[Concept] Buy or sell excess bandwidth using bitcoin.

[Bitcoin Oz]

If you could come out with a router thats ready to plug and play with these features is that something you could put on kickstarter since you would then have an actual product to give out as rewards for backing it ?

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[bitlizard]

would be cool to have at the airport where wifi can sometimes suck presumably because a lot of people are on it and its being provided for free so not much incentive to make it really work well for the captive audience that is not paying for it. If I could pay some bitcoin to use a good high speed wifi connection at the airport I probably would.

[Bitcoin Oz]

would be cool to have at the airport where wifi can sometimes suck presumably because a lot of people are on it and its being provided for free so not much incentive to make it really work well for the captive audience that is not paying for it. If I could pay some bitcoin to use a good high speed wifi connection at the airport I probably would.

Most of the free wifi spots you can use around here only use 50mb or 30 minutes a day before they shut you off..Mcdonalds for instance has this limit.

You cant buy prepaid 3g plans for bitcoin either

[bitlizard]

would be cool to have at the airport where wifi can sometimes suck presumably because a lot of people are on it and its being provided for free so not much incentive to make it really work well for the captive audience that is not paying for it. If I could pay some bitcoin to use a good high speed wifi connection at the airport I probably would.

Most of the free wifi spots you can use around here only use 50mb or 30 minutes a day before they shut you off..Mcdonalds for instance has this limit.

You cant buy prepaid 3g plans for bitcoin either

No clue if it would be profitable even in an airport where there is actually a chance that someone will have a bitcoin or two just based on the sheer volume of people, but would be fantastic exposure for bitcoin as it would likely attract mainstream media attention. Its probably a very cheap form of advertising to host wifi in an airport. 

[bitlizard]

a kiosk vendor in an airport could probably sell bitcoin for a large markup right there in the terminal.

[SgtSpike]

If you could come out with a router thats ready to plug and play with these features is that something you could put on kickstarter since you would then have an actual product to give out as rewards for backing it ?

I don't think it's legal to sell DD-WRT pre-installed on routers, so no, I don't think anyone would be able to do it.  At least, not based on DD-WRT.  There might be some other variation of linux that is sellable and runs on a router though...

[Etlase2]

gargoyle sells his variation of open-wrt preinstalled. I dunno if dd-wrt licensing disallows it

[kr105]

I have something more or less build based on OpenWrt (I like it over ddwrt) and a bitcoind running on a computer on the same lan, its clean, fast but rather basic so far. I will publish the source in some days if i get time/motivation to continue it

[Bitcoin Oz]

I have something more or less build based on OpenWrt (I like it over ddwrt) and a bitcoind running on a computer on the same lan, its clean, fast but rather basic so far. I will publish the source in some days if i get time/motivation to continue it

nice

[Gabi]

A nice idea

[giszmo]

I love the idea and my router, that promotes pirate party now in its name would definitely be configured to run this for a ridiculous low bitcoin fee as I see this far more as promotion than as a way to make money at this point.

Only problem is, getting this up and running involves flashing my router? I mean it means messing around with my connection to the world? Carefully reading through books of how-tos before so I don't break anything?

You get the idea: I'm not an IT illiterate person but out of all bitcoiners, only a small fraction would take the hassle of messing with their routers, so providing a click and play solution - if possible - would be one way to go and another - also mentioned above - would be the router with preinstalled bitcoin welcome page, for sale for bitcoin of course

[Sukrim]

"Easy installation" could be done with DD-WRT (and/or Open-WRT) packages for the more technical people and selling pre-flashed routers should also not be that hard.

In the end it seems to me, that what's needed is the following:
* open port 8333 with a (local) bitcoind behind that can upload the current blockchain to the laptop that wants to connect and accepts/relays the transaction for payment into the network.
* Firmware on the router that can be modified to run an application that can ask the local bitcoind (or a blockexplorer-style page) for incoming payments and then releases the internet connection for a certain MAC.

The second part might work with already availabe solutions (are there any Open Source implementations for this stuff actually that are not external and work with e.g. Paypal?) and could be adapted from there.

[Bitcoin Oz]

If someone can come up with a price to get this to market we could raise it through a glbse IPO.

[ribuck]

How  is he going to pay with bitcoins when he isnt online yet?

Here's how, and it doesn't require having the Bitcoin port open.

The user access a web page. The request is intercepted by the router, which returns a page quoting the rate. Suppose for this example that the rate is 0.1 BTC for 30 minutes.

The user has a bitcoin client with a nifty feature. By clicking "pay for WiFi" the bitcoin client sends a transaction to itself for 0.1 BTC. Then it sends the private key for that transaction to the router, within the address of an HTTP request. The router sees this, makes a bitcoin transaction to claim the payment, and enables web browsing for 30 minutes.

[DeathAndTaxes]

Alternatively allow port 8332 to be open and limited to wifi provider's node.  So your bitcoin client can get online but nothing else can.  Once you pay it unlocks full access.  Bitcoin doesn't really have the density yet but I could see it being popular way to pay for service someday. 

[Garr255]

I'm going to see if I can't make this this summer.

[coin_toss]

Another cool idea would be to sell excess bandwidth over the internet, rather than over wifi. So if i have 100gb of spare internet quota with X ISP, and you need extra internet quota, then i sell you my spare quota for bitcoins. Not sure if its technically possible tho

[SgtSpike]

Another cool idea would be to sell excess bandwidth over the internet, rather than over wifi. So if i have 100gb of spare internet quota with X ISP, and you need extra internet quota, then i sell you my spare quota for bitcoins. Not sure if its technically possible tho

o.O

You'd still have to use internet quota in order to use the spare internet quota.  It wouldn't work.

[Garr255]

Another cool idea would be to sell excess bandwidth over the internet, rather than over wifi. So if i have 100gb of spare internet quota with X ISP, and you need extra internet quota, then i sell you my spare quota for bitcoins. Not sure if its technically possible tho

I lul'd

[Stephen Gornick]

Alternatively allow port 8332 to be open and limited to wifi provider's node.  So your bitcoin client can get online but nothing else can.  Once you pay it unlocks full access.  Bitcoin doesn't really have the density yet but I could see it being popular way to pay for service someday. 

Or if at a retail joint, the cashier can sell scratch-offs with an Instawallet URL, preloaded with whatever the hotspot charge is.

Incidentally, there are multiple threads over time with basically the same topic of conversation.  Perhaps better progress would be possible if the conversation all occurred in the same thread:

 - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=7998.0