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I had an image of what this was before I clicked the link but I was disappointed. Here's my idea: No hardware required. You share your existing connection (mob

I had an image of what this was before I clicked the link but I was disappointed. Here's my idea: No hardware required. You share your existing connection (mobile or not). It's public except the user needs to give you some sort of token that you can't forge and shows how much time they used. In turn you can use those tokens to get time on other people's wifi. Basically "pay it forward" with a little bit of abuse prevention. Maybe the tokens are BitCoin, but it would probably work better if it was a little more "karma" like and the accounting wasn't so strict.

pdenya 14y ago
These will be available in places where there's no existing wifi which seems much cooler to me.
hosh 14y ago
I was thinking about this a while ago when I started hearing about the Super WiFi / Regional Area Network and meshing networks like the equipment they were testing for the Occupy protests. This is useful for if you wanted to recolonize urban blight areas, such as Detroit, and you could not get enough capital to pull wire (or don't know whether the wired infrastructure rotted). I doubt this will let a lot of people consume streaming video, but it would let people pass around 3D printable files, Open Source Ecology documents, and stream bits of Wikipedia.
mtgentry 14y ago
Cool idea but at the end of the day, your idea encourages people to violate the terms of service they have with their ISP. Karma gets around that.
fudged71 14y ago
1) Battery drain. 2) Your phone isn't a great router. Having dedicated hardware to do this would be far better.
Cogito 14y ago
I was thinking about this too, but there is one problem with a purely pay-it-forward type model - there is no 'debt'. That is, how does one earn karma in order to buy uptime? You can 'sell' your connection to someone else, but where do they get their karma from? Part of the solution might be to provide 'seed' karma to new users, but then you inevitably will have users who don't spend the karma they gain and so become karma sinks. This all assumes a zero sum economy, so perhaps a different model is a better idea. Keep track of metrics like how much bandwidth someone has shared or used (somehow), and then allow providers to define a measure for who can share their connection based on those metrics. For example, one provider might let anyone connect no matter what, while someone else might only let people who have shared their own connection connect. Determining what to share and to whom is a hard question, and when there are upstream costs to the provider the balance seems like it would be hard to find. The yourkarma model is more or less a loss-leading strategy (we pay you in bandwidth to sign up new users) and it's hard to see that being sustainable long term for the user. It's not completely obvious if the 100mb is for new karma users connecting, or for any connection, but based on their help page[1] it seems to be only new users: Why do I get extra bandwidth when I share my connection? Every time another person uses Karma, our company grows a little bigger. The more the merrier! So when you share your connection, you are essentially helping us and we feel like we should help you. After all, we’re not called Karma for nothing. What I am really interested in are the ad-hoc networking projects [2], that will be able to route data by hopping between networked devices, reducing the need of centralised ISPs. Simply being part of that network adds value, however similar problems will probably arise in any case. [1] https://yourkarma.com/help/82-why-do-i-get-extra-bandwidth-when-i-share-my-connection https://yourkarma.com/help/82-why-do-i-get-extra-bandwidth-w... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_ad_hoc_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_ad_hoc_network
- jessaustin 14y ago
  > inevitably will have users who don't spend the karma they gain and so become karma sinks. This doesn't seem like a problem to me. A karma sink is a connectivity source. Surely we're trying to optimize for the latter quantity? If it makes you feel bad you can give away prizes or something.

pdenya 14y ago

These will be available in places where there's no existing wifi which seems much cooler to me.

hosh 14y ago

I was thinking about this a while ago when I started hearing about the Super WiFi / Regional Area Network and meshing networks like the equipment they were testing for the Occupy protests. This is useful for if you wanted to recolonize urban blight areas, such as Detroit, and you could not get enough capital to pull wire (or don't know whether the wired infrastructure rotted). I doubt this will let a lot of people consume streaming video, but it would let people pass around 3D printable files, Open Source Ecology documents, and stream bits of Wikipedia.

mtgentry 14y ago

Cool idea but at the end of the day, your idea encourages people to violate the terms of service they have with their ISP. Karma gets around that.

fudged71 14y ago

1) Battery drain. 2) Your phone isn't a great router. Having dedicated hardware to do this would be far better.

Cogito 14y ago

I was thinking about this too, but there is one problem with a purely pay-it-forward type model - there is no 'debt'. That is, how does one earn karma in order to buy uptime? You can 'sell' your connection to someone else, but where do they get their karma from? Part of the solution might be to provide 'seed' karma to new users, but then you inevitably will have users who don't spend the karma they gain and so become karma sinks. This all assumes a zero sum economy, so perhaps a different model is a better idea. Keep track of metrics like how much bandwidth someone has shared or used (somehow), and then allow providers to define a measure for who can share their connection based on those metrics. For example, one provider might let anyone connect no matter what, while someone else might only let people who have shared their own connection connect. Determining what to share and to whom is a hard question, and when there are upstream costs to the provider the balance seems like it would be hard to find. The yourkarma model is more or less a loss-leading strategy (we pay you in bandwidth to sign up new users) and it's hard to see that being sustainable long term for the user. It's not completely obvious if the 100mb is for new karma users connecting, or for any connection, but based on their help page[1] it seems to be only new users: Why do I get extra bandwidth when I share my connection? Every time another person uses Karma, our company grows a little bigger. The more the merrier! So when you share your connection, you are essentially helping us and we feel like we should help you. After all, we’re not called Karma for nothing. What I am really interested in are the ad-hoc networking projects [2], that will be able to route data by hopping between networked devices, reducing the need of centralised ISPs. Simply being part of that network adds value, however similar problems will probably arise in any case. [1] https://yourkarma.com/help/82-why-do-i-get-extra-bandwidth-when-i-share-my-connection https://yourkarma.com/help/82-why-do-i-get-extra-bandwidth-w... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_ad_hoc_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_ad_hoc_network

jessaustin 14y ago
> inevitably will have users who don't spend the karma they gain and so become karma sinks. This doesn't seem like a problem to me. A karma sink is a connectivity source. Surely we're trying to optimize for the latter quantity? If it makes you feel bad you can give away prizes or something.