With the vote against net neutrality, cryptocurrencies have had to have a rethink what they can do to ensure their services will not be affected by the larger ISPs.
It is the case that there could be a conflict of interest and the service provider decides in no uncertain terms they do not wish for a coin or multiple coins to use their network. They can either throttle connection speed for any altcoin that uses their network, ban them altogether, or they will request premium charges that will be forced back to the end-users.
With the whole concept of being decentralized, this is quite a reversal, and it would definitely hinder certain types of cryptocurrency progress if it were to happen to that degree.
What Is Net Neutrality?
Net neutrality explained most easily is as follows. It was the case that the government of the United States said that all traffic on the internet should be treated equally.
No matter what size of business they are all allowed to have access to the same bandwidth with no prejudice of one against the other.
The FCC voted in December 2017, and the restrictions that were placed on the more significant ISP providers were lifted. Now all control of how the ISP deems the use of internet bandwidth is back in their hands.
Who Could Net Neutrality Affect and How?
When you look at cryptocurrencies, they can be viewed at in the same light as P2P file sharing is.
If they want to prohibit functionality of this service they can quite quickly shut off any connection they wish. It is not only the traffic that passes around the internet from the Blockchain applications.
It could be a matter of the coin exchanges being held in prejudice. This is the most extreme case that could affect how coins are traded which would affect thousands of individuals as well as the many businesses who now wish to use these cryptos as a payment option for their services.
How to Get Around Net Neutrality?
There are a few ways that cryptocurrencies are able to negate these restrictions that they might face in the future. Without any of the technology being in the hands of any company, many coin based companies have taken the open-source approach to their underlying technologies.
This makes it easy for anyone to check their code to make sure they are totally transparent in their operations. This is against the practices of the more significant ISP’s who at present hold a monopoly of the global internet.
What Else Can Cryptocurrencies Do?
There are some technologies which are set to change the face of the internet regarding function and the providing of data while maintaining security. This is another part of net neutrality that is frowned upon. With requests from the government a large part of traffic is or will be monitored, so end users lose their privacy while online.
Rather than using VPN services some new technologies will take the onus away from ISP services and give it back to the users.
How Do Mesh Networks and Their Coins Work?
A mesh network is made up from nodes. These are similar to how BTC is currently mined, but their focus yet is not on coin mining, it is on hosting and the forwarding of data. In simple terms, this means the internet will be hosted by thousands of users who have the dedicated mining rigs to perform this operation.
One of the best methods to consider is the mesh network open source approach open source approach. No one person will be in control of the internet as these nodes are all interconnected to provide users with a more secure and faster way of communicating.
Even if an ISP attempted to affect the Skywire network, the data would be routed differently so there would be no lack of performance. Although there are other mesh network technologies which are being developed, there is another stand-out network. This is linked to BTC and might be better well known to a lot of people.
Biternet aims to overcome many problems by creating an incentive for collaboration between devices and overcome the lack of trust that exists. With this one, each node would run a Biternet-daemon as well as an OSLR daemon to perform routing functions.
This would operate at a peer-peer level and do away with the reliance on a fixed infrastructure that is currently in place. As with Skywire, this type of network is not slowed by consumer demand as is the case now.
There are many options available for cryptocurrencies and the ones that pull away from a conventional network and embrace these meshes will thrive and blossom for many years to come.
Mesh Network Operation
This type of network works on an ad-hoc basis which configures itself. This would be the beauty if any large ISP attempted to restrict or throttle bandwidth. The connected devices are free to leave the network at any time, and the interconnected nodes will update their routing tables accordingly.
These ad-hoc devices are able to directly communicate with each other at the physical layer of the OSI.
When this happens, there is a direct connection between these two devices which is strictly point to point and without needing an access point.
Once users, businesses, and nodes are in place, the mesh networks are able to self-fund as the nodes are paid for their contributions to power, storage, and bandwidth which would be in the form of a cryptocurrency and would add value to both the network and to the coin itself.
The days of monopolistic ISPs could be coming to an end where networks such as Skywire bring with it a new internet for everyone to benefit from.
This is secure and will never suffer downtime or slowdowns as current technologies face on a continual basis. With mesh networking and the coins that drive it to end users will benefit knowing that big brother is not watching over their shoulder.
Editor’s Note:
From time to time, SensorsTechForum features guest articles by cybersecurity and infosec leaders and enthusiasts such as this post. The opinions expressed in these guest posts, however, are entirely those of the contributing author, and may not reflect those of SensorsTechForum.
Henry Benjamin (Guest Blogger)
Henry Benjamin is a tech marketing expert of over 15 years, specializing in online security, privacy and cryptocurrencies. He currently works with the Skycoin team.
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