That's pretty much what a bitcoincard is supposed to do, but it doesn't have the memory for a full client.  An android app could do it using ad-hoc wireless or regular wifi and a piratebox as a hotspot.

http://www.strike-the-root.com/grover-and-annie

With regard to government research.

Compression is not likely to be worth it, and can violate ham rules against encryption.

"Automaticly" isn't really what ARRL is into promoting.

Yes, but keep in mind that your talking about transmitters in the 10's of kilowatts using commercial quality gear and very tall, low angle biased tower antennas.  In order to travel farther than 300 miles, the signal must be able to bounce off the F level of the ionosphere repeatedly without losing too much signal to be picked up by common receiver gear.  IMHO, start with a NVIS setup in order to get a good single bounce.  Keep in mind, a 300 mile radius is a lot of area.  If I did that in my home city near Louisville, Kentucky; using commonly available ham gear and a max PEP of 1500 watts, my signal should be clear from Chicago to Atlanta.  The same setup in Frankfort, Germany should be able to cover from Paris to Prague and Amsterdam, Munich, Berlin, Hamburg and maybe Milan.  It's not necessarily more cost effective to set up a full power shortwave station intended to wrap the planet compared to several well placed NVIS transmitters using gear at ham power levels.

Power consumption varies considerablely due to a number of variables, but about 300 watts is your top end limit, practically speaking.  Range with that kind of digital gear is more limited by line of sight issues than anything else at greater than 50 watts peak-envelope power, and is somewhere in the range of 10-15 miles radius with a high mounted mobile antenna of decent quality, or up to about 30 miles on a roof mounted stationary antenna.

Again, shortwave bands make those ranges look like crap, but are bandwidth limited, crowded and noisy.  A shortwave setup using a near-vertical incidental skywave antenna (NVIS) has a range radius of about 300 miles in all directions, and PSK-31 can do this with a peak-envelope power rating of under 10 watts.  Slow as hell, though; but it scales up bandwidth almost linerally, so 50 watts PEP is about right for PSK-250 to that same range for a clear enough signal to be picked up with common quality shortwave listening gear.

They consider strong encryption to be 'ammunition' under export law.  Rediculous, really, but it has zero effect upon bitcoin, because bitcoin doesn't actually encrypt transactions or any other broadcast data object.  The network is, generally, broadcast in the clear.  Secure hashing algos are not encryption algos.

Well, yes.  To licensed hams.  But the D-STAR off-the-shelf transcievers are usually cheaper anyway.

Packet radio is a crude form of wide area, time-division type mesh network.  Might be useful for relatively small areas, such as a medium sized city, but if the POTS system still works, regular phone modems would be better.  Hams don't really use packet much anymore.  Better systems are phase-shift keyed modes, such as PSK-31 and up.  PSK-125/250/500 are more robust, and generally has better range and practical throughput, than a 300 baud shortwave packet modem.  There are many other types of (software defined) soundcard modes to choose from, PSK was just the first in widespread use, and one of the simpliest to impliment.  Packet radio requires specially modifed modems, and specialized hardware is expensive.  Sound cards are not expensive anymore.  Hell, I can do PSK-31/63/125 audio conversions on my android cell phone.

Modern hams willing to invest that kind of money into specialized mode gear just tend to skip the packet modem and go for a full blown digital transciever with built-in software defined capabilities.  Much better capabilities and costs about the same.

EDIT:  Really, some of this gear is truely impressive.  If you've ever seen some of the modern digital transcievers that cops use in their cars these days, hams have had that kind of gear for over a decade now.  A commercially available digital radio with 'meshable' computer capablities, called D-STAR, makes anything that you've heard of so far look about as advanced as morse code.  A 50 mile, two hop, mesh connection while in a moving vehicle isn't even pushing the margins anymore.

A torrent of the blockchain would do well, to a point.  The torrent file would have to be updated on a regular basis though.  Perhaps the magnet file is what you would broadcast occasionally on your transmitter.


Not even close.


Not multiple connections.  There really wouldn't be 'connections' per se.  There is the transmitting station and the listening stations, data flows one way, in a one-to-many format.  A computer using much wider bandwidth sound cards (64, 128 bit) can listen to a muc wider band of the radio specturm at once, and could receive data from two ajacent stations, but it can't tune to tow distinctly different channels at the same time; that would require two sondcards at least, likley two different shortwave recievers as well, unless you've got the skills to bypass the tuner an access the internal frequency of the reciever.  The bandwidth of the signal is limited by the transmitter gear, power requirements, and clear frequency bandwidth on a shortwave band.  Shortwave is a worldwide set of bands that most americans have no experience with, and they are crowded.

