Tyler Durden wrote:

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. In other words, say I'm driving down the FDR receiving telemetry about the road conditions downtown of me by a few miles.

Um, just to point out the absolute obvious, if you're >DRIVING< you already have a power source, even if you have to use an inverter to power your notebook. At that point you're not worried about worrying about spending a few miliamps on transmission here and there. It doesn't matter at all whether or not there's a string of other "you's" ahead of you. Having already paid for the tank of gas, the juice is free, and so should transmission - even routing of other users' data. If you're in the woods, or at the beach, that's a different story. :) Ok, well, if you're at the beach, you could get a solar cell and geek away.

If I'm a router, I'm also sending that info behind me (which is routing I'm paying for basically), but I will understand that the reason I am getting my telemetry is precisely because there's a string of "me's" in the cars in front of me, routing info down to me. If I insist on getting paid, so will they, and the whole thing breaks down.

Actually, this reminds me of the prisoner's dilemma. I remember (I think) Hofstaedter doing an interesting analysis that showed that smart 'criminals' will eventually realize that it pays to cooperate, even if that doesn't optimise one's chances in this particular instance.

Yup, can't have a network without nodes.

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.

In which case, you won't be to willing to transmit either since receiving costs you far less battery than transmitting. In this case you're far more likely to store whatever you want to transmit for later - same as working "offline" with a mail user agent.