It has been a very busy last one month for the skycoin project team which culminated in the launch of the testnet of the their flagship project – Skywire .
The test net was launched on the 22nd of May 2018 and it has been a flurry of activities for the project as the participants and supporters of the project have been working night and day with the support team of the skycoin projects in getting their skyminers ready and giving them updates about software releases as well as troubleshooting with the entire community to make sure there are enough nodes to run the system and make sure the skyminers (the core of skywire) are running without bugs and problems .
Skyminer is a hardware component that will provide bandwidth, storage, and computing power for the Skywire network.
Skyminer is completely open source, anyone can build Skyminer, can participate in Skywire by providing resources to the network. Skyminer is low cost and efficient. Each Skyminer acts as a node in the Skywire network, creating a node mesh network together.
Skyminer allows the Skywire network and even the entire Skycoin ecosystem to be used by everyone regardless of their technical background. In addition, Skyminer's "plug and play" functionality is currently under development so anyone can easily deploy nodes on the Skywire network.
Skywire is the decentralized mesh network that will serve as the foundation of new Internet
The Skywire project aims to create a faster, more affordable next-generation decentralized encrypted peer-to-peer Internet. Skywire will eventually implement the Wireless Mesh Network (MESH) while allowing individual users to provide bandwidth to each other and pay with Skycoin tokens. In this way, with Skywire's platform, users no longer have to pay excessive fees from Internet Service Providers (ISPs) or worry about ISPs selling user data. In developing countries with weak Internet infrastructure, Skywire can provide ultra-low-cost Internet connectivity for the entire community.
The objectives of skywire are
• Increase broadband competition. Provide an alternative to existing ISPs. Span last mile.
• Enable communities to build ISPs running on user-operated infrastructure.
So what’s the new Internet?
The new Internet proposed by skycoin project is
Fast and doesn’t suffer from throttling and other service disruptions that you get with large ISPs.
It is private. This means that you can’t be tracked as you browse. Instead of paying $$$ per month to be tracked by the ISP (which then sells your browsing data without permission), the Skywire community will have Internet service that protects their privacy.
It is secure. Users for users create Skywire. Users dictate the decisions made on the network and the network operates on a web of trust system where malicious nodes can be cut off from the main Skywire network via collective agreement of the community. This consensus model allows Skywire to be immune from attacks, exploitation and manipulation.
Above all it is incentivized. Skywire will develop to be a wireless mesh network (WMN). Users can earn both Skycoin and Coin Hours for running hardware nodes that provide both bandwidth and storage to the entire network. Users can then spend earned Coin Hours on content and other network resources, as they choose.
Skywire is currently running on public testnet in Phase I. This means all traffic is routing through traditional ISPs and existing Internet infrastructure.
The testnet allows the team to ensure Skywire is ready for broader adoption. Operators of official Skyminers and select DIY miners will receive Skycoin for their participation in the testnet.
In this phase, the network functions as an overlay — traffic between Skywire nodes must travel over the existing Internet unless the nodes are directly connected over Ethernet or Wi-Fi.
Phase 2: Mainnet
The second phase marks the official launch of the mainnet and the beginning of real mesh network capabilities. Skywire nodes will connect to each over Wi-Fi and share bandwidth. Both short-range and long-range wireless antennas will become available during this phase, enabling node peering over distances up to 5km and 15km, respectively.
At this stage, the market for bandwidth will not be at self-sustaining critical mass; therefore the Skycoin Foundation will temporarily subsidize node operations. As an incentive for early adopters, a daily allotment of Skycoin will be distributed evenly among the total number of nodes in operation. As the number of nodes increases, this subsidy will naturally decline and rewards from usage will grow. Eventually, the reward structure for operating a node will result entirely from usage. If none of the nodes in a cluster have direct fiber connections, the network will depend on consumer ISPs for last mile traffic and will not perform at its highest potential. Thus, the final adoption phase focuses on ensuring that every cluster can connect to fiber
The Wi-Fi antennas are currently in development, when they are released then people will start putting them on their roof and running a cable down to their Skyminer. This will allow Skywire to exist as a MESH networks, running wirelessly and completely independent from the current Internet. Antennas for this part of the project are already in production and will be ready by the end of the year.
