The biggest problem I immediately foresee is that this sounds backwards. It doesn't work best in areas with patchy or no internet, it works best in areas with lots of participating devices. It's most needed in areas with patchy or no internet, but those areas are likely to be the opposite of the areas with lots of participating devices.
I would say that the underlying issue is that people do not really "own" their devices and the corporations that do are vulnerable to (or complicit in) state coercion.
You cannot truly have freedom on a non-free device, you can just be small enough to not be worth taking action against yet.
For a more extensive discussion on censorship resilient mesh networking, see IETF Internet Standard draft from 2012 [1]. After the Arab Spring there was global hope. Great to see revival of this topic today. Mesh networking is 1990s. The lesson from decades ago was that mesh networking can't be the killer use-case. Users need a reason to install this and allow it to drain the battery while looking for nearby nodes. Mesh networking never broke through the glass ceiling.
Blocking apps is real. Even Amazon killed a side-loaded app [2].
[1] https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-pouwelse-censorfree-sc...
[2] https://torrentfreak.com/amazon-remote-disables-piracy-apps-...
But I mostly agree - they rolled it out worldwide later on because once you reason it through, disabling it when it's not actively used turns out to be the better default.
I think you could reasonably argue that the measure limits Airdrop spam.
If there is a low density area between two people, a message could take a long time to show up. A message from NYC to LA is effectively relying on the messaging being cached on a phone in NYC, that person flying to LA, and then continuing the journey.
Those working against the demonstrators could send people out with QR code to infect the phones will malware for their own means.
On a Pinephone you can turn it off with a physical power switch.
If you really wanted to, on most other phones you could desolder it and throw it in the garbage. You'd need to already have custom firmware on the main CPU (or should I say "application processor" to fit in with the people who say "baseband processor") so it wouldn't crash or lock up when booting.
A little bit less destructive (in case you want to use your cellphone as a cellphone later) would be replacing the antenna with a dummy load.
Wireless internet is getting better, but when you really need something like this, you really need it.
In fairness to op, the proposed solution seems best intended for comms blackouts in densely populated areas rather than areas with persistently limited access.
The thing is, it's almost impossible to guarantee payments work as expected in decentralized system, see "double spend attack". Bitcoin was designed to prevent it but does it by having common ledger which is a bit too much for a chat
"Just encrypt things" might be your reply. TOR folks have been fighting an uphill battle for ages with that as their main weapon.
LN payments are based on Sphinx[1], but they don't leverage the full capabilities of it. Sphinx only allows for single-use replies.
The proposals for bidirectional anonymity involve using HORNET[2], which builds on Sphinx (specifically, it uses Sphinx's single-reply message to establish a HORNET connection), and enables sender-receiver anonymity and bidirectional transfer beyond single-reply messages.
It has also been proposed to include the use of TARANET[3] to prevent deanymization via traffic analysis.
[1]:https://cypherpunks.ca/~iang/pubs/Sphinx_Oakland09.pdf
Ontop of that, I think payment isn't critical. You join the mesh because you want to use it yourself - all you need then is to limit how much power you're prepared to spend on it. What does it matter to you if 100 people use your phone or none? ....other than power.
To put it another way, I think money would introduce a commercial motive which would end up gobbling up the system like bitcoin mining.
I don't think relaying messages would require that much power and as you said, "You join the mesh because you want to use it yourself".
Aside from that, most of what your concept includes (but uses Internet instead of BT) exists with Nostr+Lightning.
i'm not sure if in this case "only" the 4G network was shut off, but IMO it still serves as a good reminder of when such an event might happen again.
How resilient are those protocols to attacks on the integrity of the network, when most (or signicant part) of the nodes are controlled by a bad actor and deliberately operate in a mode that prevents the functioning of the network?
Not quite the discoverable, user-friendly experience of Briar, Bitchat etc. but it can be combined with online links (Briar can technically go online, but only via Tor; both Briar and Bitchat are only for smartphones).
