Philosophy (dist.ribut.us)

Waxnet was envisioned as a protection against siren servers. Allowing users to form communities without being coerced into trusting a central authority that cannot be replaced without dissolving the community.

Siren Servers and the Iceberg

Even a well intentioned siren server cannot avoid the Iceberg. Writing a server based social network is not a challenge. Making it scale is. And running it at scale is expensive. Charging for the service is not an option, the only model that has persisted is advertising. So a service needs to start advertising. Using an advertising service reduces control and returns a smaller cut. Writing an ad service is non-trivial.

The competitiveness of an ad service can be seen as a product of 1) the size of the user base 2) the desirability of the user base 3) information extracted from user base. This pressures the service to increase these dimensions, potentially at the cost of the quality of the service. It also increases the overall cost of running the service, eventually having a significant portion of the revenue raised from advertising going back into seeking advertising revenue.

Eventually, a small percent of revenue and therefore a small amount of influence in decisions is going into the quality of the core service.

Privacy and Security

Meta Privacy

Advertising has established that simply by knowing your friend graph, I can accurately advertise to you. Therefor, keeping the content of communications secure is not enough, the shape of the graph must be obfuscated.

High Security

Most users do not require high security. Instead it is our intention to provide "front-door security". Enough protection to prevent casual invasions of privacy and mass surveillance, particularly for economic profit. The analogy of "front-door security" is that bypassing the common front-door lock is trivial, but provides just enough of a barrier to deter and provide legal protection by showing intent.

For users that do require high security, it will come at a cost of performance. But the network of low-security users will still provide "crowd cover".

The Market and the Park

I have no issue with commerce and strongly believe in free markets. But not to the exclusion of all other models. There is a park near where I live. You cannot engage in commerce there and you certainly cannot open your own shop there. Waxnet is park - software must be free and open. If it reaches any degree of success, there will be significant pushback on this point and the community must know from the start that they must help maintain these values.

Ease of Use

It is critically important that setting up Waxnet be easy. The specific goal is that 80% of internet users should be able to setup Speakeasy without any additional help.

A New Framework

Waxnet is a new protocol running atop udp rather than http. Http and the web provide too many hurdles to overcome from DNS to browser fingerprints.

Waxnet is not intended as an anonymizing network for connecting to public services (TOR) or for hidden services (TOR and I2P). It is intended as an anonymous P2P network for P2P applications and procs. In order for the p2p aspect to be evenly scaleable, there are no special peers, therefore, no routing nodes. Instead everyone must route. But to protect users from the risks of running an exit node, only Waxnet traffic can be routed. Scalability above all else is why Waxnet is developing it's own overlay network rather than using an existing infrastructure.