Removing the last few middleman \ stacker news ~tech

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3911 sats \ 31 comments \ @Reachableceo 4 Sep 2023 tech

I am a self (sovereign) hosting enthusiast. I have built a pretty nice computer room and self-host all the things. I am an avid listener of the Self Hosted podcast.

I see lots of folks doing amazing work in the BTC/SATS etc space and things like V4V , micro payments, removing middleman that "provide trust" . All of that is amazing.

However, I see a problem looming. As this alternative payment/transaction/value rail gains credence, it's main vulnerable underbelly is the "Internet" , which is really concentrated on a few large BGP Autonomous Systems (AS).

I have been focusing on helping extend internet access , via high altitude balloons. It's a multi year project, and I'll do a dedicated post or 3 on that soon.

Is anyone looking at how we can not let perfect be the enemy of good, and remove things like Cloudflare CDN using IPFS/Apache Traffic Server? Can we all "give a little, get a little" in terms of a whole bunch of CDN nodes (can we build a trading bot that constantly scoops up inventory from lowendbox.com and we can just all toss in 5.00 a month to the bot via sat streaming)?

I've worked at some of the worlds largest internet brands and handled massive CDN build outs. Where we pushed content right into global distributed RAM caches as the origin servers to serve the mid tier and downstream tiers fast enough etc.

CDN is one of the few things remaining as a choke point. Can we build a cooperative of 10,000 "little islands" and make one?

Things like NOSTR etc are amazing. However, in the interim, how do we solve the current "middle mile" problem of (say) distributing podcasts ? Sure, RSS is how they are "sovereign" but usually that just points to "someone else computer" as the distribution point. This problem isn't solved by blockchain (ie podcast index/hive etc), that just tells clients "go to the CDN and pull an updated version".

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10 sats \ 4 replies \ @newnym 4 Sep 2023

Would the bitcoin satellite be a step in this direction? https://blockstream.com/satellite/

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Reachableceo OP 4 Sep 2023

Satellites are super expensive. It's why I am building a high altitude balloon platform as an alternative that is much cheaper.

Our objective is to have a finished prototype by end of this year. We are putting the final touches on our (completely self hosted) IT/Business/R&D systems (full disclosure we don't self host our primary e-mail or voip but hope todo so by year end).

I believe that the bitcoin satellite is an "out of band" node on the blockchain? I don't believe it provides any services except being a blockchain node.

My overall concern is that the blockchain can be crippled by the powers that be deciding that the bitcoin protocol/port (or anything encrypted they don't have the keys to) will be blocked. Unless everyone that wants to use blockchain has satellite transceiver technology (hard to do in an apartment) (and if they are blocking bitcoin, it's exactly the time everyone should be using bitcoin) .

With our system and network (which will be owned by a cooperative) (we are figuring out how todo multi state/international cooperative from a legal perspective) it will be heavily de-centralized/distributed. Owned/operated/controlled and physically co-located with it's subscribers.

The balloons (MorseFlyer) will be sold to a single entity (the cooperative) and also the ground stations/signal distribution (MorseTown). The subscribers will have a MorsePOD which will have a unique alphanumeric identifier (an identity that you can own and can't be taken away (like a sibling comment talking about DNS being used for censorship and I'll reply directly to that with more detail) .

The overall operating theory being "you can't kick in a million doors" . Of course, in theory, that is possible. And is exactly the time that a system like this will be needed.

Using (networking) layer 2 technology, direct connection is possible. So if the balloons get shut down, the middleware gets taken out, the MorsePODs can (via many many many hops potentially) all talk to each other.

I am in the process of writing all this up in detail from my private notes.

tl;dr , I don't believe an off planet blockchain node will help.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @SpaceHodler 4 Sep 2023

It would be great if this allowed bi-directional bitcoin traffic. If I understand correctly, you can use it to download the blockchain and keep it synced, but not to broadcast your node data (inbound connections) or broadcast transactions.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @nemo 4 Sep 2023

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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Reachableceo OP 4 Sep 2023

The balloon platform we are building is essentially that, but at 100x cheaper and way more accessible and able to be subscribed to by 100s of millions.

Do research on starlink and broadband satellite providers in general, you'll find significant upper bands on their adoption due to the size of the downlink radius and general RF physics.