Central node addressing control is the only way to solve it. Making it self-governing through payments is a nice idea.
And if someone tries and fails to send a message across such a gap, is it stored on every phone in the vicinity? That could lead to unwanted conditions (large queues, multiple delivery), which also muddle the accounting. But not doing so practically guarantees the message won't be delivered.
It gets more complex if there's messages intended for Village C where no one from Village A visits though without some deleterious privacy impacts from needing to know what nodes see what other nodes but if the messages are relatively small you can address that with just increasing the level of optimistic caching and forwarding perhaps. Also the higher bandwidth the link the better so you can transfer more of these optimistic packets.
I'm generally against strapping a coin to this since it seems inevitably to hamper end user adoption in favor of making money for speculators and the people in the ICO. It could incentivize creating static point to point links though by providing potential revenue. Not sure that gets over the downsides of strapping a coin onto this though.
One option --but it might require some centralization-- is that people announce they're going to travel, and stash a bunch of messages. If the sender can provide information about the geographical destination, that could help.
About monetization: remember what money did to the internet. But the above option would practically invite some form of payment. Thinking of Perth, that would lead to a kind of "Mad Max meets Johnny Mnemnonic".
>I like the idea, I just don't know how to implement a robust micropayment system that does not require a lot of messages back and forth for a transaction. Given the intended use-case, that would not work.
Your proposal is that since Alice and Bob can't communicate in real-time, either directly or indirectly, Alice does an interaction with a smart contract to lock some value and then Bob does an interaction with the same smart contract to unlock some value.
We can view the smart contract as some shared algorithm between Alice and Bob (if they are running their own nodes) or we can view it as something outside of them both (perhaps they are RPC customers of Infura). If Alice and Bob are running their own nodes, however those nodes manage to communicate with each other is a way they could just send the message to each other and not need a blockchain. And if they're both able to communicate with Infura, they could also swap Infura for Gmail and send each other a message the normal way (or if they can really only reach Infura for some reason, they can put their messages on the blockchain). But we are talking about designing systems that can work in scenarios where direct communication like this is impossible, and messages have to be forwarded hop-by-hop over a span of hours. You can't design a system for slow networking, that assumes the existence of a separate fast network just to run the payment system.
All nodes running a blockchain have to be in low-latency contact with each other. If you try to run Bitcoin in a network with multi-hour latency, you'll never reach consensus on which blocks are in the chain. You'll be hard-forking all over the place. You'd have to slow it down to, like, one block per week, but then it's far too slow to be useful for payments.
If a blockchain exists in such an environment, it exists on a tightly-coupled cluster of nearby nodes. And that cluster is pretty much the same as a single central node, from the perspective of the network. You don't gain anything by making it a cluster (except for redundancy, as usual).
The sender deposits a fee into a smart contract.
The message is encrypted in layers, with each forwarder only able to decrypt their part (like an onion).
As the message is forwarded peer-to-peer, each forwarder appends some kind of proof-of-forwarding.
When the recipient finally receives and decrypts the message, they unlock the contract using a code embedded in the message. This triggers micropayments to all the forwarders.
Do forwarders need to interact with the blockchain (i.e., create/update a smart contract) when forwarding?
If so, wouldn’t that require each forwarder to have internet access at the time of forwarding—which breaks the idea of fully offline Bluetooth relaying?
Or is all the blockchain interaction deferred to the recipient, who proves the path the message took and triggers all payments at once?
They have been around for longer and have some interesting thoughts in there.
How do I know that for device A to reach device B, I need to go through device C but not D?
And if I try to go through device D but device C actually delivers the message, then does device D get paid? How would you validate which devices actually participated in the transmission of the message? How does this not turn into a privacy nightmare?
Look up "distributed peer to peer" e.g. kademlia
In a way everyone has something to barter: you owe the milk man, your employer owes you. Identities form a web of trust in the physical world.
