# Indranet and Use Cases for Wealthy vs Poor Nations

Indranet is a peer to peer, Lighting Network monetised system of network services, primarily relaying between clients and servers, and peers and other peers. It is designed in as generalised and flexible way as possible to be easily adapted by users to fit their purposes.

The use cases for Indra are different for wealthy countries, versus poor ones. The reason being quite simple, only wealthy countries have enough resources to fund extensive, expensive large scale metadata collection systems like the NSA operates on telephone and now primarily internet networks.

## Wealthy Nations Threat Model

The value of an anonymising relay network system like Indra, or Tor, or I2P, in a wealthy country is about defending against the gathering of this information about users by large, state-level malicious actors such as the NSA or CIA, and similar organisations in other wealthy countries.

Thus, the prices, and the services provided by Indra relays in wealthy countries are about eliminating this information asymmetry between well heeled attackers versus the common people that are being attacked via this type of intelligence gathering.

Aside from the purpose of paying to have your network traffic hide end points from such attackers, there is a lesser use case that has not quite so much relevance in a wealthy country, which is in-band payment for access to network infrastructure.

## Poor Nations Threat Model

In poor nations, where corruption is rampant, and malicious actors tend to be physically threatening to their targets, such as organised crime organisations and similar, the problem of the information asymmetry is far less, even, practically nonexistent.

The government's funding base is just not high enough to cover the cost of leaning on network infrastructure providers to allow access to tapping the traffic travelling through trunks and backbones.

The need that is more acute in such regions is leveraging the division of labour to enable community based provision of network access services, and for this use case, and threat model, the bigger problem is in the difficulty in retailing one's surplus network access as a means to an income, and conversely, providing network access for all sorts of purposes, but especially facilitating businesses that make use of digital money via Bitcoin and Lightning Network.

## Indranet Covers the Spectrum of Needs of Rich *and* Poor

Indranet uses prepaid billing and anonymous payments as a spam limiter, a utility that is common to both of the categories covered in the foregoing.

Spam tends to be prevalent anywhere that communication is "free" and "unlimited". Spammers will fill every channel they can with their garbage, so long as the cost of filling the channel is lower than the profit that is generated by this messaging.

Spam cannot be economic when the bandwidth cost is market determined and the cost of messages linearly compounds with the volume. Ultimately, spam is simply a problem any time it is difficult to meter the consumption of network resources.

On the flip side of this, metered access to networks provide also a mechanism to cover the costs of provision of service, and paying a profit to employ people and resources to provide this network service.

Spam, and the unwanted capture of network volume and endpoints are integrated elements of the same problem, which in a wealthy country is more acute due to the relatively low cost of network service.

In poor countries, more often the problem is a lack of access to network service. There is many important ways in which poor people, beset by corrupt, legally protected organised criminals, can share their resources to mutually assist each other in the defence against this kind of attack. The simplest, and most concrete example is a duress alert system, which can notify nearby users of the arrival of malicious individuals who are preying on the poorly defended poor people's resources and indeed their lives.

This need is served when it can be a profitable business for technically minded members of a poor community, to make a living serving their neighbours, as well as enabling the community to have access to this vitally important resource for coordinating community action, especially in the case of predators.