing power dedicated towards mining than during they next phase they could cause new blocks to be created every 20 minutes instead of every 10 minutes and it should take 4 weeks for everything to get back to normal instead of 2 weeks. Bitcoin might survive this but what if they increased 10 fold, then it would take 100 minutes to create a new block and 20 weeks to sort the problem out. Since bitcoin is a currency doubling or tripling the power of the collective mining pool and then pulling the rug out could cause a run which would destroy the purchasing power of bitcoins which would reduce the incentive for miners to mine which would cause the situation to take longer to resolve which could create a feedback loop of death.

The resent announcement by bitmit got me thinking. It is so its wonderful that we have a service like bitcoin that is impervious to government attacks due to its distributed nature but what good does this do us when the means to exchange bit-coins are still vulnerable. Is it possible to create a marketplace similar to bitmit only protected from government attacks for the same reasons that bitcoin is protected? I am speaking of a decentralized encrypted p2p ebay-esque auction service/marketplace, obviously utilizing bit-coins as the medium of exchange.

It would be simplified by the fact that there would be no need for an escrow service. Buyers would pay up front and be forced to trust sellers. Sellers would be able to generate unique ids. Buyers would apply positive or negative ratings to these ids at the conclusion of a transaction. buyers could look at the history of the sellers id in order to determine his trustworthiness. Important to ensuring the success of such a system would be the option for sellers to state their location and how far they are willing to drive in order to personally deliver a product. Buyers could then filter their search down to only items that are available for personal delivery. In this way it could usurp both ebay and Craigslist in one fell swoop. In order to maintain the integrity of the network sellers could be required to "earn" the right to post auctions by helping to maintain the network.

the only problem i still see is in preventing sellers from using fake transactions to create fake positive ratings for themselves. Hopefully someone smarter than me could figure that one out.

here is a blog where someone described something similar "http://evolvingtrends.wordpress.com/2006/12/14/p2p-to-destroy-ebay-google-yahoo-et-al/"

I dont think such a thing exists yet but is it possible? if it is possible is anyone working on it? if it is possible and no one is working on it is the idea out there? are other people talking about it?

I dont see how this explains the following problem. so say we have party a, which is myself, party b who is the other participant in the contract and party c who is law enforcement. I can see how this technology could be used for party a or b to prove to party c that each of us signed the contract, but if b claims that he did not sign the contract and a knows for a fact that he did, how could party a prove to party c that party b did infact sign? obviously a mutually trusted party d could be used but this is precisely what i am trying to avoid.

I apologize if im being dumb but public key cryptography is so hard for me to wrap my mind around. im currently attempting to gain an understanding however progress is slow, every article i read about it is either vague and doesnt explain the mathematics behind it and so is totally useless for attempting to truly understand it or it is INSANELY technical and i have no idea what the hell any of it means so its hard to bridge that gap.

thanks ill check it out, i have been thinking about using a blockchain for contracts for probably a year now but i could never imagine a way for party a to prove that party b had signed a given contract with out both parties registering keys with some central authority, and if a central authority is necessary than why even have the system. i had assumed it was imposable but i am excited about the prospect of being proven wrong.

THANKYOU! that reply is VERY much appreciated =)

im pretty excited to find that the general consensus is that this is a feasible idea. I am slowly working on learning computer programing but im no where near the level necessary to implement this system, so for those of you who read this try to get this meme out there, plant the seed so that it so that it may one day grow into something wonderful.

on some abstract level i dont disagree with anything you said. its like the paradox that the legitimate role for the state would be the protection of an individuals right to not be harmed, this could only be done by threatening transgressors with harm, meaning the logical course for the state would be to declare war on its self.

However if the majority supported the protocols and the protocols said that exchanges of property must be made voluntarily, the only force that could take your property from you would be the majority. of course the majority is a special interest group and who may do exactly what you said, but no law is required for them to be able to do this its a fundamental characteristic of our universe that the majority can get away with anything they damn well please. we have to try as individuals to steer their will in the direction we perceive to be most productive, i.e. from my perspective into acceptance of a set of minimalist protocols for ensuring property rights and protections against needless harm.

Anyway, the important point is that this is possible to make a block-chain that would allow for the keeping of a record of ownership and easy transfer of ownership of little blocks of data that contained latitude and longitude information.

people can enforce the law themselves or they can hire agents (private police) to do it for them. You dont need public police but you do need law. You dont need judges but you do need courts. I envision the minimalist state as a set of protocols clarifying what set of circumstances demonstrates private ownership of a given piece of property and what actions demonstrate common-law transgressions. Disputes could be settled by a group of volunteers, preferably that majority of the country/world, who could be selected for jury duty with a lottery like system. But like i said i dont want to get into the legal aspects of the idea. Even if some form of state is necessary this technology could remove the need for the state to claim dominion over another sector of our lives. also lets be clear, im not claiming the situation above is preferable to decentralized statism, im just trying to explore feasibility.

how about golding out or silvering out? would that make you feel better? =P

I love the idea of anti-statism however there is a problem with anti-statism that i have for years been unable to solve. free markets are the only presently understood method for overcoming the economic calculation problem. Free markets depend upon individual property rights to function. With out some form of presumably representative collectivist entity there is no method i have previously been able to imagine for differentiating between legitimate and illegitimate claims on property. Any form of collectivist entity with the authority to pick winners and losers certainly must be called a "state", for this reason i have not been able to imagine stateless capitalism.

I posit that maybe a system similar to bitcoin could be used to solve the for-mentioned problem and allow a realistic method for the implementation of anarcho-capitalism. For now, try not to think of this question in terms of legality because until we determine weather it is technically feasible, there would be no point. The following is my best guess about how such a system may be implemented.

