Integrating bitcoin into bbs's reddit / bbs ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ShooterJennings · 2014-12-20 22:27 So why don't we create a fidonet type network that acts as an active bitcoin network node. A backup of the Blockchain is required on any connecting computer and each block is distributed via packet tosser say hourly or mid daily or something. This way if the internet even went down bbs's with dial up connections could confirm transactions by transmitting to functioning nodes. There would be a lot of interest in the altcoin world for this too. Another note. Spoke to ChangeTip about integrating change tipping into fidonet and other networks by communicating via twitter. They liked the idea. Long live the bbs. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ScootyPuff-Sr · 2014-12-21 00:27 > This way if the internet even went down bbs's with dial up connections could confirm transactions by transmitting to functioning nodes. First... I'm not sure the Plain Old Telephone System is any more robust than the internet, these days. Second, I don't have a cyrptocoin and I'm not really up to date on the technology, but from what little I do understand, you are talking about keeping a very large amount of data synchronized over what people today consider very slow speed links. bitcoin.info says the blockchain is just a hair under 26 gigabytes today. This would take more than **seven weeks** to transfer on a 56kbps connection (Pro tip: this is one of those times when, even though YModem-G could potentially save you a few days of waiting, you should choose ZModem and its ability to resume broken trasnfers). Every month the blockchain grows by about 1.1 gigs, adding just short of two days to the transfer time. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- derfherdez · 2014-12-21 07:31 Dial up, like 36k realistic best speeds? Ever try to make a data connection over seas? I had to get pc's with modems collocated worldwide last time I needed to do something like that. And the backbone was still over the Internet. And I see from the other comment you are talking gigs of data... I don't see this working with anything less than a frame relay network. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- argiope_aurantia · 2014-12-21 16:49 Is it possible to pre-load a BBS with blockchain data? Once preloaded, the "only" ongoing data demands would be the addition of new blocks. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ShooterJennings · 2014-12-21 19:08 Yes you are right about the Blockchain size but each block found and transmitted is under 1 megabyte. In all reality I am talking about a network of internet nodes that have a small percentage of land line nodes within the entire bbs network. The land line only mode would only happen if for some reason the internet went away. Otherwise the nodes would he transmitting via the internet and telnet packet tossing such as Internet Rex. Its just an idea but with Jeff Garzik trying to rally having a satellite launched that is a bitcoin backup node, it seems having this already in place system be another form of backup while also supplying the Blockchain and bitcoin network to areas of the world where the internet is censored. Say in Egypt the bitcoin node is outlawed and blocked. Dial up bbs's could continue to provide a connection to the Blockchain despite senseless censorship ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ShooterJennings · 2014-12-21 19:09 Each new block in the chain takes 10 minutes and is less than a meg. This is the transmissions I'm talking about. The Blockchain is 20+ gigs but could he downloaded initially and then it would grow naturally ---------------------------------------------------------------------- chairmanmow · 2014-12-21 20:02 Shooter, thanks for the bitcoin tip yesterday for Futureland, made my day - spurred a little more interest in bitcoin in me since the last time it came into my consciousness when there was a lot more speculation. I'll have to pick that tip up in a bit, but it did get me thinking about the idea of bitcoins and BBS's again. I think your idea sounds great and while I'm always doing some development for my BBS and totally try to push the envelope - I've been back online (BBS wise) for just a year, so some of the things I've ignored until this point are things like P.O.T.S. and FTN networks (sticking to QWK/Usenet/other So when people raise concerns here I'm not equipped to answer, that being said - in an odd twist of fate, some of the best places to get BBS answers is on BBS networks themselves. Or maybe IRC (many synchronet devs on irc.synchro.net) I actually need to get on a couple FTN networks going soon however, as Agoranet abandoned QWK support. I also have to figure out that bitcoin stuff - although a few of my homies are semi-into it but maybe less on the technical implementations. Understanding most of the stuff isn't beyond my pay-grade, I just have avoided bitcoin on a technical level based on the parroted arguments people presented to me regarding prices going to the moon amongst other things. Having a background in Economics and up until this point, little stake in bitcoin, a couple of weaknesses I've found in bitcoin was how will it function when energy/power/communications are weakened or at a premium, and it will never be successful if its goal is to act as a substitute currency if people don't put it back into circulation expecting the price to go up (un)naturally (hoarding). I think the market has realized some of things - and I think your idea of how to manage bitcoin economy (and giving me a TIP [making me a minor stakeholder] thank you very much) go a fair distance in making me interested in this idea. Anyways, I'd like to think this could work somehow and maybe there are other places where the discussion can be furthered for collaboration beyond reddit. If you need any info or what not let me know. