Follow the Bytes, Follow the Money

October 17, 2026 · about 12 minutes

Every diagram of a network shows where the data goes. These three also show where the money goes. In Bandwidth Swap the two move in opposite directions: bytes go out one hop at a time, and payment comes back the same way, each hop paid when the next one acknowledges. Five percent of every payment is burned on the way, a defense against fake traffic, so sending traffic to yourself costs the fee.

The three maps are a street, a forest, and four planets. Each has a switch that takes a link down, so you can see who still gets through, what they pay before and after, and where the money ends up. Only one price here is real: ten cents a gigabyte for an uplink, the price the pilot charges. The pilot is the protocol as it runs today, three small computers on one bench, settling in dollars with an invoice at the end of the month. Every other number is made up, and kept plausible.

Green arrows are data. Orange dashed arrows are money. They are dashed because the money moves after the bytes: in the pilot as an invoice at the end of the month, in the design as a payment channel. Every payment shown has already lost its five percent to the burn, and the burn is written beside it.

1. A street with three dishes

Three houses on one street each have a satellite dish, and each sells a share of its connection to one neighbor. The street looks like this.

Each dish house sells its connection at ten cents a gigabyte. The dish houses are also linked to each other, by Wi-Fi between 1 and 2 and by 915 MHz between 2 and 3, and each charges two cents a gigabyte to carry a neighbor's traffic across that link. Every hour each buying house signs a receipt for the bytes it bought, the house that carried them countersigns, and both copies go to the Pi at House 2.

House 1's dish Working Down (snow on the dish)

Working: three one-hop markets, each dependent paying its dish house. Down: House 1a's bytes cross the street link to House 2's dish and House 1a pays both houses; House 2 can charge up to what the way around through House 3 would cost ($0.02 + $0.02 + $0.10). Nothing is paid to House 1 for its dish being down, and nothing for standing by.

The street links are not charity. When House 1's dish fails, House 2 earns more than twice what it did the day before, and House 1 keeps a customer it would otherwise have lost for the price of a hop. That is what pays for the second radio before the snow.

Daily income after the burn. House 2's dish carries four houses instead of two and earns for all of them. House 1 earns a hop fee from House 1a and pays House 2 for its own traffic, so it ends the day behind, but connected.

Prices and money, before and after

Working: three one-hop markets, each dependent paying its own dish house. Down: House 1a pays House 1 sixty cents a day as a hop and House 2 three dollars for the dish, House 1 pays House 2 two dollars for its own twenty gigabytes, and House 2's income goes from $2.85 to $7.60 a day while House 1 is left with fifty-seven cents and a two-dollar bill.

The conditions

Is there a way around? Only if the street links exist. Without them, House 1 and House 1a are dark, nothing moves and nothing is paid: a relay that is offline earns nothing, which is not a punishment, only the absence of a customer. The protocol does not create backup links. It makes them worth building.
Who pays for the detour? The payer, per hop. House 1a's receipt names both hops. House 1 is paid its hop price when House 2 acknowledges, and House 2 is paid when the bytes reach the internet; for traffic to the internet, the payer's own signature closes the receipt. House 1 cannot charge House 1a for a dish it no longer provides.
What bounds House 2's price? Nothing in the protocol. The market does: the way around through House 3 costs $0.14, so above that House 1a's software routes the other way, ranked by what previous payers actually settled on each path. The street's third link is what keeps the second one honest.
What about the hour the dish failed? House 1a's window with House 1 settles at the smaller of the two counts, which is the bytes that crossed before the snow. The rest of the hour is on the new route, in a new receipt. No one adjudicates.
How does House 1a know the detour works before it needs it? Routes are ranked by settled receipts, so a path nobody has used ranks nowhere. A small purchase commitment on the route from House 1a to House 2, a tenth of a gigabyte an hour with a proving allowance, keeps the street link in use and in the receipt graph for a few cents a day. That is insurance bought as bandwidth, and it is the only kind of insurance this protocol sells.
The slow link. If House 3's dish fails instead, House 3a's way around runs over 915 MHz at four megabits: it works, and it settles a tenth of the bytes an hour. Quality is priced, not proven. House 3a pays less because less arrived.