The amount of bandwidth that the Wi-Fi antennas can transmit will max out the current Skyminer nodes maximum processing capability of 100mbps, so if you have an 8 node Skyminer you should be able to get pretty close to 1gigabit/s of completely encrypted internet for a fraction of the cost of your current plan depending on location and antenna density.
In the future once a neighbourhood or area has an active Skywire network, running the app on your phone will allow you to connect instantly without any password and since its fully encrypted their is no risk of a man in the middle attack.
HOW DOES SKYWIRE ACHIEVE ITS OBJECTIVES?
In order to achieve these goals, mesh networks must have:
Communication protocols, protected from Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) restrictions.
Payment agreements that compensate operators for the resources they provide to the network.
· Hardware platform for the network (Skyminer)
· Apply the ecosystem to promote network applications and network resource requirements (Fiber).
Skywire's new communications protocol uses Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) to achieve high scalability and high-speed data transmission on any medium. Determining routes before using MPLS to send traffic makes it more efficient.
MPLS is like a postman using GPS so that parcels can be delivered as quickly and efficiently as possible whereas the present Internet which functions as TCP/IP is like using a map and manually tracking the route. If a packet takes a route that is 10 hops, each hop only knows the previous node in the route and the next node in the route. It is not like IPv4 where each packet gives the source and destination
Payment agreements are absolutely necessary to ensure the success of the mesh network. At present, volunteers free of charge operate the Internet alternatives. This means that most users do not pay for accessing network resources, so network expansion is very difficult.
Skywire solved this problem with an included payment agreement. Each node can operate effectively as a micro-ISP for automatic metering, billing and settlement, providing intrinsic motivation for continuity and growth.
The hardware platform consists of Skyminer devices, which include dedicated nodes that provide functions and resources for the network.
Skycoin will reward people with skyminer for setting up and registering the mesh nodes.
20-30% distribution of the coins, through network will be incentives for people running Skywire nodes, consensus nodes and services via the skyminer
You will earn coin hours for forwarding data/traffic. The coin hours will have an exchange rate for Skycoin.
Coin hours are generated for holding Skycoin. So if you own Skycoin you basically get to use the network for free.
Bandwidth is priced in coinhours.
Developers will be paying participants in coinhours for running the testnet.
Developers then have a pool of Skycoin to buy back the coinhours.
Accumulated coinhours can then be cashed out into Skycoin.
HOW MANY SKYMINERS WILL BE NECESSARY TO REPLACE CURRENT INTERNET?
It would need lots of nodes, but this is a long-term goal and the team is very clear about that. Right now it works over the current Internet where it will function as the fastest and most private VPN to date.
Synth the founder has talked about ramping up Skyminer production to 10,000+ Skyminers a month, and the Skycoin distribution to provide extra incentive to participants is scheduled to take place over ~2 decades. So the team is very aware of the very high ambitions of this project .A full rollout isn’t going to happen in just a year or two
Areas that need it most will promote the project the most as well. Someone would be much more incentivized to participate and promote Skywire if they have no or very limited internet access in their country vs. someone in a very affluent country that already has access to gigabit internet, for example.
In line with this, a lot of partnerships have already been struck with the skycoin project by various organizations and governments
Once the antenna are launched and deployed for the mainet in the first quarter of next year, the HAM radio African Internet project will be launched.
The team has also been contacted to see the feasibility of providing Internet services for the remote regions of northern Canada communities
ONCE MAINNET IS RUNNING IF I HAVE A SKYMINER WILL I BE ABLE TO DITCH MY ISP? ARE THERE ANY BANDWIDTH TARGETS?
The answer to this is Yes. You would connect to the skywire meshnet, wirelessly with an antenna. When you own a Skyminer, it makes you an ISP yourself, essentially. It provides people in your surrounding with wireless access to Skywire, the new Internet
You can install the Skywire software on Window and Mac as well.
In addition, small plug and play nodes for the general public will be produced and at this stage a full-sized Skyminer will not be required.
For clarity, to use Skywire, you could just install Skywire on your normal desktop computer, and then your router would connect to the nearest node. You don't need to have an antenna yourself to use the mesh net.
As for bandwidth targets, it will depend on the size and quality of the meshnet in your area.
In terms of bandwidth, you are going to hit the limits of what your hardware can decide before you hit the limits of what Skywire can provide.
