W.A.S.T.E: "We await silent Tristero's empire."

From the novella The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon; it's a mail delivery system by hobos, of letters dropped in what appear to be trash cans.

My goal with this website is to facilitate the decentralized adoption of distributed network of people willing to deliver letters and packages cheaply and efficiently; something that can replace government-run mail services worldwide.

Each city or rural area can have any number of mail collectors, distributors, and relayers. All 3 roles can be played by any individual, of course. The distributors and collectors go door-to-door, dropping off and picking up letters and packages, and the relayers take batches of it to other nearby hubs. There will have to be a vetting system to reduce the likelihood of dishonest people in our network. Hopefully the kybyz project can be built out to where it is usable for that and for communication between hubs and individual agents.

One idea that occurred to me is that collectors in a particular city or surrounding area can hold onto mail for destination areas until there is enough to send by U.S. mail or other carrier cheaply to a distributor in that city: say, Sam in San Francisco waits until he has 100 letters bound to Chicago, then sends them in a package via UPS to Charlene for distribution.

Source code will be at https://github.com/jcomeauictx/w-a-s-t-e.