Would all payments be just non-fungible bilateral agreements? So if I paid the milkman for some milk, but there was no good or service I could later provide to him, he would be unable to take my payment to the butcher to buy some meat (unless the butcher was also willing to enter into a new bilateral agreement with me)?
The butcher would have to trust the milkman in the real world to extend credit to him. At some point the butcher would go to a lender and borrow USD against the IOUs from the milkman. The lender knows the butcher, but can also evaluate the IOUs from the milkman by evaluating who owes the milkman, etc etc. Based on the level of trust the lender has in the butcher (and his IOUs) the lender can lend some hard USD to the butcher, and sell IOUs in exchange for USD to people wanting to join the network.
USD is also not backed by anything, and relies on trust. The important thing is that someone would be prepared to exchange IOU promises for USD/BTC/GLD - market makers. Demand for IOUs comes from people wanting to access the network.
Participate in the development of Reticulum. Install the app Sideband on your Smartphone or other device.
Sideband is a chat app that uses LXMF. LXMF is a messaging protocol based on Reticulum. Reticulum is a full network stack that is decentralized and transport layer agnostic.
What we need for your vision is LoRa modems integrated in our phones.
Or just a bluetooth mesh interface for Reticulum. That is a great idea. Develop that, and you have exactly what you described.
To be more specific: Reticulum's main program is the daemon rnsd. It uses so called interfaces and can route between them (WiFi, LoRa, other radio services...). Implement a new interface type that uses the technology called 'bluetooth mesh' and your vision is done.
(YES APPLE DOES THAT TOO)
Reticulum supports using serial ports as interfaces, so if you get serial-over-Bluetooth working it can be done now.
One other thing I really like about Reticulum is that it also supports generic stdin/stdout to a process as an interface, so with some scripting and what not you can literally make it work over anything.
The Helium Network tried something like this, but with a fixed infrastructure: People were incentivized to run Helium network nodes and could earn micropayments for running nodes and handling traffic.
It revealed a lot of problems with structures like this, such as the incentive to cheat through various loopholes that were discovered.
It also became apparent that the monetization/tokenization aspect overtook the network functionality as the primary motivator for the project. After a while, people started looking at the traffic and payouts and realized that almost nobody was using it for real communication, it had become one big shell game for collecting the payments designed to incentivize nodes to come online and relay traffic. Then the token itself had become a speculative commodity that people used for trading more than anything.
I think it would be interesting if someone could invent a stable coin cryptocurrency with low overhead that enabled some of these use cases, but it seems the allure of generating a new token that the founders can sell into a speculative market to raise funds for the project is always too alluring, so every project goes from having good intentions to becoming a veiled pump and dump. Maybe some day there will be a stable coin that escapes these issues, but I haven’t seen it yet.
Like the US dollar and Postgres?
For like $200 anyone can start a business entity in the US with a tax ID and a bank, I’m still yet to understand how crypto is better other than for circumventing regulators
Irreversible is bad because mistakes happen. I lost ~$1,000 in a bad transfer because of a typo.
Publicly verifiable -- not good because I don't want the public knowing what I buy.
Pseudonymous is the worst of both. Is it or is it not me? them?
I am thinking digital cash using pub keys on a network run from space on something like starlink sats.
Was the option of doing a much smaller amount available to validate the account before following up with the full transfer? I've never understood not doing a test transfer first.
I just got sent real estate documents because the sender used my uncommon firstNameLastName@ gmail, but because they had a typo of the last name it landed in my inbox.
In fact, I have no idea how your comment is relevant to losing money.
You accidentally got someone else's document. How is that relevant to losing money?
As a reminder, you said: "I lost ~$1,000 in a bad transfer because of a typo.". How can you lose ~$1,000 because of someone else's typo in which an e-mail landed in your inbox?
