Kind of unfortunate that a comms or systems latency destroys civilian airliners. But nice to live in a world where all flyers have $10B per missile/aircraft pair lying around, and everyone trusts each other enough to hand it over (and hand it back later).
Think about video calls you had with someone on the other side of the world, you don’t notice that much latency. The an internet signal can travel from the US to Australia and back again in less than 0.2 seconds, and is often faster than 80% the speed of light (fibre optic ping statistics).
Computers are very fast: a lot of computer programs can run a million times a second (in sequence).
$10 billion lying around
There isn’t $10 billion for each missile/aircraft pair, there is only one per alliance of countries, and it’s only used when a missile asks a civilian airliner for a password.
Maybe it’s not cryptocurrency but another form of money, in which case it can be part of a foreign exchange reserve (rather than money set aside purely for this purpose).
Trust
Yes, there is no guarantee the country taking the money will hand it back. But if they are willing to “accidentally” launch a missile at a civilian airliner, and ransom it for $10 billion, and keep the money, they will be seen as a terrorist state.
The world operates under the assumption that you can freely sail ships and fly airplanes, without worrying about another country threatening to blow them up and demanding ransom money.
If you do not trust a country enough to pay their missile and save your civilian airliner, you should keep all your civilian aircraft and ships far far out of their reach. You should pull out any money you invested in them since they’ll probably seize that too.
I’ve been in networking long enough to know that “can be less than”, “often faster”, and “can run” are all verbal ways of saying “I haven’t thought about reliability or measured the behavior of any real systems beyond whole percentiles.”
But really, I’m having trouble understanding why a civilian plane is flying in a war zone, and why current IFF systems can’t handle the identification problem of a permitted entry.
Thank you. I admit you have more expertise in networking than me.
It is indeed just a new idea I thought of today, not something I’ve studied the details of. I have nothing proving it will work, I was only saying that I don’t see anything proving it won’t work. Do you agree with this position?
Maybe there will be technical issues preventing this system from moving information as fast as a video call, but maybe it can be fixed, right?
I agree that this missile problem shouldn’t happen in the first place. But it did happen in the past, so the idea might help.
It’s not the same thing as current IFF. From what I know, IFF can prove who’s side you are on but not whether you are military or civilian. From an internet search, I read that Iran once disguised their military jets as civilian, which contributed to the disaster of Iran Air Flight 655.
A civilian aircraft might be given permission in the form of a password, but there’s nothing stopping a country from sharing that password with military jets. Also, if a civilian airliner is flying over international waters but gets too close to another country’s ships, it might not have permission.
[Note: I apologize for being somewhat combative—I tend to focus on the interesting parts, which is those parts which don’t add up in my mind. I thank you for exploring interesting ideas, and I have enjoyed the discussion! ]
I was only saying that I don’t see anything proving it won’t work
Sure, proving a negative is always difficult.
I agree that this missile problem shouldn’t happen in the first place. But it did happen in the past
Can you provide details on which incident you’re talking about, and why the money-bond is the problem that caused it, rather than simply not having any communications loop to the controllers on the ground or decent identification systems in the missile?
I thought about it a bit more, and while I still think it’s possible in theory, I agree it’s not that necessary.[1]
When a country shoots down a civilian airliner, it’s usually after they repeatedly sent it a warning, but the pilots never heard it. It’s more practical to fix this problem rather than have the money system.
Maybe a better solution would be a type of emergency warning signal that all airplanes can hear, even if they accidentally turned their radio off. There may be a backup receiver or two which is illegal to turn off, and only listens to such warnings. That would make it almost impossible for the pilots to ignore the warnings.
Kind of unfortunate that a comms or systems latency destroys civilian airliners. But nice to live in a world where all flyers have $10B per missile/aircraft pair lying around, and everyone trusts each other enough to hand it over (and hand it back later).
Latency
Think about video calls you had with someone on the other side of the world, you don’t notice that much latency. The an internet signal can travel from the US to Australia and back again in less than 0.2 seconds, and is often faster than 80% the speed of light (fibre optic ping statistics).
Computers are very fast: a lot of computer programs can run a million times a second (in sequence).
$10 billion lying around
There isn’t $10 billion for each missile/aircraft pair, there is only one per alliance of countries, and it’s only used when a missile asks a civilian airliner for a password.
Maybe it’s not cryptocurrency but another form of money, in which case it can be part of a foreign exchange reserve (rather than money set aside purely for this purpose).
Trust
Yes, there is no guarantee the country taking the money will hand it back. But if they are willing to “accidentally” launch a missile at a civilian airliner, and ransom it for $10 billion, and keep the money, they will be seen as a terrorist state.
The world operates under the assumption that you can freely sail ships and fly airplanes, without worrying about another country threatening to blow them up and demanding ransom money.
If you do not trust a country enough to pay their missile and save your civilian airliner, you should keep all your civilian aircraft and ships far far out of their reach. You should pull out any money you invested in them since they’ll probably seize that too.
I’ve been in networking long enough to know that “can be less than”, “often faster”, and “can run” are all verbal ways of saying “I haven’t thought about reliability or measured the behavior of any real systems beyond whole percentiles.”
But really, I’m having trouble understanding why a civilian plane is flying in a war zone, and why current IFF systems can’t handle the identification problem of a permitted entry.
Thank you. I admit you have more expertise in networking than me.
It is indeed just a new idea I thought of today, not something I’ve studied the details of. I have nothing proving it will work, I was only saying that I don’t see anything proving it won’t work. Do you agree with this position?
Maybe there will be technical issues preventing this system from moving information as fast as a video call, but maybe it can be fixed, right?
I agree that this missile problem shouldn’t happen in the first place. But it did happen in the past, so the idea might help.
It’s not the same thing as current IFF. From what I know, IFF can prove who’s side you are on but not whether you are military or civilian. From an internet search, I read that Iran once disguised their military jets as civilian, which contributed to the disaster of Iran Air Flight 655.
A civilian aircraft might be given permission in the form of a password, but there’s nothing stopping a country from sharing that password with military jets. Also, if a civilian airliner is flying over international waters but gets too close to another country’s ships, it might not have permission.
[Note: I apologize for being somewhat combative—I tend to focus on the interesting parts, which is those parts which don’t add up in my mind. I thank you for exploring interesting ideas, and I have enjoyed the discussion! ]
Sure, proving a negative is always difficult.
Can you provide details on which incident you’re talking about, and why the money-bond is the problem that caused it, rather than simply not having any communications loop to the controllers on the ground or decent identification systems in the missile?
Thank you for saying that.
I thought about it a bit more, and while I still think it’s possible in theory, I agree it’s not that necessary.[1]
When a country shoots down a civilian airliner, it’s usually after they repeatedly sent it a warning, but the pilots never heard it. It’s more practical to fix this problem rather than have the money system.
Maybe a better solution would be a type of emergency warning signal that all airplanes can hear, even if they accidentally turned their radio off. There may be a backup receiver or two which is illegal to turn off, and only listens to such warnings. That would make it almost impossible for the pilots to ignore the warnings.
I still think they money system might be useful for preventing automated militaries from waging accidental war, but that’s another story.