[Cu-wireless] Fwd: Financial Cryptography Update: The Digital Silk Road (DSR)

[Todd Boyle]

Ian said,

 > DSR is a historical pre-commercial (circa 1994)
 > http://www.agorics.com/Library/dsr.html shared accounting
 > architecture that was proposed to compensate router owners for
 > passing the packets of other entities.

Good reminder!

 > DSR is like LETS for routers. As a thought experiment in multi-
 > agent accounting, it is interesting for its influence on later
 > micropayment systems (Mojo Nation?), but it assumes pre-commercial
 > net-style honest behaviour and the absence of competition. It also
 > suffers somewhat from the cool engineering approach ("the silk
 > road was so cool, let's rebuild it") that always gets
 > steamrollered by markets and marketing.

Ian you're loathesome!   <grin>

DSR might have been nonviable 10 years ago.  Today,
computing power and bandwidth are thousands of times
cheaper.  The market price of 802.11b wireless routers
is around $20 now.  Do you all understand what's inside
those?  11 megabit WiFi wireless access point with a
range of hundreds of meters, or over a mile with external
antenna.  Bridge from the wireless universe to the
completely different flow control of ethernet.  Plus, a 4-port
ethernet switch, and unix host computer with filtering rules,
NAT host, DHCP server, webserver for configuration, etc.
That's a lot of computing for $20.

However, capacity is not infinite and the critical element
missing from a large-scale urban mesh is only the lack of
social agreement how to measure or charge each other
for transit across our hub.   SPAM is a great example of
when happens when no effort is made to charge for use of
a resource.  SPAMMERS send 1 million ads for viagra,
or 1 billion, what's the difference?

Todd http://ledgerism.net/arapcloud.htm

PS you say competition won this battle?  I am now paying
over $60/month for DSL and the speed is 64 up 384 down.
I am also paying over $60/year for 3rd party hosting, domain
names, etc since the proliferation of hackers makes it impossible
at home.  ten years ago I was paying $20/month for 28K
Monopolists won this battle, not competition.

Date: Sun, 21 Mar 2004 18:45:30 GMT
Subject: Financial Cryptography Update: The Digital Silk Road
From: iang at iang.org
((( Financial Cryptography Update: The Digital Silk Road )))))

http://www.financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/000099.html

DSR is a historical pre-commercial (circa 1994)
http://www.agorics.com/Library/dsr.html" shared accounting
architecture that was proposed to compensate router owners for
passing the packets of other entities.

Cooperating router nodes would count packets passed between them, and
occasionally, they would send "number" money packets back and forth to
reset the counters. These paid-for resets would cause charges to
trickle across to big users, and money towards working routers.
Defences against cheating/fraud were limited to
http://cap-lore.com/Economics/DSR/SumCheck.html signed
notifications of balances and a simple
http://cap-lore.com/Economics/DSR/Bank.html payment system.

DSR is like LETS for routers. As a thought experiment in multi-
agent accounting, it is interesting for its influence on later
micropayment systems (Mojo Nation?), but it assumes pre-commercial
net-style honest behaviour and the absence of competition. It also
suffers somewhat from the cool engineering approach ("the silk
road was so cool, let's rebuild it") that always gets
steamrollered by markets and marketing.

E.g., FedEx beats the original silk road, as does a host of other
transport innovations such as trains, bulk container ships and
blind men with canes. In today's Internet world, large
corporations achieve internal Coasian efficiencies by owning
thousands of routers and not doing internal charging, but
collecting flat fees from customers.

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