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ScootyPuff-Sr · 2014-12-21 20:03 Again, I am not very well versed in this stuff, but I think that is the normal way to get started, you download a giant snapshot of the blockchain taken at some point in time, then you get the updates since that snapshot to bring you up to the present, then you keep pace with the updates as time goes on. But "if the internet even went down," if you have to set up a node over dialup, that pre-loading transfer is going to take forever. Between any two points in the continental USA or most of civilized Canada, it will be faster to save a copy of the blockchain and RIDE A BICYCLE to the new node than it would be to do it over telephone modems. (Like the old saying goes, "[Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet#Non-fiction)") With the blockchain growing by 1.1 gigs monthly, that's about 38 megs of fresh data per day. Assuming no interruptions, one node keeping one other node up to date will take 1h40m on the phone every day. How many nodes does each system need to be passing information to? They'd better all be multi-line boards... /u/derfherdez points out that the 'real' throughput of these modems is more like 36k (as I look it up, it's even worse, 33.6kbps). I forgot about this; I made long generational skips in my modems, so I went from 2400bps text-crawling to 28.8kbps dialup to 2mbps cablemodem, I forgot about the whole "56k modems only upload at 33.6k" thing. That bumps your daily updates to nearly three hours, and bootstrapping a new node without the broadband interwebs jumps to a mindblowing 1983 hours, 25 minutes, which means that the process of starting up a new node will take, near-as-makes-no-difference, **four months of constant connection** (three months to transfer the snapshot, then a little short of two weeks to catch up on the new transactions that happened during that three month download, two days to catch up on what you missed in those two weeks, six hours to catch up on those two days, then you're pretty much ready to go). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- autowikibot · 2014-12-21 20:04 ##### ###### #### Section 5. [**Non- fiction**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet#Non-fiction) of article [**Sneakernet**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet): [](#sfw) --- > >> >Never underestimate the bandwidth of a [station wagon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Station_wagon) full of tapes hurtling down the highway. >—Tanenbaum, Andrew S. (1989). *Computer Networks*. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. p. 57. ISBN 0-13-166836-6.  > --- ^Interesting: [^ASCII ^porn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_porn) ^| [^IP ^over ^Avian ^Carriers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers) ^| [^Darknet ^\(file ^sharing)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet_\(file_sharing\)) ^| [^Internet ^censorship ^circumvention](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I nternet_censorship_circumvention) ^Parent ^commenter ^can [^toggle ^NSFW](/message/compose?to=autowikibot&subject=AutoWikibot NSFW toggle&message=%2Btoggle-nsfw+cn1iyxd) ^or[](#or) [^delete](/message/compose?to=autowikibot&subject=AutoWikibot Deletion&message=%2Bdelete+cn1iyxd)^. ^Will ^also ^delete ^on ^comment ^score ^of ^-1 ^or ^less. ^| [^(FAQs)](http://www.np.reddit.com/r/autowikibot/wiki/index) ^| [^Mods ](http://www.np.reddit.com/r/autowikibot/comments/1x013o/for_moderator s_switches_commands_and_css/) ^| [^Magic ^Words](http://www.np.reddit. com/r/autowikibot/comments/1ux484/ask_wikibot/) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- chairmanmow · 2014-12-21 21:05 While you are probably technically correct about download speeds between any two points in Canada and the U.S. over POTS for a file of that size being faster copied to media and taken by bicycle - I'm not sure why that scenario would be the primary use case for the need it seems to me OP is trying to address. I'm not well versed in everything either, fwiw. But why would a new node be adopted so far away? It seems like if communications went down in any capacity, big to small, if a copy of the blockchain didn't already exist in that locale then it seems to me like the market doesn't exist there. Basically what I'm saying is above is creating a new node across two random points via modem probably would never be practical - but why wouldn't those nodes already have seed data in place if they were deemed to be use? Would everything need a complete reboot in this scenario or is there a way for a node to catch up on data if it's behind without starting over with the blockchain or does it have to start over? Telephone lines can be limited but if the issue is keeping up on 38 megs of data, don't quote me on this (not an expert on this subject) but you can connect to BPS via HAM Radio at around 1200 bps I think, which according to my calculations is around 100 MB a day. So maybe in theory you could broadcast the blockchain at given times and frequencies, until it basically triples in size. I don't know if you can partition/segment the updates on different frequencies so you might be able to listen in on different frequencies with more tuners. Again, I know little about this. It seems like you might want to move/copy the blockchain out to servers at more remote locations, however, if there were packets of better network access where things were better connected to the cluster under whatever the given circumstances. Things like ad-hoc mesh networks might be built out to expand on whatever is dictated. Again, I'm shooting from the hip here - but these are all things BBS people are in to beyond just telephone access. Also, simply being able to connect to a BBS that can authenticate things on the blockchain seems like it can be of value any where in the world you can dial in. You don't need to download the whole blockchain, just like to use your credit card in the 80's and 90's when it connected to the bank via modem to authenticate it didn't download your credit