Theoretically we could all memorize the chain and shout transactions to each other, the computers are just here for our convenience. So, yes, possible for sure, and it shouldn't be that hard.

Bitcoin needs a mesh network and a way for people to earn bitcoins for supplying bandwidth.

So the hotspot owner would earn the bitcoin? That would be a really viral way to grow the network and help provide a massive buffer against a network split.

The only reason wifi has such a short range is because government regulations artificially limit transmission power to 50 mW. This is tiny. Even a mobile phone can go up to 2000 mW.

Technically it should be trivial to modify transmission power of a wifi device, and government regulations don't get enforced much anyhow in "offline" parts of the world like Somalia, if they exist at all.

Then it should be possible to construct a wireless mesh network with several tens of kilometers between each node, bringing even the most isolated villages online.

All you need is one person with a smartphone in each village acting as the local banker.

He probably does want to send money to a relative in a different village.

In many remote parts of Africa this is currently handled by SMS.

This system is better than nothing, but it still relies on capital-intensive mobile phone infrastructure, and the transaction costs are huge, in the region of 10-20%.

I'm also a ham, and a former military radio operator, and know that the reasons for the limitation on output power are not arbitrary.  In the case of WiFi in particular, the only reason that such devices are in that band is because it's unlicensed; it's unlicensed because it's the same band as microwave ovens, microwave ovens use it because it's the resonant frequency of water, which is why it can heat up food at all.  It is an extremely bad idea to uncap the output power of devices that use this band, as if any frequencies can harm human life, it's this one.  Also, Wifi is range limted because it's a particularly wide spectrum technology and because of it's frequency choice.  It was never designed to cover great distances, and the fact that it can be done at all is due to the talent of the geeks to do it and not the nature of the technology.

And even if Wifi was uncapped, it is unlikely that mobile users could turn up the watts anyway, as they are battery limited and just turning on the wifi radio eats the battery.


It's not trivial at all, but mostly because the functions of a wifi device are encoded into the hardware because that's much cheaper in volume than a software defined radio.  SDR devices that can act like a standard (or moded) wifi device within that band do exist, but they are too expensive to use as a base node for any kind of mesh network.


Anything is possible with enough money, but if that kind of money were available, tens of kilometers of multiwire, direct burial phone cable (buried or laid directly upon the wilderness dirt) to connect these villages, and a computer  in each village with a few standard modems and a wifi card would be much cheaper and easier to maintain in the long run.  Hell, even a null modem might work.  To this day, that is exactly what the USMC does to connect commanders of base camps using huge rolls of POTS cabling with quick connectors and extra tough armored jackets.  (they do have extra wires connected to special devices that can detect tampering, and even tell where in the cable a cut is.)  In fact, the best place to get the stuff to do what you are talking about is military surplus, since this kind of stuff tends to not sell very high as there is very little value in it outside of military or aid missions.


That might work, but you would need at least two, otherwise all you have done is move the monopoly power from some faraway company to the one guy in the village who owns the cellphone.

Why not have a bank issue notes backed by bitcoins? Users will have to trust the bank, but at least you won't need electricity to conduct a bitcoin transaction.

So, if your network got isolated, and you didn't want to fork the block chain, you could just conduct transactions without confirming them?

I've actually been tossing that idea around in my head too. In fact, I've seen it mentioned here a few times already. I like the idea of a lightweight client though. With physical representations of currency, you start to have problems with counterfeiting. And then it's "oops, goodbye deflationary model!"

Upon further reflection I think that sort of thing might start getting us into trouble. After all, if the bank still has the bitcoins, and if they figure a certain percentage of the bitbucks they issue will be out of their hands at any given moment, they can start doing things like:

1) Using the bitcoins behind the "missing percentage" to speculate. When they lose the bitcoins they will effectively be inflating the bitbucks economy.

2) Printing more bitbucks than they have bitcoins to cover. Let's say the bank is short some money and needs to pay off a debt *now.* Why not print off some bitbucks to represent that "missing percentage?" After all, it's not like there's ever going to be a run on the bank such that they'll have to actually account for that missing percentage.

By creating a physical currency issued by a single entity we will have re-created the Fed and the fiat system we are desperately trying to escape. Let's worry about the local stores that don't accept bitcoins before we worry about the villages that don't have access to the bitcoin network. If we need a physical representation of value, we may as well use one of the established fiat currencies, or else numismatics. Both of these currency classes can be bought with bitcoins and can be used to represent bitcoins physically.

If the time comes when the isolated African village *is* a worry for us, then let one of us who were here in the beginning bring the network to *them.* As society struggles on and the standard of living rises globally, the Internet will become almost as ubiquitous as gasoline or plastics.

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. We'll have to work to keep people educated about such possibilities.

We could also potentially pre-emptively create an "open bank" based on the same decentralized principles underlying the Bitcoin network to handle basic bank functions like lending and borrowing. People are going to want loans, and if we don't give them a *good* way of filling that need then some bank-like entity will take advantage of that giant, gaping hole in the market.

Loans, of course, will be tricky. In a deflationary system any sort of interest rate will act as a constantly rising variable interest rate even if it's fixed. It'll be a completely different way of thinking for people since most come from inflationary systems. And even if there is no interest rate on the loan, the rate of deflation will act as an interest rate. If that rate is too high, it could result in bankruptcy for a lot of unwary people. It might be prudent to implement a negative interest rate for such loans so that the rate of deflation plus the negative interest rate works out to be something sane and manageable.

Wow, this is a fun thought experiment. I'm not used to thinking in terms of deflation...