Irreversible is also not a good thing just ask anyone who had their NFTs stolen during that craze. If someone hacks my bank account or skims my card and transfers the money out the bank can reverse a lot of those transactions. Irreversibility wipes out decades of consumer protection advances.
See Monero
So is cash. What we really need are ways of scanning a piece of fiat currency that instantly transfers that money to an account while then disabling the physical copy from the registry as valid. That's how silly I see crypto for anything other than illicit transactions
Very much depends. Cameras, fingerprints, banknote ids, cell tower/GPS or just people seeing you.
https://netzpolitik.org/2025/bargeld-tracking-du-hast-ueberw...
>".... one entity in charge which gets to set the level of fairness"
Exactly what is unfair about the current system? The way we insure fairness is with laws and regulation. A system without those will suffer - well - lawlessness.
How is it centralized? The vast majority of dollars only exist as bits in computers in multiple banks all over the world. Doesn't get more distributed than that. Not only that - if you don't like dollars trade it for Euro's or Yen - you can pay your rent, mortgage and buy things with them also.
Other benefits of the current system. If someone steals my credit card I'm only on the hook for $50. My transactions are confirmed in a matter seconds pretty much anywhere in the world. I AutoPay many of my bills. If I set up automatic payments with Bitcoin I wouldn't be able to sleep at night.
There are problems that Bitcoin could help solve - it just isn't replacing currencies. I see a technology in search of a problem.
Do you even hold significant government currency, or do you only hold the layer-2 bank currency, and stocks?
I asked for specific evidence or instances of corruption or unfairness. Making an accusation (gov't is corrupt) without evidence or example and saying something is true repeatedly is not a substitute for actual evidence. There are many documented cases of money laundering and wash trades with Bitcoin. These same activities are done using fiat currencies, but in the US at least BT (before Trump), they were illegal and people doing it were subject to criminal investigation. I do agree that there are many gov't policies that have lead to inequities in the distribution of the money that should be addressed.
Bitcoin will only make a fixed number of Bitcoins but they forked Bitcoins into 2 separate coins years ago which some might consider as printing more Bitcoin since everyone got a copy of their existing coins. New ShitCoins are minted to scam people on a regular basis. If anything the barriers to printing too much money are lower with Crypto because it is so easy to make a new coin type. Have you invested in any NFT's lately? What about coin front running? [0]
[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/argentina-main-stock-...
Thinking Crypto is not subject to corruption is very naive.
>"If you don't think the government is corrupt, I don't know what to tell you. " If you cannot explain of give examples then I have to assume you don't really know - it is your opinion. I am sure people living in certain deeply corrupt countries - Russia comes to mind - like Bitcoin because their countries currencies are unstable and access to other currencies is limited. That said the reason they like it is BC can be exchanged for stable currencies to buy things. If those stable currencies did not exist BC would be useless for them also.
The one to look at for that is Monero: the closest thing to private(anonymous) digital cash that I've found (so far).
I think Bitcoin has become a typical fiat asset ouroboros now, because the people who actually want to circumvent regulators are using Monero (which is why Monero is banned in most countries), while the Bitcoin price is supported almost entirely by speculation and a little bit by people doing only-slightly-shady things with crypto who haven't noticed everyone else moved to Monero.
More details here if interested: https://x.com/0x_Osprey/status/1925299005191577921
We are thinking about this and building in this direction with Paygo.wtf
The OP's idea is an improvement: if you have to use crypto, then the only way a token is generated is when a sender buys one with fiat, so that they can transmit their message on the network.
Personally I think everything gets perverted when monetisation becomes the primary goal.
The firmware on these devices is open source (minus proprietary blobs for ESP32 WiFi, etc.) and the community is active. Check the Meshmap [2] to see some nodes that have made their location public in your area.
So long as you're using the standard long fast and 0/20 frequency slot you'll still have your messages passed via NCMesh nodes even if you're using the broader US Mesh as your MQTT server.