With balloons, we believe we can avoid most of those problems. It will take some significant engineering, no argument. :)

0 sats \ 6 replies \ @elvismercury 4 Sep 2023

I think this is an important attitude -- I love the balloon idea, excited to hear what you're up to! There was some work by Sabo and Elaine Ou on using ham radio (here's a writeup) that I liked; as well as relay version using these walkie-talkie things (can't remember what that one was called.) Would love to see a rich web of alternate network / transmission methods.

I think of this in the same way as the current drivechain discussion -- so much better to have some of these ideas well thought-out and developed before they're needed because of some catastrophe. Just having them in place and ready to go as credible alternatives to the default internet transmission may be enough to prevent the attacks in the first place, since it will seem pointless to bother.

60 sats \ 0 replies \ @Reachableceo OP 4 Sep 2023

We work very closely with the HAM community in central texas and around the USA. We are using commercial / ISM bands, but all of the ideas/research/hardware trials the HAM folks do, we closely collaborate on. :)

Yes, we need these systems thought out, tested, in process before a crisis.

The balloon platform is payload agnostic, it will also carry US Government payloads for forest fire monitoring, ground water analysis and dozens of other use cases currently served by satellites.

Internet access is probably 5% to 10% of the addressable market.

0 sats \ 4 replies \ @Reachableceo OP 5 Sep 2023

Over the past 10 years or so I’ve worked with hams here in Texas and we’ve been flying various float/ascent (float stays in roughly same altitude and goes in more of an “orbit”, ascent shoots up and bursts ~100k feet). We’ve developed things like geofencing (to shutdown when we can’t legally transmit) lots of small/minimal solar cells etc.

I hope to build a standard “kit” that folks can buy and attach a payload to , as our first saleable product.

0 sats \ 3 replies \ @elvismercury 5 Sep 2023

This is really cool. Seems like a thing that people would buy for a collective benefit for the general good of btc (e.g., to help make the network resilient) vs as a product they use to earn money. Is that how you're thinking of it, or do you imagine actual use-demand?

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @Reachableceo OP 5 Sep 2023

Are you referring to the balloon kit ? Or the CDN/DNS?

Both of those have wide use cases and direct demand. BTC is one of hundreds of protocols and software platforms that can use it .

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury 5 Sep 2023

Was thinking of the balloon -- not obvious to me who would want that besides (in theory) bitcoiners, or blockchains hell-bent on preventing chain splits and the like. Would be interested in pointers / documents / whatever to learn more.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Reachableceo OP 6 Sep 2023

Well, think of the balloon as a replacement for a satellite. Think of all the things satellites do, and what the world would look like if the same functionality could be delivered 100-1000x cheaper and could be landed / take off again.

The balloon is payload agnostic. Sensing, surveillance, internet are payloads we are in talks with potential customers for today. HFT is another area.

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @duvel 4 Sep 2023

I also see DNS as an obstacle that can be used for censoring.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Reachableceo OP 4 Sep 2023

Yes. Absolutely

CDN/DNS are all "middle mile" technologies and serve as "invisible choke points" and is why I started this thread.

We need a cooperatively owned/operated de-centralized/distributed CDN/DNS.

https://www.opennic.org/ is the best project I'm aware of in the DNS space.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @duvel 20 Sep 2023

Thank you for sharing. I wasn't aware of an open dns initiative. The amount of innovation being enabled by technology in the self sovereignty space is amazing, so I hope/think these innovations will arrive over time. I was aware of DNS being a risk, but didn't think about CDNs. Good to know.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @JesseJames 4 Sep 2023

Not sure what you mean by the "internet", if you mean your ISP then get two or three providers. (cable, fiber, mobile, etc) If you mean when the whole internet goes down (with power down, that's most likely the case) then I think you have much bigger problem than your payments...lol You talking zombie time and make sure you have enough shotgun shells time :-) Also, P2P seems to be what you looking for , check keet by holepunch.to

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Reachableceo OP 4 Sep 2023

I am not referring to the last mile connection. I am talking about the content distribution and routing (the "backbone").

Yes, being well prepared is a wonderful thing and I hope folks are able todo so :)

0 sats \ 11 replies \ @huluvublue 4 Sep 2023

I'd like to see a Bitcoin native distributed storage and compute scaling layer. IPFS has a lot of recent advancements like IPNI, WNFS, IPVM, Bacalhau etc. We will get there eventually whether its with drivechain or ZK or some other innovative 2 way peg.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Reachableceo OP 5 Sep 2023

I think all of the above sounds really good.

