"So, get a clue. When your battery runs out, you get *zero* benefit from the mesh. Or even your local device *sans network*." Well, as usual I don't think I'm understanding you here. In my example I'm imagining I'm a livery cab driver or something. In that case, instantaneous micro-traffic-conditions can be very valuable in NYC. In that environment, a cabbie will quickly understand that the network will collapse if all of the wireless nodes act to conserve power by not re-transmitting information. So even though it costs you something to route a packet you yourself will not use, if you're even reasonably smart you'll pass some on until you're nearing your batteries exhaustion, then perhaps go into a listening mode. (And of course, it may easily be possible to form spontaneous VLANs that deal only with traffic, and then only route those packets...but that doesn't change my argument any.) -TD
From: "Major Variola (ret)" <mv@cdc.gov> To: "cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net" <cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net> Subject: Re: Meshing costs, the price of RAH's battery Date: Fri, 09 Apr 2004 21:03:35 -0700
At 07:06 PM 4/9/04 -0400, Tyler Durden wrote:
RAH wrote...
At 10:43 AM -0700 4/9/04, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
Meshnets (everyone's a router) is cool, admittedly. But are you going to spend *your* battery life routing someone else's message?
Only if they pay me cash
Someone enlighten me here...I don't see this as obvious. I might certainly be willing to pay to route someone else's message if I understand that to be the real cost of mesh connectivity.
One can run a P2P app from mains-powered home machine and incur only a minor bandwidth penalty, which you can possibly throttle when you're busy. But my understanding of *mobile* devices (where meshing matters) is that they are severely power constrained. To the extent that boozohol power cells and various semiconductor/logic tricks are being used, despite the difficulties they require.
So, get a clue. When your battery runs out, you get *zero* benefit from the mesh. Or even your local device *sans network*.
Of course, the battery lifetime acts as the "weighting" factor here...if only a small % of the traffic I'm routing belongs to me, then I may not be so willing to route it if my battery lifetime is short. As battery time
lifetime increases however (though this sorely lags behind Moore's law) then more and more people will be willing to route.
The traffic-fraction and the extrapolation of Moore's 'law' are largely irrelevant for the next decade. In fact, given that standby usage will *decrease* relative to transmit usage only makes the relative proportions worse. I don't care if you use a picoamp on standby/listen, you'll still need a few milliwatts to forward a packet. Or more, if there are no nearby cooperative nodes.
Sure, in the distant future, mobile power may so vastly dominate power usage that meshes become practical. (There's even positive feedback, the more meshnodes the less transmit power.) Meantime, uncompensated altruism is maladaptive.
With something like soldier-radios, or smart dusts, meshes will happen sooner, since the Many eat the Few. For *your* cellphone, you have a *long* time to wait for it to be Rational to share your battery with randoms.
In RAH's defense, mesh-everything is not necessary for the disintermediation, which he idiosyncratically calles 'geodesic' info flow, to have big effects. Neither is a geodesic (in any physical or otherwise meaningful sense) net important. Just cheaper info to more people. And that's been happening since before ponies carried dead trees with stamps.
Re-reading RAH's "if they pay me enough" reply, it is also right that a price can be set on the wattage you've sherpa'ed, perhaps so that you can pay off your usage of said mesh by letting others use your batteries. And the micropayments will be feasible thanks to real cheap info + crypto, what RAH's undiagnosed brain tumor labels geodesic info flow. Perhaps the price of being a meshrouter to others will even depend on the wattage you have left. Your phone will negotiate with Fred's phone (has 10 Joules left but is 1000 m away) and Joe's (has 5 Joules but is 100 m away).
But that's economics/physics applied to resource usage, nothing new, despite the neologisms and extrapolation.
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