It turns out that in two months, I will have
the opportunity to announce this project at a
convention. I will be happy to do so if it
appears that there will be sufficient progress
in the next two months. A fairly firm
commitment by someone to write the software
would be an excellent start. And, this
announcement MAY lead to some financing of the project.
The main question, other than the financing, is
the programming of the software. Has there been any progress on this matter?
Jim Bell
On Monday, December 9, 2019, 11:39:10 AM PST,
jim bell <[email protected]> wrote:
I hope people haven't fotten about the idea for
making an alternate anonymization system. The
hardware requirements almost write
themselves. Yes, there was some discussion
about the software issues. Could/did somebody
write a proposal of the functions and features
of this system? Any volunteers on programming it?
Jim Bell
On Tuesday, October 15, 2019, 01:21:31 PM PDT,
jim bell <[email protected]> wrote:
Jim Bell's comments inline:
On Tuesday, October 15, 2019, 11:23:53 AM PDT, Punk <[email protected]> wrote:
On Sun, 13 Oct 2019 22:15:58 +0000 (UTC)
jim bell <<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]> 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.htm
l
but>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>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
> <https://www.freehaven.net/papers.html>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
>
<https://lists.cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks/2015-June/053438.html>[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/>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?
>
<https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/maidsafecoin/>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...
> <https://storj.io/>Decentralized Cloud Storage Storj
"Decentralized Cloud Storage"
> <https://tron.network/>TRON
Foundationï¼Capture 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...
True, <sigh>, quite true.
Jim Bell
