Garrett MacDonald 🛸 Alternate Data Transport Layers

[Music] hello everybody um yeah and thanks also to Tim and everyone else who made it happen such a great conference today um yeah in general alternate data transport laders have been an interest of mine for many years now because when whether it's interfacing with ethereum or other networks um you know most people don't consider the actual like lower level than ethereum of of the St back uh which you know first is the internet um and then even lower than that but whether you're interfacing with the Internet or just ethereum you know the r rpcs can censor you isps can censor you um and looking at these layers of the stack is is really interesting especially um yeah if you care about uh sensorship resistance so you know looking at uh at you know below the level of ethereum as uh you know L l0 you can go L minus one internet the internet in general is very decentralized from like a physical infrastructure perspective super resilient to naturally caused outages and so on but isps have a knack for being uh you know government regulated and can censor anybody um at at will like that so it's mostly a problem of you know deliberate um censorship rather than um you know natural outages so from the so from one perspective it is you know sufficiently decentralized but um not so much on where it actually counts and like the access to it so you know if you look at the energy of the universe that's sufficiently decentralized you don't have to look about that electricity infrastructure is pretty good as well you can deploy that yourself and you know you don't have to worry about that so the internet is really where it starts to be starts to matter and you know I I encourage everyone to look at the you know whatever we're building from the entire uh opening up to that entire perspective um so yeah um internet uh is not decentralized enough you you know the censorship risk is uh yeah just conditionally High just because um it depends on your location the government that's imposing the regulations on you and so on um and you know it's also like somebody said earlier as well it's a economic um wall as well in many um developing countries there's these uh kind of packages where you can buy only access to just just WhatsApp for example for a fixed fee for month and then that is your entire internet reality um so you can't even get access to the whole internet if you just don't have enough money for it in general so you know thinking about how we can solve these problems and give people anywhere in the world access um especially in places where the isps are super like prohibitively expensive or um in general just restricting certain kinds of transactions and information flow um is a complicated problem so yeah one one potential um solution to that is what we'll talk about and um but first why um obvious I think this is pretty obvious to everybody who's here you know um we want to make sure everybody has equal access to Communications and can um evolve as a part of the collective Humanity together and uh it's just going to happen way better if uh everybody has this freedom of communication so um so basically what I've been doing some research on over the past few years is Radio um and you can use these uh radio waves to you know people communicate all the time just as like hobby as well as like military and um there's so many use cases for really long long range radio but uh it's very low bandwidth so you know what you can expect out of systems is like very like like 10 kilobits per second or something like that and um yeah but that's plenty if you're just sending transaction data so if you want to make sure that you have a little piece of information like I want to send a friend of mine some Bitcoins or ethereum or whatever your favorite cryptocurrency is um you can can just do that over over radio waves so the basic steps listed here um which we'll which we'll go over it's uh it only requires really you know one um non interet connected actor um to transmit a message out and it to be received by one actor who is connected to the internet um and then can pass that message along to you know whatever memory pool there is so yeah first there's tons of uh software out there um that you can use to encode data into audio which then is super compatible with all the existing infrastructure that we have to broadcast um radio signals uh most most radio is in the form of audio but this converts it into like a a digital format um so yeah there's tons of encoding algorithms um tons of open open source software this is a really good one called FL Digi um that has built-in error correction and um yeah tolerates a significant amount of loss um depending on the encoding algorithm that you use um and then yeah you can just broadcast that there's um you know there's a lot of uh you know people that are known to be very like you know bitcoiner prepper types that really are into you know building out self-sufficient infrastructure and you know have camps in the woods with broadcasting stations and stuff like this and there's one example from 2019 where you know people transer a transmitted a Bitcoin transaction across all of the United States um completely just peer-to-peer directly wirelessly without going through any intermediaries that could possibly censor it um it's pretty incredible that you know really long range can be achieved with very low power um there's uh yeah so with uh devices that you can build um relatively easily um you can you can transmit across the entire world you can bounce signals off of the Moon and and back there's a repeater on the International Space Station um there's tons of ways to to get messages out um even if you're living in in a very very difficult uh situation um so then yeah all you have to do is use some uh relatively inexpensive Hardware like this radio costs less than $50 um to receive the signal you can attach a hefty antenna to that which you can build out of basic materials that you can find at any hardware store and um yeah you just connect that back down to um a a similar software package to decode the the encoded audio stream to get the transaction data out of that um then yeah all you have to do is uh to decode that and you know the visual representations of the audio basically it's just like little blips on different parts of the the frequency uh bandwidth that you're actually using um and it's uh it's it's really really fun to to look at these signals to start sending these back and forth to friends and uh and just see how it works um but then yeah all you have to do after you decode the transaction data is just like any other transaction that you normally interact with um you just send it to the men poool and um and it gets in the queue with all the others just like it originated from somewhere else on the internet so what you're effectively doing is building a proxy for um for people who don't have access to you know whatever part of the internet they actually need or the internet in general um to to submit these transactions um so yeah the biggest issues around around this are you know coordinating which frequency and which coding algorithm do we want to use um so creating a standard for that could be something that's really interesting um yeah and this is a this is actually a really really huge issue but you know figuring out some kind of standard for that as well as um as well as potentially creating a protocol which you know automatically de like saves the data and then runs it through all potential ways of of decoding it um and then automatically process this data accordingly could be interesting um as as well as uh in a lot of jurisdictions you know you're limited to a very low wattage of how how much you can actually transmit um and this can limit the range um but with uh for example you know if you're using like a a a low frequency transmitter with about like three watts of power which is generally legal um in most places you can transmit um thousands of kilometers so this is a really interesting technology for for that um but yeah so in general the uh the Way Forward is going to be um you know a big mix but I think as long as people keep uh thinking about this letter of the stack and uh working in that direction um it's it's looking bright um but uh yeah so in addition to just being a dumb transmitter of data and not being sure whether anybody's out there receiving it a really um a thing that requires a bit more infrastructure um because you have to also be able to receive a signal again and the receiver has to be able to send but that's implemented of acknowledgement receipts so that at least you know that your transmission has been received and transmitted to the blockchain um that would be uh you know an obvious thing and then once you have uh bidirectional communication setup you can actually Implement IP networking and then you can have multihop networks where instead of just being pointto Point you're communicating with uh with different uh users through a whole thing so you can actually run uh IP network um on uh on radios uh it's super low bandwidth super high ly but when what matters is like getting the data out in a you know otherwise like censored situation it's can be super useful um yeah otherwise yeah standards guides I mean a lot of the hardware that you need for this you can find you know at at pawn shops and hardware stores so just making guides and and uh and uh you know Distributing those to folks who might find them useful um is a project that you know some people like the M7 project are kind of working on um but it's definitely not like they haven't made it easy yet um you know and they're also be other Alternatives other than this like you know it's a lot more expensive but you know launching our own you know Dow owned net constellation of satellites as an alternative to starlink you know things like that um so in general I if uh if any of you folks are interested in um working on you know this kind of thing there's a few discussion groups that are starting as a result of this day um some of them were focused more on the um like Li P2P stack um if you're interested in working on the internet level or below um yeah you can hop in that group um but yeah happy to take any questions [Applause] thanks