Pillars of Propagation
- The first two pillars
- The monetary pillars
- Foundation for propagation
- The harmonious hand-off
- In closing
When the internet goes down, a lot goes down with it. All communication grinds to a halt. And communication entails more than WhatsApp, TikTok and other brainrot-catalyst apps. It is about getting in the new order for tomorrow’s groceries that will await you fresh ‘n green. It’s about getting the truck-driver at the right loading-dock to pick up that load, and give him the right delivery address. It’s his navigation to even get there. It’s the Fuel-pump payment terminal to get him the gas to do it. And (nowadays), it’s your good night’s sleep.
F*cked would be an understatement to say the least. Now imagine that when the internet goes down, we simply…
…wouldn’t care?
What if we can live in a way where we wouldn’t even notice that the internet is down. That’s what I want to talk about with you today.
The first two pillars
I want you to think about the physical location of data. Now what does that mean? I mean the physical location where a copy of data exists.
On the normal internet, this data is in a central data centre somewhere far away. When you visit a site, you pick up that data, it gets displayed on your browser, and discarded when you close the page.
This is a very wasteful and fragile model. If you visit the same page, and try to find the same information again, the whole circus starts all over, to once again throw away the data at the end. This means that you’re incredibly dependent on all parts remaining accessible. Which we know isn’t always the case.
Compare this to processes in nature, like a tree that gathers nutrients. A tree doesn’t send out something to go to the roots and pick up a nutrient, go back, and deliver the nutrient. Go out and fetch, go out and fetch, and so on… Instead, a tree has liquids that flow up and bring along nutrients as they are needed, after which it travels down with (waste) products that go back into the soil. It’s a continuous flow, with no start and no end.
This is exactly the model that’s possible with Nostr and Blossom. Because the data integrity can be validated from the data itself, the data can flow freely. And since it’s data, these flows can be filtered and duplicated at any point.
If that sounds a bit woowoo, let me give you an example: I go to a friend’s profile on a Nostr social app and I load their posts, including the images, which are Blossom files. At that very moment I tap into an existing flow of data somewhere on a far-away relay & blossom server and filter it to my liking. But unlike the go-and-fetch model, the data is now physically replicated on my device. This means that the connection to that far-away relay is never again needed for this same information to propagate.
Let me repeat that: After receiving data from a far-away relay, that same connection is NEVER AGAIN needed for the same information to propagate.
Now that this data exists in my local community, ANYONE in need of this information can retrieve it from me rather than the far-away place.
THIS is what makes Nostr + Blossom so incredibly potent. Though few seem to realize it.
The monetary pillars
Because Nostr/Blossom are free of any interpretation of the data, we can transport anything with the model described above. AKA: relays don’t care if it’s a social media post or some event that makes a doorbell ring.
So, for example, this model can be used for propagating websites with nsite as well. Now anyone in my community can view a website that I’ve already collected from the other side of the world once.
I want to sketch a scenario here:
Let’s say the internet is down and this (nsite) website happens to be a webshop for a local bakery. I’ve visited the webshop before, and just by doing that this data has already been propagated to my devices.
This means that anyone in my community can get this data from me, rather than from that connection to far away that’s now unavailable. My neighbour who’s a carpenter now loads the site and products by getting it from me, selects what he needs and goes to check-out.
Now we’re stuck with a problem, because we can’t pay without an internet connection. Except… we actually can. With Bitcoin Cashu mints. And not with fancy token-locking, but because our community has its own Cashu mint that continues to be accessible within the bounds of our local network.
Yes, we can’t make bitcoin payments OUTSIDE our community as the internet went down, but we can definitely keep circulating the value that is already present within the community. Which accounts for MOST economic activity that we need to survive.
My neighbour can order his bread for later pick-up. I can pay him for that job he did for me the other day from the sats I have of this local mint.
Then, whenever the wider internet returns, we all pay in/out of the mint as we desire. I might top-up because I net spent and the bakery might cash out over lightning to pay their supplier for next week’s flour.
Foundation for propagation
But, one huge problem remains… The internet’s architecture doesn’t support this organic flow of information. It is structured in a way that is too rigid to support a flow so organic, between parts that move around in physical space. The foundations are rattling and about to crumble…
It’s not strange that it evolved this way, the great minds behind TCP/IP and adjacent protocols couldn’t have designed for this world of flowing, self-validating data, as the tools we have at our disposal now simply didn’t exist yet.
But we can’t keep using a hammer now that we have screws. The tools may look similar and have similar goals. Yet, they’re fundamentally different.
Many projects have come and gone that tried to create this new foundation, but never seemed to put all the parts in at once. Focussing on the reinforced concrete, but built on unstable ground. Or put in the pile foundation, but neglect the reinforced concrete. All these genuinely want to build a beautiful structure, but you need to get the touch-points between earth, foundation and structure exactly right.
In internet-land that means that we can’t throw away 4+ decades of TCP/IP libraries for a new protocol. We have to be 100% compatible with the existing IP stack. You can’t build a protocol and rebuild everything from the ping application up to Minecraft.
At the same time, we can’t build on top of IP itself either, inheriting all its limitations. But, we won’t get anywhere without fully supporting it either. It’s a fine line and hard to get right, but I think FIPS has a good shot at making it work.
The harmonious hand-off
The key is in the touch points on top, where applications interface with the networking stack. And the earth, where the networking stack interfaces with the physical world.
Structure & foundation
This is the intersection where the pillars rest on their foundation. We can’t require the whole structure to be designed around the foundation, it should just expect a sturdy footing.
Cashu mints, Nostr relays and Blossom servers currently rely on DNS as their de-facto identity, it’s not truly theirs. An npub is. However, the system already exists, current tools expect a domain name. FIPS won’t fight this fact, but interoperates with it. Npubs as domain names cover this gap, owning their identity, zero code changes.
Not forever, but as an in-road, possibly for decades, but it must be in place to invite the transition to Free Internetworking.
Foundation & Earth
The foundation & earth connection is the interface between FIPS and physical transport, which can be any medium and should be many of them at once. A good spider-web is attached at many places, a leaf, a piece of bark and a branch. Any of which can fail for its own reasons, amounting to a mere nuisance when it happens. No catastrophic failures like an interrupted network today.
In practical terms this means a network where fiber, Bluetooth and Serial all become your carriers, regardless of the application, or type of data. No application should be bothered with how Bluetooth transport works. And no Bluetooth transport implementation should care what application is using its link.
In closing
We’re in a huge paradigm shift of data propagation, in a way we’ve never done, on a scale we’ve never seen. And with that scale I mean a scale so small that we tend to overlook it. A resilient internet is not one with huge backbone gateways, hyperscale compute clusters and fiber lines. It’s a messy interplay of small relays, mints and Blossom blobs hopping over crappy links in all directions, right to where it needs to be. It is a network that persists through power-cuts, human error and shutdowns. It’s a network where Bluetooth, USB cables and MicroSD cards become your carriers. Data will flow no matter the circumstances, or the scale. You can dam a river, but not the rain.
-Arjen
The meshed internet:
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