Quote from: BTC_Bear on April 11, 2012, 11:20:20 PM

Quote from: btccomm on April 11, 2012, 10:35:28 PM

Quote from: Stephen Gornick on April 09, 2012, 06:25:43 AM

Consider the attempt last year for the government of Egypt to block cross-border Internet traffic. Sites like gmail, Youtube and CNN even were not accessible by those within Egypt. But the traffic within the country was still functional. Eventually the bitcoin client would find peers within the country (or helped a bit by manually specifying which peers to connect to) so all that needs to happen is for one of those nodes to connect to the rest of the internet for the blockchain to be kept current. That could occur over dialup if nothing else.

There are other ways the Internet could survive if disruptions to massive subcomponents were to occur (e.g., if consumer access providers were to block all traffic, for instance). Metro-wide networks built using mesh networking technologies with inter-city peering links could some day make reliance on the existing Internet infrastructure. You wouldn't get Facebook but you could still route e-mail, transfer data files and transact using bitcoin.

Here's one approach for a quick-deploy emergency internet:
- http://wiki.hacdc.org/index.php/Byzantium#Project_Goals

what if all major interchange points were shut down like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAE-East and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAE-West the result would be an overload of traffic on the rest of the system making the internet essentially worthless. Think cascading failure, it would be like a denial of service on the network

Yes, you make a good point.

I would propose though that 'efficiency' shouldn't be the sole model for durability. Imagine someone ddos'ing FIDO Mail. It would be a futile exercise.

Decentralized meshed networks, might not be efficient, but they are durable. Also, by just slowing down the information a little, it deters attacks on a system.

Remember all those BBS's that would call each other once a day or so and pass on information? Hard to stop that especially when there are so many lines of transfer of information between them.

yeah i was around in the BBS days, and yes the internet is durable. but going back to the functional level of the '90s seems like a big cluster to me. but it would better than nothing