In Brief

Your Internet Service Provider is underperforming and over charging. However, mesh networking combined with the micropayment capabilities state channel technology offers will soon provide a prosumer alternative to the aging, legacy solutions.

Whether you live in Auckland, Oakland, Paris, or Shanghai your internet performance is probably limited by the poor performance of last mile Internet Service Providers. A decentralized solution to this problem called mesh networking has been deployed by a number of communities to provide higher performing and often free internet.

The is one problem however. Paying nodes to relay information is difficult when they may be connected to many other nodes and peers relaying very small amounts of traffic from each. The aggregate of this traffic is large but the individual payments requires are numerous and often so small that transaction costs consume much of the potential revenue. Enter Ethereum State Channels.

Since the beginning of the field of cryptocurrency in 1985 with David Chaum’s canonical white paper Security Without Identification, micro transactions have been a chief value proposition. State channels reduce the cost of a cryptocurrency transaction to purely the cost of sending the data concerned. Using these tools, incentivized mesh networking is now possible.

Jehan Tremback is a developer and friend of ConsenSys building a system using all these technologies. This interview was originally concerned with his state channels work dubbed “Avocado” developed with consulting from rockstar developers Ameen Soleimani and Martin Köppelmann but just as interesting is the Althea mesh network.

Content: Jehan Tremback, Arthur Falls

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