Services in a Brain-to-Brain Internet

The below article is intended for a very futuristic use case, involving implants. You can study actual, ready BTB services at our github.

Future plans: Imagine a service called YouLive. Rather than sharing user-uploaded videos (as YouTube does), YouLive would share user-uploaded experiences. In such a system of shared experience, care must be taken to ensure that a user’s downloaded experience does not exceed the length of the recording, and that the downloaded experience is of the quality expected by the receiver. A user’s brain must be fundamentally protected from becoming ‘trapped’ in another (potentially ill-acting) user’s experience.

On a POC blockchain, safety is ensured by publicly-announcing connections between humans and services. The value or script of the transaction would be signify the length of time a connection was assumed to be valid. A human would confirm a connection time after receiving a service’s proposal. Once a connection was terminated, a human would then send a second transaction to signify they had been disconnected. The publicized initiation and termination of a connection is crucial to the safety of the network. If a connection was not terminated after the specified time, users on the network would notice on the blockchain, and could remove the ill-acting service from the network, or simply leave the network themselves. Once again, the decentralized nature of blockchains offer a safer means for these broadcasts than a centralized server, the latter of which can be hacked. Thus, a blockchain is absolutely necessary as a foundation for brain-to-brain security.

In the bitcoin protocol, a small number of ’emergency broadcast keys’ are given to core developers to alert users in the case of network failure. These keys could be used to automatically disconnect users in the event a number of downloaded thoughts or service connections did not receive their termination transactions.

In the case of human-service handshakes, a minuscule digital currency fee would be incurred to allot for the cost of blockchain data storage, as well as to help support the centralized structure hosting the experiences. If the service were decentralized (which it should be), a portion of the digital currency fee could be sent to the user who uploaded the experience, or whatever other feature the service offered. This fee would be necessary as an incurred cost for network spam, and relatedly, would ensure human nodes with a poor level of trust could still have their human-service transactions posted on the blockchain.

The protocol for a brain-to-brain internet outlined here is one that is discontinuous. Downloaded thoughts and service connections would only be utilized for an agreed-upon length of time. Code signing (Kiehtreiber and Brouwer [2006]) would ensure that downloaded thoughts were unaltered, similar to how file downloads on the internet are secured. Continuous, live stimulation of neurons will probably never be a safe mechanism for brain-to-brain communication, though refreshable service connections may allow for continued data sharing.


Reference: proof-of-cognition-implants , published May 2015. Disclaimer: Project Oblio’s mechanism does not rely on brain implants, but the mechanisms of action are the same. An early version of the paper provably exists in bitcoin address 13eeMVU5fXNfZdoBk5z4fEAbgSH9MawQ6H.

One thought on “Services in a Brain-to-Brain Internet”

  1. I agree,
    A digitized weave of human conscience will always be vulnerable to computational attacks, unless its security relies on biocryptographic barriers such as blockchain.

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