You must design a system to deliver news content (text, images, short videos) to 1 billion people globally. Your design must adhere to the following constraints derived from first principles:
- Zero Centralized Infrastructure: You cannot use traditional CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) like Cloudflare, Akamai, or AWS CloudFront. There can be no central servers or data centers that represent a single point of failure. The system must be resilient enough to function even if entire continents go offline.
- Physics-Limited Latency: The time it takes for a new piece of content to propagate to 95% of the user base must approach the physical limit imposed by the speed of light across global networks, not the limits imposed by server processing queues.
- Near-Zero Marginal Cost: The marginal cost of delivering content to one additional user must be as close to zero as possible. This means you cannot have costs that scale linearly with users or bandwidth, which rules out traditional cloud hosting models.
- Incentivized Participation: The system must rely on its users’ devices (phones, computers) to store and distribute content. You must devise an incentive structure, grounded in economic or game-theoretic principles, that encourages users to contribute their storage and bandwidth without direct monetary payment.
- Verifiable Integrity: Content must be cryptographically signed at its source to be verifiable, preventing censorship or alteration by the participating nodes that are relaying it.
How would you design the architecture, protocol, and incentive system from the ground up to solve this?