Prevent it, no.  Interfere with it, yes.  The problem with a moonbounce is that it requires not just some high quality transmitters with highly directional dish antennas with accurate moon tracking gear, but due to the distance & scatter issues with a moonbounce, the receiving gear has to be pretty high end as well.  So it takes a relatively low power jammer to screw with that, or a high quality one also pointed at and tracking the moon.  If you turned up your transmission power high enough to overcome a moonbounced jammer signal, they would be able to identify your transmitter from orbital sats due to the signal leakage of your dish.

Normal shortwave is much simpler, and much more effective, IMHO.  The receiving gear is much cheaper, more widespread (outside of the United States) and the decoding gear is just a regular computer with a 16 bit soundcard.  Sure, it'd be difficult to transmit the full blockchain, or maybe even full blocks once they start really filling up, but both block headers and loose transaction data could be transmitted continuously up to a certain point.  The real beauty of the p2p network system is that not all the data must come from the same source.  If your broadcast only transmitted the last block header and the myrkle tree, smarter clients than are currently available could piece together full blocks by collecting the loose transaction data from other sources, and there will be other sources, evenif it's only the occasionally smuggled blockchain on a usb drive two days out of date.

Probably so.  We assume anyway.  We have no more evidence that ancap can't work than they have that it can.  What you argue for is the status quo; because you have no evidence that things could be better, you'd rather stick with the devil that you know.  I can understand that position, actually; because I'm of the same vein.  I'm as vested in this broken system as much as anyone, and would have much to lose if the US government were to collapse within the next decade.  And that is something that I need to change rather quickly because it will collapse, in some catastrophic manner or another.  I'm wise enough to have long understood that Social Security is a generational scam, and old enough to hope that I might make it so that I might be able to get some of my money back.  But now there are talks to avoid (not going to happen) this "fiscal cliff" that involve raising the standard eligibility age to 67.  Even if that doesn't happen now, it has to happen before I turn 65 if there is going to be any chance at all at there still being a meaningful amount of spending power in that monthly check.  If these government social services are not reformed soon, the Millinials will take over the electorate (probably before the next presidential election, maybe before the mid-terms, but soon) from the Boomers, and they are as likely to destroy those programs as reform them.  Many of the ancap people that you are arguing with are those very Millinials, who have little, if any, vested interests of their own into the status quo.

And yes, I am fully aware that SS is screwing the younger generations, but I'm also aware that I got screwed too.  Two wrongs dom't make a right, and I'd not cry in my soup if the SS system were to implode efore I made it, but I am not shy about taking the spoils that I can get if the system is still there whtn I arrive.

No doubt some will try.  I question their practical effectiveness.

Yeah, that's the part that seems fishy.  There is more likely more to this story than he's sharing, IMHO.

There are many examples of social movements that had no precedent.  The end of slavery was one such movement.  No one could say who would pick the cotton, but the cotton still gets picked.  We don't need an example of such an existing society (although we actually do have a couple of examples that were pretty close) in order to point out the flaws in the current system.  I'm not an ancap either, in part because I am concerned about it's weaknesses & stability, but using the fact that no such societies exist is not an argument that they cannot.

I'd like you to explain how the non aggression principle could lead to a monopoly on force, because I can't see it.

Really, no matter how you look at it, the NAP is expressed as a social more in every major religion on Earth.  In judeo-christian history, it's the golden rule.  In the book Whatever Happened to Justice? Rich Maybury did a wonderful job showing that it's not possible to find a moral code that does not have a similar principle expressed for members of the tribe, it's in the exceptions that these moral codes differ.  The NAP has no exceptions, not for those who would portend to serve God, nor those who serve government.

An example of what?

BitcoinSpinner

Well, that is already happened, and I have such an android phone capable of doing exactly that.  However, I still want a bitcoin card.  Maybe several.  Give one to each of my kids, and buy a base station for my house, and I could track them within a couple of blocks.  The ability to use it as a bitcoin client as well might be entirely secondary.

Not only that, your cell phone can track you globally, and report that data to anyone over your data service.  The bitcoin card can only track you relative to it's base stations within a store, and can only report those movements to those base stations until it's beyond the reach of that store.  This makes tracking a particular individual rather difficult, unless your goal is to actually tail a particular person who has a bitcoin card number that 1) you know and 2) you have a mobile base station to track them with.  The bitcoincard doesn't have the capacity to track using GPS, nor the ability to transmit that data beyond a couple of blocks.  The street cameras in London can track your movements better than a bitcoin card could.