Reddit reviews Walkaway: A Novel

So there's a lot of ground to cover here.

There is no single 'meshnet' protocol. There are many different attempts often with widely different properties and goals.

So any answer I can give to these questions will come with caveats and references to specific implementations.

> Will this completely eliminate the need for ISP's?

I'm going to break this question down into several inherent problems and go over how different systems try to address those problems.

Replace the existing internet? With what?

CJDNS and Yggdrasil are the two biggest 'meshnet' projects, they focus on replacing the prefix based routing of the existing internet with a more open system. Lets explore why.

What is prefix based routing? You can think of it like addresses.

172.125.0.0/16 is a prefix, specifically the first 16 bits of an ipv4 address, sort of like how a City contains many thousands of homes this prefix contains 2^16 or 65536 addresses.

A bigger prefix might be 172.0.0.0/8 which contains 2^24 or 16777216 addresses.

A smaller prefix might be 172.168.1.1/24 which contains 2^8 or 256 addresses

You can think of bigger prefixes like cities or nations and smaller prefixes like towns, streets, and eventually houses.

Much like real addresses you don't get to chose your ip address, not even as an ISP. They are assigned by ARIN which is the organization responsible for assigning ips in North America. They are a subset of ICANN who handles global assignments.

The definition of an ISP on the existing internet is literally 'someone who has a autonomous system number assigned by ICANN or one of it's subsidiary organizations'

Despite this to say ICANN 'controls the internet' is disingenuous

If ICANN revokes an assignment nothing really happens, but various ISP's who trust ICANN will eventually change their machines to match what ICANN says. It's as much a political process as a technical one.

What I want to highlight here is that the internet as it currently works is operated by people, routes are hand configured, connections are hand made. While technically anyone can become an ISP it's expensive, complicated, and easy for a human in the process to censor. Connections are made behind closed doors and in private meetings, it's an 'open' network in a very limited sense.

Real technical limitations created this system, for all it's flaws prefix based routing is incredibly simple and efficient.

With this background you can understand why what CJDNS and Yggdrasil want to do is important. They are trying develop new routing systems that are as efficient as prefix based routing without the need for ICANN or any technical knowledge to supervise the creation of new routes. This is a lot of what people imagine 'mesh' as a plug and play system that just works.

Physics, the elephant in the room

Ok so CJDNS and Yggdrasil actually succeed at what they are trying to do, we have another problem.

The internet is a low latency network! To allow for voice and video chat as well as gaming we need to move messages incredibly quickly around the world.

The physics of low latency communication make it impossible to create a decentralized network at a large scale that still maintains low latency.

If I talk to my friend in San Fransisco from my home in Florida we can look at the path this message takes over the internet.

traceroute to exit.altheamesh.com (64.71.176.93), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 _gateway (192.168.0.1) 2.324 ms 2.245 ms 2.566 ms
2 96.120.37.77 (96.120.37.77) 13.755 ms 13.687 ms 14.638 ms
3 xe-1-0-3-sur02.tequesta.fl.pompano.comcast.net (162.151.114.237) 13.405 ms 14.376 ms 18.940 ms
4 ae-17-ar02.stuart.fl.pompano.comcast.net (162.151.2.161) 20.093 ms 23.090 ms 23.125 ms
5 be-40-ar01.northdade.fl.pompano.comcast.net (68.86.165.161) 32.971 ms * 33.713 ms
6 be-20214-cr02.miami.fl.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.90.205) 25.363 ms 34.216 ms 32.835 ms
7 be-12297-pe03.nota.fl.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.82.70) 43.925 ms 50.557 ms 50.370 ms
8 10ge9-1.core1.mia1.he.net (216.66.64.149) 49.413 ms 50.135 ms 50.551 ms
9 100ge2-1.core1.hou1.he.net (184.105.222.110) 85.309 ms 84.359 ms 85.452 ms
10 100ge11-2.core1.dal1.he.net (184.105.213.53) 86.127 ms 86.365 ms 52.366 ms
11 100ge2-2.core4.fmt2.he.net (184.105.64.221) 93.098 ms 92.087 ms 92.853 ms
12 100ge4-1.core3.fmt2.he.net (184.105.80.182) 93.105 ms 86.406 ms 101.115 ms

My message goes south hitting bigger and bigger nodes until it reaches Miami, where it leaves Comcast's network to be handed off to Hurricane Electric. It then goes from Miami, to Houston, to Dallas, and finally to Fremont.

