If you arbitrarily define any large wire on a pole as being &quot;centralized&quot;, then sure, but I wouldn&#x27;t agree with that definition. For example, I can lease long distance point to point dark fiber for my personal use, and run whatever combination of wavelengths and protocols that I want on it.<p>In the case where there is only one link between two towns, then the owner(s) of the switches at either end of that link will be able to charge a monopoly price for the bits that get sent across it. Market forces will soon encourage others to create additional links between the two towns.<p>In the bootstrapping phase of my plan, the case of a single link between two cities would be impossible: Network participants would create tunnels through the IP Internet (with the obvious downside of higher latency and cost).<p>Back to my original question: Should I be spending my time on this? You claimed that crypto was a better route because mesh doesn&#x27;t scale. I&#x27;m not a crypto genius, but I do consider myself a reasonably proficient systems software engineer. I feel that if I could design a scaleable mesh network protocol stack, many of the problems we&#x27;re discussing become tractable. What do you think?