One other issue that gets pulled in , how do we bootstrap? Essentially we are talking about DHT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table (bit-torrent or similar) .

In my initial view/thoughts , the coop operating the CDN/DNS would also operate boostrap/discovery nodes.

One problem I want to solve for MorseNET is that one must presume all delegated operators (aka system/network admins) are untrustworthy (either they are, or they get targeted/compromised etc). I want the MorseNET to have a blockchain that records all privileged operations . Ideally this would tie in with a ticket system. So that if say someone is just randomly firing up a network sniffer on the router, without a specific need, it would be logged to the blockchain. The system would ship with a number of pre-canned alerts that everyone would be subscribed to.

I want this kind of system for anyone running critical infrastructure with delegated authority. Total enforced transparency. Yes, from time to time, often daily, personnel with privileged access need to perform operations that may impact privacy. Those actions should be recorded.

Because, while the system your designing ensures no one has tampered/blocked/altered the traffic (which is absolutely something that end users care about and should be able to know/prove/have attested to), it doesn't cover the threat model of delegated authority being able to read/copy/monitor traffic.

I looked into things like blockchain append only databases a few years back.

(This is something that I don't expect a deep answer on, and would fall into consulting/billable/equity/v4v time) .

We have orthogonal goals/objectives . Ultimately we want high trust and the absolute reduction of risk while not impacting usability (I am sorry if that puts words in your mouth, but it's what I'm gathering from these interactions) :)

0 sats \ 9 replies \ @Reachableceo OP 4 Sep 2023

Yes. IPFS/associated projects does seem to be the space to watch.

However, without a cooperatively owned/operated set of compute/network/storage resources, it's suffering the same fate / risk profile.

I would like to see a community effort to constantly purchase inventory (for now on VPS/colo providers, later on our own hardware) that could use a NixOS build and would join a "swarm" as an IPFS node (and also using opennic or whatever blockchain DNS folks reach concession on) (I personally think that blockchain DNS is solving the "ownership" problem at the wrong layer .)

10 sats \ 8 replies \ @huluvublue 4 Sep 2023

Agreed. We need something people can easily add atop their current node setup with little additional cost or technical experience. Every umbrel node-in-a-box is sitting with 1.2 tb extra harrdrive space and a modern CPU. Opennic looks interesting, like a more honest attempt than unstoppable or handshake stuff?

Are you building in this area? this is my fav topic. We need a 2 way peg and incentives (luckily there this thing called bitcoin lol) and we can have an open source permissionless option to compete with google, amazon, openai and the rest of clownworld

100 sats \ 7 replies \ @Reachableceo OP 4 Sep 2023

I am happy to be the project/product manager for something like this. That is what I have the bandwidth for. :) It's tangential to the overall goal of my business, and I have strong feelings/beliefs about it.

I have done limited research and have the kernel of an idea (a "trading bot" of sorts that has an account that is community funded and purchases inventory from lowendbox.com (i think they have an API site as well?) and spins up nodes. ) All using sats, all fully blockchain enabled/logged/visible. I presume we can have sats flow into an account, and then (automatically?) fill up fiat (after certain thresholds) with BTCRefill and use that to purchase inventory. Something like that. I would be happy to collaborate (I"m @ReachableCEO on Discord) and put some mindmaps / business process diagrams together. (I like https://www.insilmaril.de/vym/ and https://www.bonitasoft.com/ for that, but also interested in finally figuring out mermaid in markdown and realizing my dream of living in VsCode 99% ) .

We would need to figure out things like compliance (handling of money, filling up giftcards). It's a decent sized project. The technical side at first pass is working with IPFS experts and getting a (docker? nix?) stack going (integrating with Umbrel is nice, but I don't think folks would want to co-mingle things?) . Also this would best be run in data centers . If it's run in folks homes, it would need to be decent uptime and have ports open etc. Like a full BTC node :) (a well run one anyway).

Happy to flesh this out here as well. Don't want to pollute/spam. It's something I see as an interim goal between what we have today (emerging p2p/no middleman/border-less etc v4v) but with a vulnerable underbelly (centrally controlled DNS/CDN) and v4v riding on a cooperatively built/owned/operated network.