Notice my message goes to progressively larger exchange centers for 7 hops, traveling only a few hundred miles south. Then it exchanges onto the backbone between hops 7 and 8 (both of which are in the same building) before traversing the entire rest of the continent to California in only 3 hops.

This is the power of what's commonly known as 'seven degrees of separation' and formally known as small world networks.

The same way popular people make social networks have fewer degrees of separation than you would expect large internet exchange centres with ultra-long distance fiber lines make low latency internet possible.

Even using this enormously costly and centralized system my signal makes it to Fremont and back in 100ms, about the minimum amount of time a person takes to notice lag.

If you don't allow for these very very large, centralized nodes with multi-billion dollar infrastructure you have to increase the number of hops, which quickly blows latency out of the water.

This ties into questions 2-5

You can't decentralize networks without giving up the current low latency model of the internet (traversing coast to coast across the US device to device would take upwards of a minute in the ideal case).

So long as networks need big monolithic nodes to maintain low latency a central entity can install monitors on those large nodes and use them to deanonymize anything you want to do.

Take TOR for example, the US has the soft power and resources to monitor all major internet nodes in most countries, therefore they can find just about any TOR user just by looking at the timing on the packets for long enough.

This isn't trivial, probably costs a lot of money, takes a lot of time, and isn't 100% successful, but it's naive to assume it's not at least being attempted. Tor still provides significant protection.

Now remember privacy and anonymity are different things! Centralized infrastructure + low latency precludes anonymity, it is always possible to determine who is communicating with who. But it is not possible to determine what they are talking about.

CJDNS and Yggdrasil do solve a real problems, they provide privacy even in the face of centrally owned infrastructure and could make participating in the internet much easier, more open, and harder to censor.

But since they rely on existing infrastructure to deliver low latency packets like all modern applications expect they are subject to existing ISPs who are unlikely to adopt these systems.

So what's next?

At this point I hope I've given a good summary of the real practical challenges and limitations to these sorts of systems. I didn't get to go into radio design which I touch on here.

But the question is what can we do to productively help achieve the goal of a meshnet?

There are, in my opinion two major routes.

1) Delay tolerant networking

Design programs and systems that can deal with shepherding data across a continent over the course of minutes hours or days. As described in WalkAway (which has excellent mesh networking content, go check it out at your library).

There's a reason CJDNS and Yggdrasil are not already doing this, everything you know, every program, is designed for low latency networks. It's monumental to suggest changing that. Also people like their voice chat, video chat, and gaming. But if we really want the option to Walk Away (see what he did there?) from centrally controlled infrastructure it's a challenge that must be undertaken.

Projects to make a 'decentralized reddit' or 'decentralized twitter' are generally piecemeal versions of this. Which doesn't make them bad, but the lack of coordination and shared grand vision shows.

2) Community ownership of infrastructure

This is what mesh networks like NYCmesh and Guifi. This doesn't solve the issues with the existing internet so much as bring regular people to the negotiating table.

If #1 is plan Walkaway this is plan stick around. It's about improving the internet as it is by taking control of enough infrastructure to make a difference. With incremental improvements in privacy and openness.

If you want CJDNS and Yggdrasil someday replacing prefix based routing, this would be the way to go about it.

I work on Althea which is a project that has set out to build community owned, decentralized infrastructure.

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I hope this was helpful, let me know if anything is confusing.