2. A cabin in the forest

Six kilometers from the end of that street, through trees, there is a cabin with no connection at all. Nobody will string a radio to it on a promise. So the cabin posts a purchase commitment, the paper's word for a bounty: a prepaid offer to buy bandwidth on a route that does not exist yet. The offer names the route, from the cabin to House 3's dish; a minimum rate, one gigabyte an hour, which is about two megabits a second; a premium of ten cents a gigabyte above whatever the relays post; 720 hourly windows, a month; a deadline of sixty days; and a proving allowance, ten windows a week that the escrow will reimburse for anyone else who tries the route. The value is escrowed with the street's Mint and announced. Then the cabin waits.

The bounty Posted, nobody has built A neighbor built the ridge relay The ridge relay goes dark

Posted: the cabin's $180 sits with the Mint and the offer is announced; no bytes, no payments. Built: a neighbor on the ridge serves the route and each hour's receipt draws the posted prices and the premium out of the escrow. Dark: the relay stops, the receipts stop, the payments stop; nothing is paid for the relay having existed.

Prices and money, window by window

Each window draws its own amounts out of the escrow. Above the minimum the relays get their posted prices and the full premium. In rain the premium prorates and the rest goes back to the cabin. A hiker's window is reimbursed from the escrow, so the route is proved by use. A window with nothing sent, or a relay gone dark, moves nothing, and its escrow returns at the deadline.

The conditions

Who builds, and why? Whoever can see the arithmetic. The bounty guarantees a month of at least a gigabyte an hour at fifteen cents posted plus ten premium, which is at least $72 to the two relays for a $150 radio pair. The protocol does not pick the builder. It publishes the offer and pays whoever's receipts settle on the route.
What does the cabin risk? Nothing but time. The escrow pays only on receipts; a month with no relay refunds in full at the deadline. What it cannot buy is a promise. A relay that goes dark has broken nothing it was paid for.
What does the relay risk? The radio. It is paid per window, and only for windows the cabin's receipts settle. A rainy hour pays less; a quiet hour pays the carry, which on a link with no delay is nothing. The paper's own sentence that the posted price on a committed window is the poster's to lose, and its newer sentence that an unused reservation pays only the carry, do not yet say the same thing; this note follows the newer one, and the paper should pick.
Is the ridge a monopoly? Yes, for as long as it is the only ridge. If it raises its price, the cabin's bounty is a bid against that toll: another neighbor can serve the same route and collect the same premium. The cabin does not have to post a second bounty. The first one is already an offer to anyone.
How does the cabin trust a route it has never used? The proving allowance. Up to ten windows a week bought by other payers are reimbursed from the escrow, and their receipts put the route in the graph at a measured rate before the cabin relies on it. A relay cannot prove its own route through a second identity for more than the allowance, and loses the burn doing it.
What the bounty cannot buy. Presence. A commitment can name a place and pay for people served there, within a radio's range, but it cannot pay a box for being in the forest. Only receipts from people who paid for bytes earn anything.

3. Earth, the Moon, Mars and Europa

The third map keeps the same rules and changes only the distances. Four worlds, four bookkeepers: a Mint on Earth, one on the Moon, one on Mars and one in the Jupiter system serving a lander on Europa through a relay orbiter. Light takes 1.3 seconds to the Moon, three to twenty-two minutes to Mars, and thirty-five to fifty-two minutes to Jupiter; Mars to Jupiter is about thirty to fifty-five. On every link the window is the contact, the clock tolerance is the base five seconds plus the light time both ways plus the drift since the last contact, windows are prepaid, and a relay that holds a bundle between contacts has signed for it. Each bridge relay is bonded with the Mint on both sides of its link, and the Mints reconcile their books whenever a link between them exists. An institution on Earth wants a terabyte from Europa.

