Tesla’s Dojo Trick Isn’t a TCP Fix—It’s a Private Walled Garden

Reader, everyone’s buzzing about Tesla’s new patent for TTP—their hardware-only transport protocol that crushes microsecond latencies in Ethernet clusters. It sounds revolutionary, right? Bypass all the software overhead, go straight from NIC to NIC, no kernel, no interrupts, pure speed.

But here’s the brutal truth nobody’s saying out loud: TTP doesn’t solve the 1981 RFC 793 problem at all. It doesn’t fix TCP’s core trust flaw—that packets are unauthenticated, anyone can spoof source addresses, flood you, or hijack connections because the internet was designed for friendly university networks, not today’s chaos. Tesla didn’t patch that. They just… left the room.

They built a completely private, physically secured cluster where no outsider can ever plug in. Inside that walled garden, spoofing and floods literally can’t happen, so they stripped out every cautious check that slows things down. It’s brilliant engineering, but it only works because they control every cable, every switch, every machine. Expose TTP to the real internet and those 1981 ghosts would laugh all the way back.

And that’s what frustrates the hell out of me.

Every time I try to keep something truly private—really private—I hit the same wall: the public internet’s threat model is baked in. You either add heavy crypto and authentication on top (which brings back latency), or you isolate everything and lose reach. There’s no clean third door.

So my mind keeps wandering to simpler, older ways of moving information. Ways that never had these problems because they never pretended to be a global trustless network.

Think about the sun.

Every morning, light from a fusion reaction 93 million miles away hits the Earth. In the same instant, billions of living things—plants turning toward it, birds waking, humans glancing at windows—receive the exact same signal: it’s a new day. No packets, no headers, no authentication handshakes, no spoofing possible. Just raw photons carrying perfect synchronization across an entire hemisphere. That single “packet” of light turns half the biosphere on or off, resets circadian rhythms, triggers photosynthesis, starts the food chain. All from one continuous broadcast with zero overhead and perfect reliability.

It’s a physics problem, sure—but it’s also a screaming indictment of our lack of imagination.

The sun communicates at the speed of light. Our networks do too—but not the same speed of light.

Light in vacuum (or air, close enough) travels at ~299,792 km/s. Light in glass fiber? Only about 200,000 km/s because of the refractive index. That tiny difference—roughly 50% slower—adds up over distance.

Back when fiber was being laid between Chicago and New York/New Jersey, high-frequency trading firms went to war over those milliseconds. One group spent hundreds of millions drilling the straightest possible fiber path through mountains to shave distance. But others realized something simpler: transmit through the air instead. They built chains of microwave towers—line-of-sight point-to-point links—because electromagnetic waves in air outrun photons trapped in glass. No bends, no refraction slowdown, just pure c. They beat the fiber guys by 3-5 milliseconds round-trip, enough to front-run trades and print money for years until everyone caught up.

Old radio tech, reapplied with ruthless focus on physics, turned milliseconds into billions.

When I design our blackboxes, this is the mindset burning in the back of my head. Security isn’t a bolt-on; it’s the core premise. But speed and sovereignty are too. Everything else builds out from there. I don’t want to inherit 1981’s compromises and then spend my life patching them. I want to start with something that assumes hostility from the start—or better yet, sidesteps the hostile environment entirely by choosing the fastest, cleanest propagation medium I control.

There are so many ways to move data if you let yourself imagine beyond the regulated box we’ve been handed:

• Line-of-sight microwave or laser links bouncing gigabits tower-to-tower, beating fiber on both latency and independence.

• HF skywave radio carrying encrypted telemetry across continents.

• Acoustic coupling through materials no one’s monitoring.

• Even visible light communication—Li-Fi style—inside rooms where Wi-Fi fears to tread.

• Drone relays, balloon networks, underwater acoustic meshes.

The physics is there. The spectrum is there. The hardware is cheaper than ever.

But imagination? Regulation? That’s what kills it.

Most promising bands are locked up by governments and incumbents. Experimental licenses are a nightmare. Commercial use on ham bands is forbidden. Want to run a private coastal mesh that skips across the water? Better hope the FCC or ITU doesn’t notice.

So sometimes I think the only place left to really build this stuff without choking on red tape is international waters.

Picture it: a platform or ship twelve miles offshore, beyond national jurisdiction. Your own towers, your own spectrum choices (as long as you don’t interfere), your own rules. Blackboxes on customer sites talk to local gateways, then beam everything home over your private microwave or laser links to the platform, which relays globally via whatever physics you trust most. No single government can shut you down with a letter. You’re not breaking laws—you’re just operating where most laws don’t reach yet.

It sounds extreme, but it’s not new. Marconi did transatlantic leaps before anyone regulated it. WW2 fleets ran global networks on HF with encryption that held up for decades. HFT firms turned 20th-century microwave tech into weapons of profit. Voyager’s gold record didn’t trust future networks—it etched everything on a physical disk and fired it into the void with instructions any sufficiently advanced species could decode.

There was wisdom in that isolation. In accepting that perfect interoperability sometimes isn’t worth the compromise.

Old tech is the new tech when the new tech’s foundations are crumbling.

I’m not saying we all need to become radio pirates, microwave warriors, or seasteaders tomorrow. But when I’m wiring up another blackbox and thinking about how to get its heartbeat back to us without touching the public internet’s poison—or without losing those precious microseconds to someone else’s glass—these ideas aren’t nostalgia. They’re necessities.

Maybe the real innovation isn’t another layer on TCP. Maybe it’s remembering that light, radio waves, sound, and timing were moving information perfectly long before we decided everything had to route through the same flawed pipe.

The sun doesn’t ask permission to start the day. Neither did those traders when they went tower-to-tower. Maybe we should stop asking either.

— St. Paul Smitebyte