Faster, cheaper, decentralised internet..
A few months back I came across Althea, which is this really cool mesh networking ISP setup where you have lots of people maintaining nodes and you effectively have a group of people that earn money by being part of the network and redistributing signal to other parts along the route (as part of the mesh)
Althea is a system that lets routers pay each other for bandwidth. This allows people to set up decentralized ISPs in their communities. In an Althea network, instead of one ISP at the top collecting monthly payments, many different people can earn money by expanding and strengthening the network
Not only did I think this was genius for a fixed location where you were willing to stick up a bunch of aerials and networking equipment but it got me thinking about how something like a MESH networking STEEM could work which then got my all excited for a forked maybe 200/500 strong group of people in an area that worked together and earned their own steem neighbourhood and skill exchange — I’m sure this could be a steam-engine token for instance (heck, run with it!)
Anyway this morning I just got the update video that they had integrated https://poa.network/xdai with the erc-20 first USD stable coin blockchain support bolted into the dashboard! — like, yes, of course that makes sense, why have a volatile crypto when you can have a pegged stable coin — but more than that, it shows me this project is thinking about time and crypto in their overall package and that’s freaking exciting! :)
Why? Well, peer to peer payments for a start! :)
Thanks to xDai, sending money to a friend, relative or vendor is fast, cheap and easy. It’s also stable - the value of xDai is pegged to the US dollar. Peer to peer (P2P) payments on the blockchain can replace the current expensive, slow, bank-driven processes that dominate online payment systems today. It’s already happening - click on the case studies to see xDai P2P in action.
Simplify the process makes people use crypto! :) — I love the fact they built a bridge and are using this https://uniswap.io to build out a smart contract to swap the ETH to Dai — super awesome, this really expands the MESH network utility and in a currency that people can understand! — sure it’s got the whole metamask stuff in there that might scare a few people but that’s gonna get easier too in the long run! :)
They actually have an advanced setting dropdown for the blockchain that you want to use so that’s pretty awesome that you can use a blockchain as a payment engine for finances part across the Althea nodes — so maybe your not gonna get better than a stable coin when it comes to the money component of your social network than xDai right now but this does make me think about the social component now that people are getting paid in crypto for their routing and for payments for more speed etc.
Maybe I’m just being overly philanthropic here in my social notions but can you imagine if this platform supported STEEM? Maybe the network itself had a few witnesses servers, or a number of the althea network had their own forked version of steem and a batch of consensus witness servers — maybe the most reliable nodes on the network with the least dropped blocks became the consensus nodes so there was always an effort to keep your routing and network in good order.
Consider then on top of this mesh network then you have this large expanse of a region covered with connectivity and nodes dotted within this region, every other node running a 24/7 forked steem code and witnesses, we could run a social network just for that region — a place where people could blog, offer work to people, communicate with each other — think of it like a notice board for a local area — people exchange value, steem, daix for chores, tasks or engagement in local issues.
How freaking awesome would that be? :)
pinterest epic wins pinboard → brand advocate for nokia, 1000heads, verisign → won vloggie for node666 (san fran 2006) → television for time team history hunters 1999 → sold me.dm to evan williams in april 2011 → went to phil campbell, alabama to help raise money after tornado (was on sky news, bbc news)→ CNN for sxsw 2013 about austin sxsw → video chat with robert scoble → music video can you spot me?