These weeks can be summarized in 2 words. Community building. Monday of the first week me and a Cobrador said our goodbyes to our friends in Prague and made our way towards Oslo.

We met up with another contributing cobrador and the hacking was on. We’ve been toying with the idea of adding multi-wan for a while. In laymen terms that means automatically connecting to another router if one fails. (like how your phone auto-switches to the best available wifi).

We worked on some things in parallel and I worked out a way to pay out the router’s owner over lightning. First I had to solve the compilation issues i encountered earlier when adding the gonuts library to manage the ecash. Since, i’ve gained a bit more experience working with go and it was quite easy to solve. I just had to keep the code that uses this library separate from the code that uses gonostr (which internally uses gonuts) in order to prevent dependency hell. So that worked, and now it’s possible to configure a router to do payouts. The router will keep a minimum balance to allow for upstream payments.

Config location: /etc/tollgate/config.json

"profit_share": [
  {
    "factor": 0.70,
    "lightning_address": "your@lightningprovider.com"
  },
  {
    "factor": 0.30,
    "lightning_address": "tollgate@minibits.cash"
  }
]

We’ve been able to get in the lightning payouts before the freedom forum, something that’s been on our wish-list for a long time!

Oslo Freedom Forum

The freedom forum was a unique experience. Speaking with people that don’t have the freedoms we take for granted is a sobering experience and a good ego-check. There’s many things people in the west do every day that in other places will be punished by destroying you and your family’s lives.

I mostly took in the stories and experiences of the forum, i was positively surprised with the focus on freedom tech to support human rights from a technical perspective.

TollGate got a lot of attention from communities with unreliable internet connectivity which I think is a great application of TollGate. All we need to do is teach people how to build on / or install TollGate and they can without having to rely on our involvement build their own infrastructure.

We’d love to get our software running on the most low-cost hardware so that we can scale the network worldwide!