I imagine breaking the planet into billions or maybe even trillions of little units. Each unit could be readable by anyone and would contain latitude and longitude data about the exact geographical position of said unit. Each unit would be registered with a corresponding public/private key pair. A person would prove ownership of the unit by demonstrating their ability to sign it over to a new public key which has a corresponding private key owned by themselves. If they wanted to transfer ownership they could sign the unit over to a public key which has a corresponding private key owned by someone else. Any unit which has had a single key pair for more than a given amount of time, for the sake of conversation lets say one year, would be considered stale and could be used to incentivize miners who would gain ownership of the unit when they solves the mathematical puzzle which grants them the right to add a new block to the block chain. Unfortunately, this would mean that property owners would need to update their keys annually but this really isn't a big deal because it solves another entirely separate problem at the same time, when bitcoins are lost its no big deal because they are infinitely divisible, but if to much property was lost over time eventually people would begin to starve to death. In order to combat trolls or destructive agents who would attempt to harm the network by spamming transfer requests, coins similar to bitcoins could be created with each new block and some token amount of these coins could be requested by miners in-order to write transfer requests into the block-chain.  Finally, a large "monument" could be built on each tectonic plate, changes in the position of the monument could be used to cancel out the effects of shifts in the tectonic plates.

well i think that's about it. On a final note, i don't want the readers to only attempt to pick apart the specifics of my assessment of how i think this could be done, because ill be the first to admit that i don't fully understand the technicalities behind how the bitcoin network functions. Im more looking for a dialogue on weather the general idea is possible, and how you think it could be achieved.

the fact that it uses digital signatures and not pki is i think exactly the piece of the puzzle i need to form a somewhat coherent picture. Thanks for all the great responses. One thing im still somewhat unclear on is once the network opens a new block it seals the old one correct. But if we are all adding information to the newest block after the block is sealed how does the network determine which version of the previous block is the newest one. Maybe when a node is searching to see weather or not it has the most accurate blockchan it also looks to make sure each block in the chain is independently longer than the blocks in its chain as well as checking to make sure the new chain has more blocks total.

*EDIT* Hi Chris DeRose!

I have been fascinated by economics, political theory, and monetary theory for some time, and it is through my self education in these fields i stumbled across bit-coin. Upon learning about bit-coin i became infatuated with the claims made by the bit-coin community. I well understand, as im sure many of you do, the nature of the invisible cage placed upon us by powerful banking interests through fractional reserve lending, debt based currency, and the monopolization of capital and the means of exchange. If bit-coins are truly what many claim them to be an independent, incorruptible, indestructible means of exchange than the potential for positive impact upon our planet by this community is of an unimaginable scale. There exists the potential for this community to be responsible for saving the lives of not just thousands or millions of lives, but billions maybe even trillions if we became an interstellar society in the future. So it would be an understatement to say that im interested in your work.

Clearly the next step for me is understanding, i want to fully understand how this software operates. I have a problem though, everything i read is either to broad to technical. For example i have this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTOhti7wxXk which goes over my head or this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjnM2shYIrM which explains nothing. So in essence what im asking for is a detailed explanation in English not techno-babel that required a doctorate to understand. I am like most members of my generation some what computer "literate" so your not talking to grandma over here but of course my understanding will be dwarfed by many on this forum.

As a base let me explain what i think i understand of bit-coins so far. Each member of the network has a record of all transactions which have ever taken place in the community. Each record of a transaction is called a block. Each block records the amount transferred, the address of the sender and the address of the recipient. The address of the recipient is a hash value of their public key. The record as a whole is called the block chain which is nothing more than every known block organized chronologically. Member nodes broadcast the length of their block chain to all of the nodes they are connected to periodically, the receiving node then compares the length of their existing block chain to that of the sender, if the receiver finds that his block chain is shorter than the senders, he will send a request to the sender for the entire block-chain. When a node initiates a transaction it adds that transaction to its block chain stating that node now has x fewer coins and the receiving node now has x more coins, the nodes connected to the transacting node would then see that the transacting node has a longer block chain and send a request for the update, eventually the receiver of the transaction would receive an updated copy of the block chain proving that he now owns x coins. Now for what i dont understand which greatly outweighs what i do. The network uses pki, but what exactly is being encrypted. What is to stop someone else from sending a message to the network stating that he is you and he transacts x funds to y account, im sure this is where the encryption comes into the equation but how. Also i understand what the theory behind the usefulness of proof of work systems, such as forcing a server to solve a problem before being willing to receive a message from it in order to prove that their is a cost involved for the sender limiting the potential profitability of spam, but i cant for the life of me figure out how it factors into the whole bitcoin equation. If im asked to solve a complex problem then rewarded for solving it, whos asking the question, what method is used to generate the problem. Also isnt it possible that two different public keys could return the same hash value, i know its unlikely but if people are using this service 100 years from now on a global scale there could be a LOT of transactions by then.

This message may seem confusing to some of you but it comes from my personal definition of understanding. I dont consider myself to understand something just because i can explain it or solve a problem relating to it. All through out my life i was so frustrated with public education because no one seemed to understand what it meant to understand, and no teachers ever required their students to be able to understand the material, only that they be able to answer questions correctly. To me understanding involves being able to draw a complex picture in my head accounting for all given variables and potentialities, explaining the relationships between how all parts of a system interact with all other parts, and right now im on a quest to understand bitcoin.

Also if i need to read a book or two then come back before understanding will be possible than let me know how to find it.

I apologize if i missed the plain English explanation somewhere else and have just wasted someones time. The FAQ page fails to meet my criteria of understanding, even i can tell with my limited understanding it leaves huge gaps while the technical paper is in that other language i dont speak.

Anyway now to just sit back and wait for the barrage of insults i get at every forum i ever try. If you are preparing to attack me though please find some grounds other than spelling or grammatical syntax errors.