In recent years, around the world, we are facing rise of low power mesh networks.

And compared to older systems, that mostly dissipated and failed, recent wave has something different to offer.

Those systems are built on custom protocols and low cost hardware, that is pretty limited in what it can do with reasonable time and power consumption. On top of that, for the purpose of long range communication, messages can only be short and transmission has to be slow.

Just like any other distributed system, it also faces challenges of trust in other nodes. And in this case, that is even harder issue, because due to bandwidth limitations, there can not be something like consensus over the network, due to bandwidth limitations.

While building it, designer faced unique challenges and constraints, that did not let them retroactively fix things, to be able to maintain backwards compatibility. Backwards compatibility being important since embedded systems in the middle of nowhere on slow network can not be updated.

This talks leads you thru those unique challenges, decisions made, analyzes them, looks at the compromises made, measures them on being worth it and in the end comes to conclusion, why meshtastic despite all those mistakes and scars still persists to survive.

Layers I will be going over are:

• Physical layer (what nodes are talking about in RF world)

• Metadata layer, for routing

• Encryption

• Portnums (application routing)

• Actual payload

I will be breaking down each layer at byte level or protobuf model level, interacting with audience on their ideas of why something is unsafe and showing live PoC on nodes that are willing to participate in local, vulnerable network