Skywire can use channel bonding, which means you could route traffic through numerous paths. So if you can connect with 3 separate nodes run by other people that have an available bandwidth of 200 mbps each, your available bandwidth would effectively be 600 mbps. The goal is gigabit plus speeds.
CAN SKYCOIN HIDE IP AS WELL?
The IP is whatever node you've connected to, not your own. And Skycoin nodes can be installed over Skywire for enhanced privacy.
Skywire encrypts IP address and instead displays them as public keys, which would also only be the exit nodes IP that could be recorded.
Even when using the public Internet, whichever Skycoin node you connect to acts as a proxy on your behalf. The only thing you need to do on the client side is sign the message with your cipher.
Users of Skywire will be able to choose what content they subscribe to, and therefore will not have to view any content they do not want to.
Any data passing through a node will be entirely encrypted, so there is no way for nodes to know what they are forwarding. However if they know another node is a bad actor, they can blacklist that node from their connections and no longer send or receive data from them.
In terms of privacy protection, Skycoin also has relevant regulations. A user running a Skywire access point allows any user in the range to connect through the access point. Because of encryption, the access point operator cannot determine the form of traffic passing through the access point. The recipient of the traffic cannot determine the path of the traffic through the access point. This is very effective in removing the legal responsibility for operating open access points. The operator can never grasp any information of the transit traffic, and the receiver of the traffic cannot recognize the operator of the network access point. And, by adding mandatory hops (a "guard node"), ISPs cannot easily identify Skycoin Darknet traffic from a particular public access node relayed through a particular cable modem.
WHAT WILL BE THE GAMING LATENCY FOR SKYWIRE BE LIKE
Latency is a term that is commonly heard in online games. Something that is related to your connection with game servers a low latency makes sure that players can enjoy their game to the fullest
The measurement of this round trip then gets referred to as latency. Now that we have a better understanding of latency, lag and ping, let's look at what it means. While we all want the lowest latency, it is recommended to have less than 75 to 100 milliseconds for a good gaming connection.
Anything below a ping of 20ms is considered to be great, while anything over 150mscould result in noticeable lag.
A lower latency is preferred, especially for gaming, although while ISP's advertise their download speeds ad nauseum, none indicate their latency
The latency should be improved with Skywire. The current methods for routing packets through the conventional internet is very slow and based on dated technology originally developed in the 80's. For example, going to a website may involve 15 to 30 different 'hops' or computers that your traffic has to flow through before reaching its destination. Each one of those hops will slow down traffic and can potentially contain an illegal wiretap. Peer to peer networks are extremely efficient. This is how Skywire works. It's part of why you get such high transfer speeds when downloading a torrent - they can automatically find the most efficient route out of hundreds or thousands of peers available.
You can test this yourself. Open up a command prompt (start > cmd) and type tracert blizzard.com
The underlying technology skywire is to make it capable of faster speeds and more efficient routing by making it go through fewer hops.
WHAT OF IF GOVERNEMENTS DECIDES TO BAN SKYWIRE? DOES IT MEAN THAT SKYMINER OPERATORS WILL NEED TO GET ISP LICENCES FROM RELEVANT GOVERNMENT TO DIRECTLY CONNECT TO THE FIBER INFRASTRUCTURE?
The answer to this is Government cannot ban skywire because Skywire is designed to be the fastest VPN that was ever developed.
Even with the great firewalls in China people are able to get out across VPNs and skywire is a specialized VPN.
For the mesh net, the only way to block it is to remove all license free radio bands (2.4/5Ghz, etc.). If they did that, all baby monitors and other wireless products would need a special license
As per connecting to connecting to fiber infrastructure without going through an ISP, skywire is backwards compatible with current ISPs, but will eventually break free and be entirely independent by building it’s own wireless mesh internet. While Skywire runs over the legacy network, ISPs can’t throttle the traffic or observe it via DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) because Skywire uses pluggable transport, therefore it can be masked as any other protocol out there. This mesh Internet is possible now with current unlicensed consumer technology.
