  Devices connected to the Internet today have a wide range of local
communication channels available, such as wireless Wifi, Bluetooth or NFC, as
well as wired backhaul. In densely populated areas it is possible to create
heterogeneous, multihop communication paths using a combination of these
technologies, and often transmit data with lower latency than via a wired
Internet connection. However, the potential for sharing meshed wireless radios
in this way has never been realised due to the lack of economic incentives to
do so on the part of individual nodes.
  In this paper, we explore how virtual currencies such as Bitcoin might be
used to provide an end-to-end incentive scheme to convince forwarding nodes
that it is profitable to send packets on via the lowest latency mechanism
available. Clients inject a small amount of money to transmit a datagram, and
forwarding engines compete to solve a time-locked puzzle that can be claimed by
the node that delivers the result in the lowest latency. This approach
naturally extends congestion control techniques to a surge pricing model when
available bandwidth is low. We conclude by discussing several latency-sensitive
applications that would benefit for this, such as video streaming and local
augmented reality systems.
