[Battlemesh] Althea discussion

[Jehan Tremback]

Hey, a friend forwarded me this discussion on your list and I just wanted to give some more info.

What we mean when we say "trustless protocol" is simply that you do not need to have a contractual or business relationship that enables you to trust your neighbors to 1. Not misrepresent their route quality, or 2. Take your money and not provide service.

We solve 1. with a currently quite primitive "stealth probing" method where we do speed tests through a tunnel, and we solve 2. with micropayments so nodes do not need to pay each other a lot of money up front.

I'm not sure where to start with your hypothetical scenario of some sort of token takeover. We currently use the Ethereum token, but plan to switch to a token which holds its value against the dollar (MakerDAO). Communities could issue their own token, but tokens with such a small supply would likely be subject to extreme volatility.

Either way, the only way this could result in a takeover of the infrastructure would be if the entity accumulating all these tokens actually just went around and bought everyone's radios from them. 

As far as Althea goes, there is nothing particularly magical or advanced about it. We are simply trying to create a suite of protocols that let routers pay each other directly.

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Hey Patrick,

On 17.11.18 15:58, pdbinder wrote:

The trustlessness of the protocol and the "*LOCAL* structure of trust" are
two different things.


Thanks for the comment, I agree that those two domains are different.
But I feel like there is a strong link between them. Let me explain why:

(I hope the list forgives a short economic debate ;-) I've seen very
fine hackers getting annoyed very fast when the talk goes "crypto" -
probably due to speculative aspects.)



Some context:

Here at Funkfeuer Vienna, we really could use new tools that help us
keeping uplinks and public address spaces safely funded. The model we
have been using during the last ten years is getting harder and harder
to sustain. I see some parallels to our current national government in
AT ... but that's another story :(

So, we are open to experiments with new economic models, we actually
have scratched our heads over the pros/cons quite a bit.

Thanks for your hint on Althea, I'm in the middle of reading up on its
current state. You wrote:

Althea is using trustless protocols but those who actually
run the infrastructure do not need to be trustless nor anonymous


I think it makes sense to check here if we mean the same thing when we
say "trustless protocol".

To me a "trustless protocol" is one in which actors cannot be
re-identified within.

E.g. let's assume a community network introduces an anonymous token as a
means of economic exchange. We think that in such a case it may become
very easy for individual actors - maybe even completely outside the
community (e.g. private investor) - to gain control over large parts of
the infrastructure. And since the tokens are anonymous, the community
can't detect this and therefore can't counteract.

Our definition of a community network is something like this:
"infrastructure is in control of those that are served by it"

So, if said accumulation occurs - which seems likely as soon as any
speculative motive appears - the community network according to our
definition may cease to exist. The infrastructure may even stagnate
altogether because of a tragedy-of-the-commons situation.

Evidently, that's very relevant for us to avoid :-D

Do you know if such an accumulation is detectable with an Althea network?


Sorry for the off-topic digression, but I guess it may be relevant for
other communities too... otherwise please feel free to STFU me

-paul
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