So I was thinking about what if we could make a network that the only thing you needed to connect to it is to directly connect ( through wires or directed wireless antennas ) to at least 1 computer that takes part in it, with no centralized node of any kind. For that we would need a whole new protocol and address system. THIS IS JUST A THING IN MY MIND TO TALK ABOUT. I AM NOT ADVANCED IN THIS DOMAIN.
At first I thought at making groups of 256 nodes so that every node inside of that group knows every other node. A node will know nodes’s group address that until now are just 2 hexadecimal digits like “D8” and the location address. A location address means what path to take to connect to any node, a location address for 98 would be “connect to 63, ask 63 to redirect message to A9, ask A9 to redirect message to CF, ask CF to redirect message to 98”. Messages between a groups nodes would be all encrypted and all steps of the location address would be encrypted for each node in part.
Now every node in a group can send encrypted messages to anyone else in that group.
Now lets say that another node wants to connect to that network, but the group is already 256 nodes: That node will create another group. The first node of a group picks a random 2 digit hexadecimal address for that group. A node knows at least 1 computer’s location address from every group. Untill now addresses are like “D8.01” D8 is a computer’s address in a group and 01 is that group’s address. 256 groups will create a kilogroup, each node knows at least 1 computer’s location address from every kilogroup. Untill now addresses are like “D8.01.8F” , 8F being the kilogroup’s address.
This thing can scale ever more, creating megagroups, gigagroups etc…
If I wanna connect to D8.01.8F then I first connect to a node that I know is in the 8F kilogroup, that node will connect to a node it knows in the 01 group, and that node knows D8 directly so it will connect to him and give him message, this kinda works like a DHT, wich me sending the message to the closer node I know to the destination node
Now this is very very far from perfect or usable, what happens if 2 networks grow independent and when they connect they have the same addresses? What if someone wants to sabotage this with a fake node? The location is also not very private.
Can this get better or even usable? Do you have any ideas or just want to discuss this?
It is a good idea / a good suggestion.
In general, the existing internet protocols actually work that way – they were originally designed as a way for networking organizations to connect their networks to one another, for free, because they wanted to talk to one another. You had your internet connection for free through your school / your work / your user group, and TCP/IP connected you via them to everyone else on the internet. The idea only came in much later that one of those “networking organizations” can be a paid ISP that is selling access to the network to anyone who wants to pay them, and it actually wasn’t widely seen as a good development when that was introduced, and as years have gone by it’s become the dominant model which is a bad thing for many reasons. But the core protocols still don’t care and don’t require an ISP to be part of the equation. TCP/IP and BGP are good places to start if you want to research more about how it actually works on the peer-to-peer protocol level.
There have been people who’ve tried to restart the idea of getting internet connections from other motivated / tech savvy individuals, instead of from Comcast. This is a lot more similar to your suggestion idea details. The key word is “mesh networking”. A quick search will turn up a bunch of people who are working on it or have set up little networks that work that way. Honestly, to me, it seems a little unlikely that that way can be made to work at any scale for any reasonable amount of effort, at the end-user level. I think probably more what you want is something like community broadband/fiber internet - your local government organizes internet for you at a tiny fraction of the cost that you would have to all collectively pay to Comcast in order to get it done, and we go back to the original model where it’s all provided “for free” as a collective, but still centrally organized so it doesn’t take technical skill and lots of effort on the part of every single user on the network.
But it’s a good idea. Those are just my thoughts to fill in some of the details of how it could happen relative to our current dystopia.