Month: June 2020

Richard Myers says the future of ad-hoc mesh networks for SMS messages and bitcoin transactions on your smart phone is here, but it needs the lightning network to succeed.

The episode is sponsored by eToro.com and The Internet of Money Vol. 3

On today's episode of Let's Talk Bitcoin! you're invited to join Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Adam B. Levine, Stephanie Murpy and special guest Richard Myers for an in-depth look at the past, present and future of 'Mobile Mesh Networking' technology.

Just as cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin don't rely on static infrastructure and professional providers, mobile mesh networking allows the creation of inexpensive, high range, low bandwidth and power consumption ad-hoc networks that'll let your phone send text messages or even bitcoin lightning network micro-transactions, even in areas with no coverage.

According to Richard, Bitcoin's lightning network is a what's needed to make mobile mesh networks catch on by bootstrapping on top of the payment routing infrastructure.

"...the Lightning Network currently sends payments from A to B to C and then all those intermediate nodes can connect a small fee if the payment is delivered at the end. All we're doing is saying 'Not [can you send] a payment, but [you can send] a small message. In our case it'd be a SMS message. So you sending an SMS message along with a lightning payment from A to B to C to D, and when D receives that message they return proof that it was delivered and that's what flows back through the network. In the lightning sense, that's your pre-image. It's computed from the message, that's how the nodes are able to collect payment even if they lose touch with the original person who sent it."

But the way the lightning network uses data isn't ideal for mobile mesh. The open source Lot49 protocol is another layer on top of lightning that Richard says is necessary to make it work at scale while using mesh devices as an extremely low-bandwidth TOR-like privacy layer.

"In many ways we're not making a new protocol, we're literally using lightning. Lot49 is custom communication protocol that's optimized for mesh. For example, right now there's a 1300 byte onion that's used to route messages over the internet and that's very important because you lose a lot of privacy... you lose all your privacy... if you were to just send messages over the internet without onion routing.

We're sending over more or less a physical TOR network since it's going from node to node, not through a central ISP who can associate who you're trying to pay. We're also doing it over a low bandwidth network, so if you were sending 1300 bytes it may not sound like much in the age of the internet but we're talking about devices that [have a maximum data transmission capacity of] about a kilobyte a minute so that's a significant amount of the bandwidth that you have [tied up just in the web's onion routing]

So for example with LOT49, we take out the onion and we use the native routing at the mesh device [level] which is optimized for mesh communications. And there's a few other little changes we make like that in order to reduce the bandwidth by chunking up messages... the ultimate goal is to minimize the lightning protocol overhead so that there is more bandwidth available for data... For things like sending an SMS and as bandwidth increases there may be things like internet protocol..."

You can learn more about GoTenna Mesh Network Radios at https://gotennamesh.com/products/mesh

Credits

This episode of Let's Talk Bitcoin features Stephanie Murphy, Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Adam B. Levine and Richard Myers. Music provided by Jared Rubens and Gurty Beats, with editing by Jonas.

Photo by Josep Castells on Unsplash

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week, the wildest, most nonsensical, volatile part of the market wasn’t bitcoin, but the “Robinhood Rally” in equities.

This episode is sponsored by Bitstamp and Ciphertrace.

The stock market has long been disconnected from the underlying economy, but much of what happened this week - particularly the pumping of bankrupt company stocks - suggests that something new is afoot. 

In this episode, NLW breaks down three long-term trends suggested by the so-called Robinhood Rally, including:

• The “insurgency” aspect of a generation of young professionals who are willing to play the financial game rather than have it be played for them
• A totally new force in financial media, which could hit like a wrecking ball in one of the stodgiest, traditional media industries 
• An embrace of a certain type of cynicism or nihilism when it comes to the values of financial markets 

This week on The Breakdown:

Monday | Why War Reporting Is the Right Mental Model for Today’s Media, Feat. Jake Hanrahan

• The founder of Popular Front joins NLW for a discussion about protests, media and how the people being covered tend to not reflect divisive politics.

Tuesday | What the Stock Market’s ‘Robinhood Rally’ Means for Bitcoin

• The largest 50-day rally in stock market history and even shares of bankrupt companies are up more than 100%. What is going on?

Wednesday | A Vision for Digital Property Rights, Feat. Nic Carter

• Most people today look at social platforms like any other private company, but what if we saw them as alternative jurisdictions with a new set of property rights?

Thursday | Why the Fed Keeps Denying Its Role in Increasing Inequality

• The Federal Reserve expects low inflation, says rates will stay close to zero through 2022 and keeps lying about the role of central banks in increasing inequality.

Friday | Bitcoin Is More Than an Inflation Hedge 

• While fears of a “great monetary inflation” have driven the recent bitcoin narrative, other aspects like censorship resistance and peaceful protest matter just as much.

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In this audio interview, CoinDesk’s Leigh Cuen and adult content creator Allie Awesome talk about payments and money in the sex industry, especially the trends impacted by the coronavirus crisis. From how porn performers and entrepreneurs deal with Bitcoin Twitter to the ways the pandemic changed our digital sex lives, Cuen and Allie explore what actually drives demand for censorship-resistant systems.

This episode is sponsored by Bitstamp and Ciphertrace.

The biggest problem? Allie and other performers and sex workers basically have their digital advertising and distribution platforms controlled by third parties that aren’t responsible to the workers. For example, OnlyFans briefly froze Allie’s account earlier this year. Although she regained access, her distribution conduits remain at the mercy of tech platforms. This is where peer-to-peer transactions come in. Allie said she knows how to use a cryptocurrency wallet and would gladly do so if more customers wanted to pay her directly. The fact is those customers are few and far between.

“To those people who want to come up with a solution, my first question is ‘well, are you paying for porn’?” she said. “I think a lot of people want to make money off of ‘adult’, but they aren’t really willing to invest in ‘adult’”.

See also: Why Lightning Payments Aren’t Clicking for Porn Companies (Just Yet)

Another major issue according to Allie, is an increase in traffic or visibility doesn’t always translate to profits. Plus, many crypto fans see her industry as something they want to profit from, by building their own tech solutions, rather than contribute to experienced performers. Compared to other bitcoin or ether holders, sex workers are even more likely to rely on social networks like Twitter than exchanges like Coinbase, which deplatforms them just like Paypal. Performers require either a high degree of technical skill, to use decentralized exchange (DEX) platforms like Bisq, or a de facto social liquidity network in order to use cryptocurrency without trusting third parties. Allie shares why she is excited about cryptocurrency, even if it’s a challenge to use it for censorship resistance.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.