1. How is that helpful specifically for the creation of digital cash that "even you grandma can use"?.
Consider a Western Union kind of scenario. The granddaughter is called Carol and she works hard in a developed country to support her grandparents. Her grandma is called Alice and she lives in a small village in Papua New Guinea with no internet access. So, Alice needs to go the closest city to receive the money from Carol. But now in this village, there is a Bob with a satellite dish and willing to accept DASH.
2. I guess this use case is for 0.000001% of population at best - how many people have skills and all the required hardware to even use this stuff?
If we conservatively consider there are 4.5 billions people without internet access and that your percentage is no just made up (even if for some reason I’d tend to agree with it
). That’s still 4,500 people all other the world. Imagine how many new nodes, ATM, distributors for transferring wealth this is translating to.
More generally about this alternative physical layer, in developing countries broadcasting only can be used as the main source of synchronization and save a lot of costly data plans. Especially in regards to the figure from
@codablock above when using > 200mb blocks.
In developed countries, this alternative link can also be used as mean to mitigate over constrains:
- a redundant source of information in case of country specific ISP regulation
- increasing the anonymity of the application layer
- data storage backup
- geographic specific applications due to access to cooling, space, energy
3. One (more) company broadcasting blocks vs 1000s of individual (incentivized) nodes - does the former actually help in any way?
4. Most outdoor events/festivals take place somewhere with (mobile) internet coverage, so should probably just use SPV there. Mining in places without broadband connection also makes no sense to me - how are you going to broadcast you blocks back to the network?
6. If all internet connections (even mobile networks) are down where you are then what is the use case? Who are you going to transact with (and how) if no one can use internet?
These would be addressed by the third phase of this project which is planning to allow bidirectional transmission (Multipoint-to-Point network).
7. It's a myth that some company broadcasting smth via satellites can't be censored (or even shutdown) by the government. Again, compare that to 1000s of individual (incentivized) nodes.
Yes, you're correct that the ground station can be shutdown by the government where it is located; or by a powerful allied one. But for the production phase (2 - full coverage), we are planning to use different telecommunication companies (middle eastern, Indian, Asian, European, north American). There is a lot of economic competition in-between them so it is doable to use multiple signals.
The whole idea to "be able to use internet money in places where internet is not available" is kind of suboptimal. This use case is simply way too tiny, filled with different kind of difficulties and brings no real impact. IMO we should focus on low hanging fruits. If I'd had to chose who to target first - 100 geeks with antennas in some god forgotten places with no or very limited internet access (satellites) VS millions of casual users with mobile (smart/feature)phones or laptops with at least 2g internet access (SPV) - I'd pick the later without any doubt.
This is a very similar concern to the one brought forward by
@codablock. And as you're a developer as well, I'd have to reassure you that the funding, time and attention for such project will in any case interfere with your current priorities for Evolution. We intend to be both very open and autonomous in the development of this project. So, it's not like you have to choose in-between the twos. I'm confident this can be successfully delivered in parallel of Evolution without adding constraints; especially financially. If you have missed it above, the price of satellite leasing is not as expensive as one would expect.
I'm pretty sure that literally no one is going to _actually_ use that kind of solution (including the one from Blockstream)
If nobody knows about it, yes, this is very likely. But we are planning to deliver full open-source code, installation/mounting procedures and bring at least 2 news agencies on board to spread the word (Bloomberg and Al Jazeera).
For further consideration, in many scenarios the satellite dishes are already installed and pointed to the right satellite. The missing ingredient will be a US$20 SDR (
http://www.nooelec.com/store/sdr/sdr-receivers/nesdr-mini2-rtl2832u-r820t2.html) and some additional cabling.
Going bidirectional will require slightly more expensive hardware (BUC + larger antenna), but this will still be much cheaper than satellite Internet requirements (monthly subscription + data cap).
after the initial "wow" effect is gone.
That's why I'm proposing to approach this step by step with a cheap testing phase to first assess all the valid concerns.
If after the first 6 months we all agree this is going nowhere nothing force the governance to finance this further (2 - full coverage, 3 - bidirectional)
"First blockchain broadcast via satellites funded by the blockchain itself!!11" and so on.
Thank you for this quote. Or what about "First blockchain telecommunication infrastructure funded by the blockchain itself!"? Less catchy but better for long term?
This also makes me think that it is very important to make sure the overall crypto community understands that even if this project is integrated by a contractor, the infrastructure will belong to the DASH governance. As opposed to the similar project with BTC, where there is a virulent debate about which outside investment is trying to take ownership of the blockchain.