history, it simply verified the transaction quickly and disconnected, and the server handled the rest. TL;DR you're right, it is impractical to send the whole blockchain via phone line, but is that needed and aren't there other bbs related strengths that can fill out the purpose? just playing devils advocate... cheers ;) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ScootyPuff-Sr · 2014-12-21 22:21 The satellite idea makes a lot of sense to me, actually, especially if you can get two or three satellites controlled from ground stations in different countries. Tying back to the Fidonet idea, there was a period in the 1990s when, because phone lines just couldn't keep up with the dramatic increase in echomail & filebone traffic, there were companies that would broadcast the feed over satellite; a BBS with a ~$800 receiver and $40/month subscription would get the bulk of its feed that way, then upload outgoing messages by phone line (a much smaller transmission than the massive incoming feed from every BBS everywhere). This would be a good analog for your cryptocoins. You upload your own transaction packets into a Fidonet-esque network, and receive the updated blockchain by satellite. The technique is being recycled today as Outernet, which broadcasts a stream of Wikipedia digests and how-to articles, each receiver site has a miniature web server that saves the data all day long for later recall on demand over local WiFi. The high-bandwidth version of this is available right now (you build your own receiver from a Raspberry Pi computer, a USB satellite TV dongle, and a second-hand DirecTV-or- similar dish), and in the spring they will start broadcasting a slower signal to [$100 pocket-sized receiver/servers](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/lantern-one- device-free-data-from-space-forever). Could you rig the content vote to have chunks of the Bitcoin blockchain broadcast over Outernet? Probably. Should you? No, you should leave that system to broadcast things like crop irrigation techniques, how to make a decent toilet, and why you should keep the two separate. But it is a good model that shows this sort of one-to-many satellite data broadcast works. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- derfherdez · 2014-12-22 00:15 1mb per...? hour/week/month? dont forget with shitty dialup you can easily go a few days without transmitting. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ShooterJennings · 2014-12-22 00:42 Then it takes a few days and catches up. Look I know its antiquated technology but I miss BBS's. And for the first time in 10 years Bitcoin and its technology has felt like the same type of subculture as the BBS scene. And I see the potential in allowing the Blockchain and bitcoin protocol to be available to nations where the internet is banned. Freedom of speech. The satellite thing is rad. So are all the ideas being posted. But at the same time, innovation yields progress via reconfiguration. We are looking at a small percentage of dial up nodes and a massive number of internet nodes. So its more of a glory mission than it is some kind of worthless concept ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ScootyPuff-Sr · 2014-12-22 04:26 I know more about ham radio than I do about bitcoin (though that's not saying much!). The data mode I suspect you're thinking of is called "packet radio" or "AX.25," and typically runs at 300 bps over HF (the sorts of frequencies that can reach across continents), and either 1200 bps or 9600 bps over VHF/UHF (city-wide). 9600 bps was (and remains) hard to manage without either a fancy (read: expensive) radio or tearing a less expensive radio apart to connect the modem-stuff directly to the radio-stuff bypassing a bunch of the audio frequency stuff, while 1200 bps could be done by plugging the modem into the radio's microphone jack, so the typical network involved 9600 bps UHF backbones between boards and 1200 bps VHF user ports. However... ham radio frequencies have a lot of noise. That means the only sensible way to handle the packets is to send one, wait to hear it was received successfully, send, wait, send, wait... and each of those cycles, you have to add in an extra moment for the radio to actually start or stop transmitting... so the real throughput of a 1200 bps connection is a lot closer to 300 bps. 1200 bits per second is closer to 10 megabytes per day than 100. (You may have done the math was 1200 *bytes* per second, which is ~8x faster.) With its huge overhead and delay times, "1200bps" packet radio reliably behaves more like a 300 bps connection, for around 2.5 megabytes per day. Ham radio's systems for relaying messages are excellent for sending very short messages (traditionally, around 25 words) with high reliability. Ham radio is a lousy choice for data with any sort of bulk to it. I didn't mean with my example that you'd want to send the blockchain from one corner of the continent to the other, I meant that as an extreme example. But transmitting the entire blockchain will be required if you want the network to be able to continue to expand to additional nodes during some sort of widespread internet outage, which was mentioned as a major purpose for the BBS/Fido style cryptocoin network. As far as censorship goes... I don't think the telephone system is any more resilient to that than the public internet is. Maybe less so. I don't know how to defeat TOR, but I'm pretty sure the Potsylvanian Government Postal & Telegraph Service can make a list of which of the phone lines it owns make multi-hour phone calls every day using modem- style audio frequencies, and flag their physical locations for extra scrutiny from the Potsylvanian Moral Standards Authority. Now, the idea of using a BBS more like a dial-up credit card processor... that, I had not considered. It's a little more centralized than I think the bitcoin folks generally aim for, but it might be a system that could provide a useful service without stretching the limits of the tech available.