0 sats \ 6 replies \ @drdoom 4 Sep 2023

Digging the direction you two are going with this. I've been giving it a lot of thought at the end-user level; ie- the content consumption layer. IMO there should defintely be a hash based routing system to checksumed content that results in an immutable/introspectable endpoint as with BTC addresses (and that perhaps are BTC addresses). Users as such can consume them as a QR making it 'fun' to collect and organize your content (websites, feeds, podcasts, movies, etc) & you could potentially add another incentive/reward system to convenience users by selling shorthand naming/namespaces to such a system ie- build our own alternate DNS complete with a domain registry. The benefit of such a system is that even if a user forgets to pay a bill and their namespace 'expires' their endpoint would continue functioning at its original hash address.

0 sats \ 5 replies \ @Reachableceo OP 4 Sep 2023

What would that look like? I mean, in terms of UI/UX? Would this be a new kind of browser?

Is this something like NFT meets TOR? I am trying to wrap my head around what your describing.

Can you list out :

how the current system works today (as you understand it)
a workflow in that current system, as it currently works
how your system would work
the same workflow from 2 and how it would work in the system you are describing?

What are the key problems you are looking to solve?

In my mind, many of these high complexity systems “boil the ocean” and by taking “small” steps (like cooperative ownership of DNS/CDN) we can resolve (almost?) “all” concerns.

I think that sometimes ownership/stewardship/control and tech gets all intermixed. In my opinion existing tech (when it comes to things like DNS/CDN) is fine. The issue is the control/ownership/concentration. I don’t believe we “need” new tech stacks. We 100% need new/better/different governance and de-centralization of power/concentration. :)

New tech is of course wonderful and no reason to not let 1000 gardens bloom and see what develops etc etc.

I think, combining btc/v4v with “boring” tech gets us something “now” (ish) and serves as a nice interim solution to a nasty underbelly of vulnerability that everyone likes to pretend doesn’t exist :)

0 sats \ 4 replies \ @drdoom 4 Sep 2023

Can you list out :

Well I can keep spitballing; if we get too structured here I'll have to bill you by the hour haha

Though am indeed building on my own right now just fleshing things out & prototyping; it's why this is great to have converstation with likeminds.

Definitely agree with you let's not reinvent the wheel. On that regard, I've given the backend some thought too and this ties in to what it would look like a little bit in terms of UX and how it works. IPFS is an example of something that is rather exotic and so I think we should be looking seriously at other existing file systems/networked systems already in production that guarantee file integrity specificaly the workhorses known as Git and ZFS which both happen also to be software engineering pinnacles IMHO. Primarily the reasons these 2 are so rock solid & widespread is that they are extremely focused on limited features but absolutely nailing those.

And like you said DNS/CDN pretty much fine and as such my thinking is you bootstrap on them; nothing is going to go anywhere if its not resolvable over http so what we could have is 'nodes' that expose a port and are as such reachable on http complete with the addressing system so that any given node can host all or some of the endpoints (content) over existing DNS + http ex: mydomain.com/somehash123435dfs/mynote.md

Hard pass on NFTs but methods of authentication/permission is important and this can effectively make it useful for communications too. Some method to accommodate licenseable content may also be worthy of implementation to help individual creators publish/monetize their endpoints if they so desire.

Like you pointed out we don't need a new tech stack, I would only suggest a clever content routing/addressing system combined with intuitive UI/UX & some aspect of branding - that aside we can tackle the more pressing and challenging political, monopolozation and man-in-the-middle vulnerabilities you highlight.

Your collaborative/crowdsourced/bot driven purchasing strategy seems very promising. I think also perhaps something early on to decide is if we would want to work towards IRL hardware ie- to get rackspace and/or have a data-center strategy.

0 sats \ 3 replies \ @Reachableceo OP 5 Sep 2023

Ok…. however you didn’t answer my question :) Let me ask it more succinctly:

What workflow exists today that your system would replace/do differently?

I still have no idea what you want to build. A “clever content routing/addressing system combined with intuitive Ui/UX “ is a new tech stack in my opinion. Which, as I said, I’m not opposed to. I am just looking at this from a product management / requirements point of view and trying to understand the “why”. The “how” isn’t of particular interest to me (at this moment).

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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @fredosha 4 Sep 2023

Power to the people. By the people. And for the people. Only Bitcoin represents democracy.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Reachableceo OP 4 Sep 2023

Yes, that is true. However without an underlying physical network that embodies those principals, Bitcoin is at serious risk. As is all software based security/privacy systems.