[0] MQTT here simply tunnels the messages over the internet so you get placed in a broader chat room and pseudomesh than you could reach through RF.
I love the project and participate, but people mentioning stuff like this in response to buzzwords irritates me. Like ipfs it is a buzzword-driven curiosity, not a real solution to real problems that anyone has.
Additionally, the meshtastic encryption is a toy. In 2025 when you say encryption you make people think of modern features like replay resistance, perfect forward secrecy, etc. Meshtastic doesn’t do any of this.
IPNS, on the other hand...
In practice, it takes upwards of a whole minute to locate a file it's never seen before, so it's not terribly useful. It's better than nothing, but it's not terribly useful.
It's still cool that someone tried. IPFS is one in a long line of ideas that didn't really work. Occasionally some of these ideas have massive success, like the Internet, and Bitcoin.
Personally, I've always been surprised that traditional cellular networks didn't try to incentivize femtocell placement by awarding compensatory minutes or megs or something, to the operator of the serving femtocell. Imagine someone with an apartment over the old bakery downtown where the historical district has made it difficult to place normal towers, so they get a femtocell for their own usage. But if it carries other customers' traffic, they'd get kickbacks and incentive to place it near the window where it has the best view of the shopping area below. Suddenly they're working on RF optimization without even knowing it.
In both cases, you have an existing payment expectation that you're just piggybacking on. People already pay their ISP for connectivity, so they expect to pay Althea, and the distribution of money after that is a detail. People already pay their cellco for service, and if some of that kicks back to other customers, that's a detail.
I think your idea has legs, if you can solve the onboarding and payment expectation. There's also a critical-mass problem that Apple solved with Find My by just force-installing it on every device without consent, and you can't do that. So people will only run your software if they:
A) know about it
B) are in a place with poor enough connectivity that it's needed
C) are in a place with enough user density that it's worthwhile
D) perceive that it doesn't unduly kill their battery while in a place that also might not have a lot of opportunities to charge
That's a mighty tricky combination, especially the overlap between B and C. The only setting I can imagine is Burning Man. But micropayments directly conflict with the gifting and decommodification principles.
Remember that network operators plan their frequency allocations so that base stations on the same frequency don't also overlap in space. How would you ensure this with random femtocells? The frequency allocation plan for a femtocell relies on it having a very small area of coverage and being far away from others, so that it doesn't matter if they all use the same frequency.
Cell networks aren't plug-and-play YOLO networks like wifi - they're properly engineered stuff.
Now, they could absolutely form a contract with a customer to put a proper base station in their apartment window - according to the locations and frequencies that best fulfill the needs of the network. Not just "buy one of these and plug it in for a discount" but "we'll pay you ten times over to let us fill a corner of your apartment with big metal boxes, and enter for maintenance with 24 hours notice". Evidently this is a lot of hassle compared to getting permission to put them on roofs, so they don't do it.
I assume this Althea network does something similar but with a reversed order of operations: first someone sets up a network repeater, then someone at Althea HQ figures out how much value they're providing to the network. If it's fully automated, it would run into the same problems as Helium, like people creating fake nodes to carry fake traffic (if nothing else, getting a discount on their real traffic by pretending it passed through 100 of their own nodes before reaching someone else's node).
However, I wonder how would the sender know how to route the message so that it gets to the correct recipient. It would have to send it to all nearby devices, which would then send it to all nearby devices, and so on, but that would be terribly inefficient; moreover, the message would continue to circulate even after the recipient received it, unless the recipient sends a receipt acknowledgement, which would then need to be propagated to all devices as well.
Apple's Find My network is not decentralized: all participating devices send the locations of objects they find to Apple's servers, which then forward the information directly to the correct recipients.
Having nodes know their neighbors isn't necessarily required. It can help build a more efficient network where nodes know their neighbors and their neighbors' neighbors which can allow for a shorter number of allowed hops. If a node knows the route to get to a recipient, it can continue passing the message even if the hop counter is at zero. For example, a node in a rural area would require a couple hops to reach the edge of the city where the message is immediately passed using a known route even if the allowed hop count has run out.
