Hacker News Reader

It's not enough to have a bunch of ebooks on a drive and a pile of canned goods.

You need to get the ebooks and food to people who need them.

To that end, with most everyone having a mobile device, a wifi hotspot where people can leave text messages and grab books is useful.

View on HN

That actually makes a whole lot of sense -- might be the killer app; a bulletin board that works on your phone. Assuming people had enough power to charge their phones, and assuming the internet at large was unavailable, this would be brilliant.

"A bulletin board that works on your phone" is actually a decent summary of gossip protocol based p2p systems like Secure Scuttlebutt (https://scuttlebutt.nz). Data can be transferred when devices are in near enough proximity to each other (share a network, bluetooth, whatever). Messages are cryptographically signed (and possibly encrypted) so you could use this as a way of maintaining (albeit slowly) communications across a distance so long as there is still travel between communities.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com