Peter Van Valkenburgh has a thought provoking opinion piece over at Wired that suggests Bitcoin technology may be the gateway to true neutrality on the internet. His idea is to have many more internet providers and a solution that will switch to the best provider at any time, even if that might be your neighbor's WIFI or the Starbucks across the road. The faster connection is more important than the provider – radical! Obviously this can't start tomorrow because most of us don't have multiple vendors in our area to choose from. I think we have two: Comcast and AT&T. We've tried both and neither are fast enough for our home office so the idea of a faster internet with better encryption is optimistic and exiting.
There are three steps to enable this last-mile infrastructure over unlicensed spectrum: First, encrypt the network traffic so that sharing your connection doesn’t mean seeing your neighbor’s activities. Second, charge those who would send traffic through your devices for the privilege using micropayments. Third, program these open routers to seek the fastest connection to the larger internet not only through their own wired hook-up, but through their nearby peers. Knitting all of these consumer devices together gives us a mesh network.
So where does Bitcoin come in? It comes in at the micropayment level.
The money you earn is your revenue for being a valuable part of the mesh. You are free to pocket some bitcoins, and use others to pay for the connection to the wider internet or to invest in an even faster connection and better routing hardware. Eventually, if you’re dealing with a wholesale provider or a particularly progressive telecom, payment for your uplink could also be metered and denominated in bitcoins, and traffic traveling through you from the mesh network could directly pay your provider through an intelligent, Bitcoin-accepting modem.
It's a brilliant thought and I'm fascinated by the possibility. I'm sure the big providers will balk at losing their direct 1:1 relationship with their customers, but if they could get on board, it could be lucrative for them as well as heavy "mesh" users will still need to upgrade gear and lines. In addition:
This means that an outside infrastructure provider need only bring a pipe to the town square, rather than everyone’s home.
Sounds like an interesting solution. Personally I would like to see free, secure internet for all, but I'm a dreamer. Until then, this looks like an excellent plan.
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