Meshing costs (Re: Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies)

[Tyler Durden]

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

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.

-TD

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