The Earth–Jupiter line Clear Solar conjunction (three weeks)

Clear: Europa's lander sends to the Jupiter relay orbiter, which sends to Earth; the Earth institution pays the orbiter's posted price and the Jupiter Mint settles the lander's hop from the same receipts. Conjunction: the direct line is gone for three weeks, so the orbiter sends to a Mars relay, which holds the bundle under a custody receipt until its next Earth contact; Earth pays the Mars bridge, the Mars bridge pays the Jupiter bridge in Mars's unit at its own rate, and the two Mints that cannot see each other reconcile through Mars as paid traffic.

Prices and money, per gigabyte

With the line clear, Earth pays the Jupiter orbiter directly and the Jupiter Mint pays the lander its share from the same receipts. In conjunction Earth pays the Mars bridge $63: it keeps its $20 and $3 of carry and passes $40 to the Jupiter orbiter in Mars's unit at its own rate, with the burn taken on each side. When Mars is behind the Sun too, nothing moves and nothing is paid.

The conditions

Is there a way around? Only when Mars can see both Earth and Jupiter, which depends on where the three are in their orbits; some conjunctions have no detour. When there is none, nothing breaks. Receipts wait in outboxes, the clock tolerance has widened by three weeks of drift, and every window settles when the line returns. Nothing is paid for the silence, and nothing has to be.
Who holds the bytes? The Mars relay, between the pass that brings them from Jupiter and its next contact with Earth, under a custody receipt it signed on take-up and for a holding term its contact plan published. If it loses the bundle, the loss is on paper and its bond on Mars pays for it. If its Earth contact never comes, Earth's prepaid window is refunded and the relay's carry on the windows that did settle is where it priced that risk.
Whose money is it? Three units. Earth pays in Earth's; the Mars bridge, bonded with the Earth Mint and the Mars Mint, holds both and posts its prices in both, so the $40 it pays Jupiter's orbiter is its own conversion at its own rate. Earth cannot read Mars's unit and does not need to: the burn is five percent in any unit, and the smaller-count rule is in bytes.
Who polices the bookkeepers? Nobody can reach another world's bond. If the Jupiter Mint under-burned during the silence, the Earth Mint finds it at the first reconciliation after, publishes the proof, stops reconciling, and slashes any relay on its side that keeps settling with Jupiter. The bridge relays, bonded on both sides, feel it first. That is a boycott, and it is the only enforcement that has ever worked across a distance.
What bounds the direct bridge's price? The detour. Jupiter's orbiter is the only direct link, and it can charge up to about $63 a gigabyte, what Earth would pay to go around through Mars, before Earth's software routes that way even with the line clear. A toll is bounded by the cost of the next bridge, and this network always has one more bridge than the shortest path.
Is this still commerce? Yes, everywhere on this map. The longest round trip here is under two hours, so the party that pays is the party that wanted the bytes and will be there to sign for them. The receipt's horizon is further out than Jupiter. It is not infinitely far, and the paper now says where it is.

What the three maps have in common

In all three maps, taking a link down pays nobody for the outage. The way around is paid exactly what its receipts settle, and nothing more. The street's detour costs two cents more a gigabyte and gives House 2 a price it can raise until House 3 undercuts it. The forest's bounty buys nothing until a relay exists, then buys exactly the windows that settle, and the escrow goes home when the deadline passes. The conjunction's detour costs thirteen dollars more and crosses two bookkeepers that cannot see each other, through a relay that signed for what it held. Different constants, one receipt, and the money always moving the other way from the bytes, five percent lighter.

Sources: the Bandwidth Swap whitepaper, v0.4 (Section 3.6 for windows and the carry, Section 5 for posted prices and the sole bridge, Section 5.1 for purchase commitments, Appendix A for links with delay), the paper for operators, the open questions, the kit. The numbers other than the pilot's ten cents a gigabyte are illustrative.