HOW MANY COUNTRIES ARE ON SKYWIRE AT THE MOMENT
The test launch is one week old and the following countries are already on skywire and as at the time of writing there are over 4565 nodes running in
United states of America, Canada, China, Australia, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Czech (Czech republic) Belgium, Slovakia, Singapore, Romania, Russia, Switzerland, Croatia, Spain, Brazil, England, Scotland, Cayman Island, Ireland, Latvia, Holland, Malta, Estonia, Sweden, Vietnam, South Africa, Latvia, Hong Kong, Guam, Denmark, Republic of South Korea, Slovenia, Hungary, Indonesia, Philippines, Peru, India, Ghana, Colombia, Lithuania, France, Hungary, Norway, New Zealand, Bosnia, Italy, Portugal, Algeria and Zimbabwe
With the second shipment of skyminers commencing this week, you can put your country on the map by signing up for the skyminer at this link
https://www.skycoin.net/mailing-list/
Check out the number of nodes running on skywire on this link
http://discovery.skycoin.net:8001/#/
SKYWIRE UPDATES
All official Skyminers will be whitelisted
• The whitelist is an ongoing process. If you are in the process of building a DIY miner, please do so ASAP for you to get the best spot in the queue.
• Whitelist participants will be contacted via the email you submitted in your application. The emails will be sent this week with a small delay between official Skyminers and DIY miners.
• All submitted applications will receive responses so please check your emails regularly.
• Updating personal information in the application will be possible a week after you receiving the emails.
• If your public keys changed because you encountered issues, please submit another application with your updated keys. Your application is identified by your submitted email address in your earliest application. You will remain in your spot even if you submit another application with a new set of public keys.
Uptime Requirements:
• Keep your nodes up and running if you want to be eligible for rewards. You will need a 75% uptime in June or your whitelist spot will be forfeited.
• Currently, it is not possible for users to see their own uptime statistics. This feature might be introduced later on.
• If your pub keys change, be sure to update the Whitelist document as soon as possible with the same email address you originally submitted. The uptime of all your submitted public keys will be added together and will result in your monthly uptime.
• Make sure to check regularly if your nodes are live and restart them if necessary. Restarting the miner will not change your public keys!
Node App Connection:
As of now the only app in the Skywire network is the node app (you can see the app key for each node in your Skywire manager). The node app currently auto starts by default. If you turn off this app, your node will no longer be useful to the network and your uptime won’t be measured. The connection to the discovery is being established by this node app, no uptime will be measure without this connection. There is a cache that will mimic live connection in the discovery so you might see your node being connected on the discovery website even though your node app is off.
• An on/off switch for the node app is currently being developed and will be available as soon as possible. As part of the on/off switch comes the separation of the connection to the discovery server from the node app. This will give you the option to turn off the exit node.
See link for updates here
https://medium.com/skycoin/skywire-testnet-update-1-b4b7a23c31a7
For more questions on skywire you have the opportunity to ask Synth direct question on skycoin’s AMA
By posting your question directly on the link below
https://www.reddit.com/r/skycoin/comments/8n1ilo/skycoin_official_ama_may_2018_collecting/
The Skywire application is another core pillar of the Skycoin ecosystem.
The Skycoin blockchain and the Skywire network are able to stand on their own without the other, but mutually benefit together. Skywire provides a utility purpose for Skycoins, and Skycoin provides a financial incentive to expand the Skywire network.
This is an opportunity to join the skywire revolution and protect net neutrality that ensures that internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon should treat all content flowing through their cables and cell towers equally. That means they shouldn't be able to slide some data into “fast lanes” while blocking or otherwise discriminating against other material. In other words, these companies shouldn't be able to block you from accessing a service like Skype, or slow down Netflix or Hulu, in order to encourage you to keep your cable package or buy a different video-streaming service.
Big ISPs have hired up more than 40 contract lobbyists, and have sent their top DC staff to Sacramento in an all out effort to kill SB 822. They’re circulating disgustingly misleading “fact sheets” and pounding the Capitol with misinformation.
When you use skywire , you wouldn’t be having sleepless nights as to how the congress is going to vote on June 11
whether or not to repeal net neutrality .
Find out more at https://www.skycoin.net
Buy skycoin directly from the website @ https://www.skycoin.net/buy/
Buy from the exchanges @ Binance , Cryptopia BitRabbit , C2CX, ChaoEX
sign for skyminer waiting list @ https://www.skycoin.net/skyminer/
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