So, ladies and gents, I’d like to throw out a bunch of
confirmed facts about cryptocurrency & China:
- Because of China’s currency controls coupled with its:
- Size
- Entrepreneurial population
- Relative technical expertise
- Desire for “sound” non-manipulated money
- Population accustomed to breakneck innovation
- Relative Affluence
China is bitcoin demand, globally.
How much of bitcoin demand, you ask?
90%, the last time I read anything on the topic. So if 10 people are buying coin, that means 9 of them are tech-savvy Chinese looking to make financial bets otherwise prohibited. I think that’s a pretty big deal.
Next, because of its internet policies:
- VPNs are a billion-dollar industry
- An endless cat and mous game is played between users and censors
- Censors have been winning for a little while, though lantern is quite effective generally, it is getting less so.
- But looking at this here application, MaidSAFE, I see the potential for a coin-paid global delivery optimization and circumvention network.
If I am groking correctly the way that the nodes get in touch with one another (some similarities to consul, no?) then this could even be run as a separate application that interacts with MaidSAFE. Participants could be paid a market rate for BW and compute, directly in coin. I do not know if this could be accomplished without compromising in some ways anonymity of at minimum the nodes providing the VPN. But then again, seems we could have plenty of intermediaries. Anyway, my thought is that this would naturally create a truly gorgeous autonomous org.
an autonomus org, that never rests, fighting for humans’ network freedom
/me offically soliciting community feedback on how to implement-- with or without using SAFE. Oh, and if you’re wondering why this is such a big deal to me, just imagine the internet without google. And facebook, and any of their spunky freedom-oriented alternatives.
VPNCoin
I’m aware that there’s some prior art here in the form of VPNCoin, but as a user (on both sides of the market, in fact) I can say with some certainty that VPNCoin wasn’t really as sophisticated of a solution as is needed. It suffered from all of the problems that VPNs have in hostile network environments, and more. Essentially neither th economic model nor the technical service being provided were advanced enough to make VPNCoin truly useful.
What this looks like in my mind
I’m thinking of this as something that could be run with a golang or rust binary and a config file that uses a bockchain or something like a blockchain and the very latest in VPN-age, including its own protocols, and protocols for making protocols programatically, and active exploitation of “smuggling” routes that become available (eg: if you are behind the golden shield, and so am I, but I have far more BW available, then I should smuggle BW to your node in exchange for small payment from your node).
On the server side, it shoul dbe dead-easy to start new nodes and sell their BW and Compute time. Prices should be set fairly high-- specifically, they need to be high enough to truly incentivize small and medium hosting providers to begin taking this network seriously as one of their income streams. I happen to know that for most hosting companies this exact pattern is alraedy a large segment of business that gets deeply under-served.
Takeaways
- Helping China solve its Internet problems could be a way to massively boost the economic viability of SAFEcoin.
- China IS global demand for cryptocurrency. The rest of us are just 10% of it.
- China exports demand for VPNs in the form of its support for GFW-Pakistan and GFW-Iran, and others, too.
- Maidsafe mgiht be able to use tis network to earn directly from people in China by selling VPN service.
- This might expose individual SAFE nodes, so it might be best to keep this and that separate.
Implementation Details
- Multiple existing VPN Protocols used
- Novel Protocols generated and purchased by the autonomus org automatically. Payouts based on success rate after some inital lump sum.
- Multiple existing encrypted proxies used
- Multipathing used
- “Fast Datapath” used (check out weave.works and wha tthey refer to when they talk of fast datapaths)
- A wallet setup for the client side that accepts *coin and allows th euser to choose what unfettered access is worth to them at any given time.
- Take this from someone who’s experienced multiple situations where this is surely the case:
- At the right time, there’s no debate as to weather Internet access is worth in excess of $500/hr. If not having it can cost you $100,000 in an hour, then reasonably, getting it for that hour might be worth as much as $90,000.
- This would incentivize those providing access to be quite innovative in their delivery attempts, because access would be priced suitably high.
- High Prices are somewhat desirable because they will feed R&D.
- Take this from someone who’s experienced multiple situations where this is surely the case:
- The Majority of the time, access would be far less than $90k/hr. But every single day that passes, I bet >90k/hr is spent on circumvention tools in China. Fact is that I’d rather our community frolic in that value stream than exist just outside of it.