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

[Todd Boyle]

>Give me more power and more bandwidth and my
>response is <YAWN....>

My point was the cheapness of the devices and the
*freeness* of the connectivity.  Not the power of the CPU.
The cpus in these $20 APs are like 486's --That's 1990.

My thesis is coming from the economic perspective--
software and network people have given me extremely
negative remarks when I say these things. They are
concerned that enabling accounting in the hardware
layer will result in the network being totally captured
by robber barons, with good reason.  But I have never
heard *any* mature or deep analysis of this question,
or anything to change my mind.  Even Lessig, or these
really great thinkers, like Jack Rickard of Boardwatch.

Most software and network tech. say , "too cheap to meter"
and point to the status quo as if it were proof, that accounting is
unnecessary. And 95% of them are making their livings
in the existing system of course.

CWNs cannot operate without a marketplace anymore
than a farm or industrial economy. There was a time,
when markets didn't exist... The Atlantic wrote Dec 2003,
100 million people were killed in the last century by
communist regimes, brrr.  Allocating resources gets messy!

Whatever segment, gateway or router is provided freely,
to the commons, without a market mechanism, will
eventually be overused.  And its donor is not only unpaid,
but loses the use of the asset themselves.   Now, at $20
being unpaid is not a problem.  The problem is traffic
management. This is a scarce resource.

The telcos and cablecos control the physical layer today, and
all of the networking and wireless equipment on earth has been
designed without an accounting layer.

Telcos and cablecos don't need that, of course. It's unnecessary
overhead for them, and furthermore, it would be adverse to
their interests to see others gain that capability.

Let's not focus too much on *particular* low level protocols
like DSR (or IETF AAA, OMG ARAP, the new Grid accounting, etc.
I have spent the last 6,7 years studying)
http://www.ledgerism.net/

My thesis, is that the absence of an accounting framework
is *the* critical missing element in community wireless networks
of all kinds (adhoc, mesh, roaming etc.)

While it is true, mesh networks are being established with
technical bases of allocation of resources, the absence
of an accounting framework still represents a major hidden
risk for any network that gets into heavy use.

Every CWN to date has an implicit assumption to rely
on gateways to telco/cableco resources at some point.
This is tragic because the way networks operate, anybody
who can capture a chokepoint like that, can extract the
entire economic value of the network, and generally surveil
and gain a measure of control over usage as well.  That
affects the freedom of us all.  Since Bush we should all be
more aware of this risk.

Todd


At 12:48 PM 3/21/2004, Ian Grigg wrote:
>>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.
>
>Doh! Todd, it's *nothing* to do with the power
>of the node. We were running full scale payment
>systems that could do DSR back in 1996 on "ancient"
>Sun IPCs at 12 MHz! Even then we went away from
>"fast crypto" to "real slow Java" in preference....
>
>Give me more power and more bandwidth and my
>response is <YAWN....>


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