If bitcoin did gain moderate adoption and the powers that be thought they were loosing to much tax they may clamp down on bitcoin. This is why we should support The Free Network Foundation as much as possible -
http://thefnf.org/http://commons.thefnf.org/index.php/Free_network_definitionFree network definitionThe fundamental dialectic of our struggle is this: will we be enslaved by our technology, or liberated by it? It was in cognizance of this notion, and in service to our collective freedom that the Free Software Movement was born. It is in this spirit that we aim here to define exactly what it means to say that a network is free. We hope that the existence of this definition will help illuminate the path to a more just world.
Our intention is to build communications systems that are owned by the people that use them, that allow participants to own their own data, and that use end-to-end encryption and cryptographic trust mechanisms to assure privacy. We call such systems 'free networks' and they are characterized by the following five freedoms:
Freedom 0) The freedom to participate in the network.Freedom 0 regards your right to organize cooperative networks.
Conventional networks are characterized by a distinction between provider and user. This mode of organization encourages network operation in the service of self-interest. The provider builds and owns the infrastructure, and the user pays for access. In a free network, however, nodes connect to one another, rather than to a single, monolithic provider. By nature of its design, a free network is owned by those that make use of it. Participants act as providers and users as the same time, and growth is auto-distributed by treating any profits as investment. In this way, those that join the network are able to become owners. This mode of organization encourages network operation in the service of the common good.
Freedom 1) The freedom to determine where one's bits are stored.Freedom 1 regards your right to own the material stores of your data.
Conventional networks encourage (if not force) their participants to store their data in machines which are under the administrative auspices of an external service provider or host. Most folks are not able to serve data from their homes. Participants ought to be free to store their own data (so that it is under their care) without sacrificing their ability to publish it.
Freedom 2) The freedom to determine the parties with whom one's bits are shared.Freedom 2 regards your right to control access to your data.
Data mining and the monetization of sharing has become common practice. Participants should be free to chose those with whom they would like to share a given piece of information. Only someone who owns their own data can fully exercise this freedom, but it is an issue regardless of where the relevant bits are stored.
Freedom 3) The freedom to transmit bits to one's peers without the prospect of interference, interception or censorship.Freedom 3 regards the right to speak freely with your peers.
Information flows in conventional networks are routinely and intentionally intercepted, obstructed, and censored. This is done at the behest of corporate and state actors around the world. In a free network, private communications should remain unexamined from the time they enter the network until the time they reach their destination.
Freedom 4) The freedom to maintain anonymity, or to present a unique, trusted identity.Freedom 4 regards your right to construct your own identity
There is increasing pressure to forbid anonymity, and yet trustworthy communications remain rare. While it is essential to liberty that individuals be able to remain anonymous in the online public sphere, it is also essential that they be able to construct and maintain persistent, verifiable identities. Such identities might bear a legal name, a common name, or an avatar that masks one's corporeal self – individuals could have many such identities, and switch between them at will. Clear delineation between anonymous, pseudonymous, and onymous actors would enable all of us to better asses the trustworthiness of others on the network.
http://commons.thefnf.org/index.php/Free_network_definitionhttp://commons.thefnf.org/index.php/Freenet_ManifestoFreenet ManifestoStage 1: The Co-opStage one consists of the emergence of network access cooperatives. Stage one has already begun, so instead of speaking hypothetically, I will tell you what it looks like on the ground. I'm not entirely sure of the legality, but I am sure of the justice. Here in Grinnell, IA, the Free Network Movement has built a mesh network that we call grinnellMIND. It allows us to share a single internet connection amongst many physically disparate locations. I live on Broad Street, Dylan lives on Main Street, Martin lives on Park Street, and Anna lives on East. We and many others are able to purchase Internet access cooperatively, thus driving down the amount that each of us pays. This works especially well because of the asynchronous nature of network usage - if we each bought our own connections, they would lay dormant much of the time. We imagine that some day, the entire town of Grinnell might purchase access cooperatively. That day has not yet arrived, but we think it is on its way. This struggle for collective purchasing will have to happen in many towns and cities, the world over. It will have to happen for city blocks and subdivisions, in residential towers and intentional communities. This won't be easy to accomplish, especially when telcos catch wind of what's going on. Still, the obvious economic advantage to the end user (reduced cost) makes this an easy sell to the people.
Stage 2: The Digital VillageThe unseen benefit of the aforementioned co-ops is that they wrest the terminal nodes of the network away from the control of the telco/ISP hegemony. This provides for the opportunity of network applications that are truly peer-to-peer. At first, this will only be able to happen within each isolated cooperative community. Imagine that Grinnell (or some other town) makes shared use of a few pipes, whose flow of information is distributed accross the last mile via mesh. Now imagine that each node of that mesh network is a Diaspora pod running a codebase that is specifically designed for use in mesh networks (this is in development, but a ways off). People will still have to rely on the big pipes for access to the wider internet, but to pass each other messages and participate in social networking, at least within the town of Grinnell, we will have achieved a truly peer-to-peer architecture. Thus arises the digital village. What used to be just a co-op for purchasing access has suddenly become a community that is able to share information directly with one another. It takes only a little more imagination to see that Diaspora is one of many applications that could run on this architecture. I happen to believe that the social network is the network's 'killer-app,' and so I have chosen to use Diaspora as an example.
Stage 3: Towards UnityStages 2 and 3 are separated here for clarity, but it seems likely that stage 3 will begin shortly after stage 2, and take place concomitantly. Stage 3 is quite simple. Using packet tunneling (something like Freenet or TOR, to give an idea) in concert with the existing global network, we can simulate the contiguity of geographically disparate digital villages. Suddenly, people all over the world are able to share with one another directly. Specify a user@a_node@a_network and you've got a unique address for each network user. Of course, the corporate giants still own the backbone at this stage, which is why we can only say *towards* unity. No uprising until Stage 4, please.
Stage 4: A Backbone of our OwnStage 4 is when the dream of true co-ownership becomes a reality. We are already starting in on what needs to be done here, because it's a pretty tall order, and will take some time. (You gotta do what you gotta do). In Stage 4, we replace investor-owned fiber backbones with user-owned backbones.
This won't come cheap, but freedom is never free. It will take time, attention, energy, and materials. Community owned fiber networks, funded by real-estate loans from member-owned credit unions can be built. Some creative sofware developers in a city can develop an open-source precision farming system, and provide support and maintenance, in exchange for having some of those farmers using it to run a tiling machine plow across the prairies, burying 100 gigabit capable fiber bundles from Denver to Chicago.
Satellite dishes or TV-Band towers could replace the pipes that used to come from the ISP, and their connectivity could be distributed throughout every digital village. The only cost that anyone would ever have to pay for network access would be the cost of a mesh node (could be integrated into a PC, or shareable stand alone). Not everyone will be able to afford a node, which is why the roadmap doesn't end with
Stage 5: A Human RightOnce the Mesh Interface for Network Devices is global, we can focus our energies towards providing a node to anyone who wants one. We believe that access to the network is a human right, and this is our vision for supplying it to all of humanity.
We must be able to articulate what the basic human right for network access is. How many bits per second, and what is the acceptable latency? The existing commercial network could easily carry several megabits in the framing overhead of 10 gigabit networks. Having thousands of free network users who report outages as they happen becomes the world's most effective and advanced method for providing reliable zero-downtime business class network service.
Businesses which do not see the long-term people, planet, and profits benefit of unfiltered (but bandwidth limited) freedom network access will be out of business in 25 years.
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http://commons.thefnf.org/index.php/Needs
