Interesting links on decentralization, mesh networking, protocols, telecommunications & any other goTenna Mesh-relevant topic!

Share related links and news here! Don’t have to be about goTenna Mesh specifically. This is just about sharing cool things happening in related technology or use-cases!

Starting it off with a few good ones recently:

5 Likes

Privacy issues with cell towers.

2 Likes
2 Likes

Big improvements on Ethereum network being worked on.

2 Likes

While I believe that will go a long way towards making Ethereum nodes possible on mobile/low power devices, I am become a bit concerned about the limitations of goTenna’s throughput. From the goTenna SDK…

MESSAGES

  • Outgoing messages are limited in size to 236 bytes
  • There is currently a limit of sending only 5 messages per minute. This is to prevent developers from flooding the radio channels with their own app’s content, potnetially blocking other apps from communicating.

I am not sure that is enough data per minute to keep up with a fast moving blockchain. To put this in perspective, I believe it would take about 50 minutes to transfer a 55.2 KB jpg file, which is a pretty small low res image.

I could be wrong about all this. I would love to find out that I am:grinning:

That’s the SDK today, yes, but let’s move this conversation to the
blockchain thread? :slight_smile:

Sure, and don’t get me wrong… the existing throughput is still useful because I can picture a wildlife monitoring camera like the ones http://www.conservationnw.org/what-we-do/wildlife-habitat/wildlife-monitoring use and if they could setup a camera and have it take motion activated pictures and then transmit those pictures through a goTenna mesh network at a rate of one picture per hour, they would still get results faster than hiking in and retrieving pictures manually, or the expense of having to setup a different network to retrieve the images.

https://swarm-guide.readthedocs.io

1 Like
2 Likes
2 Likes

Related to the centralization of the media, technology… and power, generally, this is from page 40 of Carl Sagan’s 1996 book The Demon-Haunted World:

Pretty prescient, right?

4 Likes

I wonder if these planes can pick up goTenna messages, or jam and block as well? I realize that goTenna uses encrption, but the blocking case is interesting.

1 Like

https://www.plasma.io/

Oh boy, this just came out from Buterin.

Plasma is a proposed framework for incentivized and enforced execution of smart contracts which is scalable to a significant amount of state updates per second (potentially billions).

This construction is achieved by composing smart contracts on the main blockchain using fraud proofs whereby state transitions can be enforced on a parent blockchain. We compose blockchains into a tree hierarchy, and treat each as an individual branch blockchain with enforced blockchain history and MapReducable computation committed into merkle proofs. By framing one’s ledger entry into a child blockchain which is enforced by the parent chain, one can enable incredible scale with minimized trust (presuming root blockchain availability and correctness).

As only merkleized commitments are broadcast periodically to the root blockchain (i.e. Ethereum) during non-faulty states, this can allow for incredibly scalable, low cost transactions and computation. Plasma enables persistently operating decentralized applications at high scale.

I need to spend time to read the paper but this looks big.

Edit:

From the actual paper:

Instead, we seek to design a system whereby computation can occur off-blockchain but
ultimately enforcible on-chain

I think that’s what goTenna needs.

I’m too tired to finish the paper today, but I’m pretty sure this allows a smart contract to create a mini-blockchain on top of the root (main ETH) chain. If there’s a dispute it refers back to the main ETH chain to resolve it by using some proof-of-stake magic.

2 Likes

Buterin is next level smart. I hope you have more success than me understanding this. I read it twice, but its hard to keep my eyes from glazing over :grinning:

Off chain transactions will be huge but you still need a link back to the root chain and I worry about how goTenna can accomplish that and the large amounts of data that will entail.

I am anxious to see the day a blockchain currency can scale to the number of transactions VISA or Mastercard handles per minute. Once that happens, I think the way everyone spends money is going to change dramatically. Its a great time to be in tech.

2 Likes

Cool talks just posted from the Blockstack Summit on July 27 in Mountain View, CA here: https://blockstack.org/summit2017

You’ll find talks on blockchain, decentralization in general, and more by people like: Muneeb Ali & Ryan Shea (Blockstack), Naval Ravikant (AngelList/CoinList), Elizabeth Stark (Lightning Labs), Juan Benet (IPFS/Filecoin/ProtocolLabs), Albert Wenger (USV), Brian Hoffman (Open Bazaar), Arthur Breitman (Tezos), Bram Cohen (BitTorrent)… and someone named Daniela from goTenna :wink:

I learned a lot that day, check out the videos!

4 Likes

Related whitepaper here:

1 Like
3 Likes

Nick Szabo recently tweeted:

Here’s that paper: http://nakamotoinstitute.org/advances-in-distributed-security/

(h/t @rmyers)

3 Likes