But you can also build a totally blind network where nodes just pass a message until the counter hits zero. A blind network may be helpful in a contested environment where you can't trust any nodes with information beyond its own view.
If the information isn't critical, then you can hide the network even further by not requiring ACK messages from the recipient and not building a route trace in the metadata. This prevents a bad node from collecting network information.
Timing is the key: you want to start working on it when the regular internet shows cracks.
In the meantime, build features that work in both worlds!
It's very little energy, but it's literally non-zero, so definitely not "literally zero marginal cost".
Why would the user care if it's negligible? Because very-small-but-nonzero things scale very differently from actual zero things. If the price of injecting something is zero or almost zero, then this gets quickly abused and suddenly your battery drains like crazy because somebody decided that this is an excellent new vector to serve spam. So everybody will deinstall/deactivate this.
And that's why we can't have nice things.
Socially not viable since all actors that could make it happen are incentivised to actively work against this to ever happen: Governments and big tech. Where are the ad opportunities if stuff does not go to a central platform which profiles you and serves "content" with ads?
It would technologically be even pretty easy to do. There have been many attempts already, including things like roof net / freifunk. It just never works because you have very big actors against you.
You pass along a message, and get a token in return. Then, some options:
1) the message never makes it through
2) the message makes it through, via your path
3) the message makes it through, but via some other path, and yours is really a dead end
Also, how would you handle the case where multiple peers all get the message and send it through the same bottleneck node? I guess you’d want to have some incentive to widen bottlenecks, so that no nodes become important…
This is an interesting thing when financial institutions do it between themselves. It's completely useless as a consumer-facing payment system. Consumers aren't going to plan in advance how much money to lock up, that's just stupid.
I assume you're not referring to the transaction fee because last I heard, it's not currently $25.
If you gossip/broadcast messages, the message will be copied to many nodes that end up not being involved in the actual path from source to destination. Will they still be paid for it?
If so, why shouldn't I copy each message I receive onto my 50000 Sybil devices that don't move, and get paid 50001 times what I should?
So let's assume instead that they don't get paid. That means when I receive the message I read out the path it actually took and pay those people. What if I simply don't pay those people? I could even forge a different path, maybe through my 50k Sybil devices.
I don't see a way to make it work. But nobody saw a way to make cryptographic digital currency work until Bitcoin, so maybe there's some crazy innovation that could make this work too.
The Internet was a neat academic toy at one point for whatever that's worth :-)
I worked the field both academic and startup, I even made one of the first implementation of the Bundle protocol for store carry and forward (IETF transport protocol for the deep space network RFC9171).
Turns out the Mobile OS are making this kind of communication nearly impossible. To work well, it basically needs background job (automatic scan of nearby ble/wifi/radio) and automatic connection without user interaction (imagine being prompted to accept a connection every time you pass by someone), both have been basically made impossible (especially after covid).
Isn't this how some covid-specific apps work to let you know if you've come in contact with an identified carrier? https://www.gao.gov/blog/covid-19-exposure-notification-apps...
(The paper was linked from internet co-inventor David Reed's open spectrum site, which appears to be gone now.)
Now add a twist: • Senders pay a small fee to send a message. • Relaying devices earn a micro-payment (could be tokens, sats, etc.) for carrying the message one hop further. • End-to-end encrypted, fully decentralized, optionally anonymous.
Basically, a “postal network” built on people’s phones, without needing a traditional internet connection. Works best in areas with patchy or no internet, or under censorship.
Obvious challenges: • Latency and reliability (it’s not real-time). • Abuse/spam prevention. • Power consumption and user opt-in. • Viable incentive structures.
What do you think? Is this viable? Any real-world use cases where this might be actually useful — or is it just a neat academic toy?