On Sun, 13 Oct 2019 22:15:58 +0000 (UTC)
jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:



>>...let's flesh out some of the numbers and practices.  Shouldn't take more than a few hours or at most a couple days, to give everybody an input. 
>> This   appears to be a representative sample of a Raspberry Pi 4 board, in kit form, 4 gigabyte of RAM (I guess they must mean SDCard, right, and not ordinary SRAM or DRAM?

    as coderman said, that's the pi's main RAM memory. So yeah, those ARM 'systems on a chip'  are quite capable. They have 4 cores running at ~1.2gcps and tons of ram. 

_I_ remember when an Intel 8048 was called a "computer on a chip"!!!

>>  SD wears out, right?), with cables, a clear plastic box.  $85 in quantity one. 

>    the previous model with 'only' 1gb or RAM, same processor is $35 or less. (you need to add a sd card, power supply and case)

How much main memory would be useful for a transfer node to use?

 >   ...so the hardware is quite cheap. The question is, of course, to what degree is it safe? The rpi for instance is designed in the english shithole by people working for the amerikan mafia known as broadcom. The rpi's main processor is a broadcom processor (not the quadcore ARM), running closed source firmware written by the raspberry 'foundation'.

>    there are other systems that are not as bad as the rpi - at least you won't be running GCHQ-NSA firmware directly. (some people were working on an open source firmware but I don't think they got it to work)

I agree that this is a matter that needs to be discussed.  But no doubt you've heard of the saying, 'the perfect being the enemy of the good'.  


> Can we agree that 1,000 quantity will be a good initial "critical mass" for this project?

    A thousand independent node operators isn't a small number.


>> tor is currently larger,  https://metrics.torproject.org/networksize.html but 1000 is still a good start.

 >   yeah, you have to take into account for instance what % of those nodes is owned by the NSA, GCHQ, FSB, stasi, whatever the chinese agency is called, samsung, hitachi, etc etc etc etc etc.

  >  but wait, is your network partially client/server like tor, or is it a fully decentralized peer to peer network? (freenetproject.org)

First, I'm not looking for it to be thought of as "my" network, although maybe I will be credited with some initiative for giving the project a kick.   The person whose network it is publicly known as might end up being the person who initially funds it, and agrees to have his name attached to the project as sponsor.  
And no, I'm not qualified to answer your second comment.  I don't consider myself a "software person", never have been.  This is yet another issue 'we' will have to work out.  
   


>> While hypothetically node operators might receive some sort of subsidy (in full or in part) for their internet-service cost, it's also plausible that their Internet payment will be their "skin in the game", their contribution to the project.  Centurylink offers 1 gigabit/second service for $65 plus tax.  The speed itself is only one part of the issue.  I think there is no data limit for their 1 gigabit service; their slower services may have a 1 terabyte/month limit.  

>    I don't know about bandwidth costs, but they obv. depend on how your network works. So discussing those costs before having some idea about what kind of capacity/traffic/padding/architecture etc the system will have seems kinda backwards.

The reason I initially referred to "1 gigabit"  service for nodes is that I was, and still am, under the impression that current Centurylink policy exempts them from their "excessive use" policy.  I suspect that computers of this level (Raspbery pi 4) won't be able to throughput more than a few tens of megabits of (processed) data, if that, so Internet rate won't likely be a bottleneck.  But a data cap could easily become a limiting factor, especially if the network implements heavy chaff.  


>> >    As to 'entirely new', it seems to me that a high latency mixing network (which is not a 'new' design) is desirable. Such a network should allow people to communicate using non-real-time messages, instead of allowing them to browse jewtube. Low latency/real time networks and communications seem a lot harder to secure."
>
>> What I'm thinking of is a programmable-latency network, say anything from 1 to 256 hops.  Although, it would be hard to imagine needing more than 16, I suppose.

 >   some variables :
   
>    *) number of mixers/nodes a message goes through

Yes, I'm thinking that a user should be able to decide, for any individual message, how many nodes it will go through.   He will still have a latency issue to deal with, but at least that tradeoff question will be decided by HIM, not the entire network as a group,.   

 >   *) all clients and nodes are exchanging fixed size packets all the time (chaff)

I consider chaff essential to increase the difficulty of tracing messages, especially when traffic is low.  

 >   *) there are no clients - it's a peer to peer network


> >This is a list of proposed 'improvements' to TOR.   https://blog.torproject.org/tor-design-proposals-how-we-make-changes-our-protocol  No doubt SOMEWHERE there is a list of 'proposed improvements that we know the TOR structure will never agree to because they will be considered 'too good' '.   Shouldn't we use those, too?   Especially those!


 >   so the best pentagon criminals like tor's syverson have been 'working' on this for a while and there are tons of 'literature' - some of their stuff is here

 >   The Free Haven Project

 >   notice that cypherpunks(...) like adam back(now blockstream CEO, google funded) a guy called goldberg and others have been/are involved with tor to varying degrees. Furthermore, adam back was subscribed to this list. His last message

>    [Bitcoin-development] questions about bitcoin-XT code fork & non-consensus hard-fork

 >   anyway, you Jim could try to get some ideas or/and help from back. Ver for marketing and funding and back for technical assistance may be a good combination. 

I hope that if the proposal is technically sound, financing won't be a problem.  My idea of a target amount of initial subsidy for setting up one node (ignoring software-development costs) should be about $50:   Myself, I'd like to charge about $30 for the hardware kit, the quantity-1 cost would be $90 or so, but I don't yet have an estimate if the materials are purchased in 1000+ quantity.  

>    Here are some other datapoints :

>    https://maidsafe.net/

 >   those ppl have allegedly been working on teh problem...since forever. And they've gotten nowhere. They have even launched their own shitcoin/financial scam. 

I see lots of fine words on their website.    But they haven't accomplished much?

 >   MaidSafeCoin (MAID) price, charts, market cap, and other metrics | CoinMarketCap

>    And they are not the only ones who want to add economic incentives to 'file sharing'. The idea seems like a good one to me, but it doesn't seem to work. 

If it were truly easy to attach a 18-terabyte HD to each node, that would make it a really interesting proposition...   This, for $140 more...

   > Decentralized Cloud Storage — Storj
    "Decentralized Cloud Storage"

>    TRON Foundation：Capture the future slipping away
    "TRON is an ambitious project dedicated to building the infrastructure for a truly decentralized Internet."

>    there prolly are a few more like that.


 >   bottom line : there's a fair number of variables to take into account...