**Overview - This could be huge - what do you think? Lets get a discussion going ... **

A new internet to replace TCP/IP and provide mesh network type functionality at the hardware level with applications such as social media and private VPN on top.

(I’ve summarised this from a thread (interview with skycoin employee) I found on reddit that was very unstructured. Link is posted at the end of this. The launch dates were not from this but from the front page of the website).

Connects people by public key (networking) - distributing self validating, immutable data peer to peer (transactions, blocks, content, addressable storage…). You can build almost anything on those two building blocks. The whole internet will eventually be written on top of these primitives and it will replace many of the existing protocols. 

Stealth project that has been in development for 6 years. Well seems that some people do know about it but I never hear it being talked about in lists of crypto coins.

Has had huge input from intelligence agencies around the world submitting what they want want in order to have it meet their requirements (to use it rather than snoop!)

Launch of the first application (VPN tunnelling) and social media like Steemit due in Q3 2017 according to website.

**VPN application**
The VPN will be a big application. You plug inn the hardware and it VPNs your whole house and all its connections. The ISPs are allowed to sell all the data they collect now. And you can start hardware blocking the IP addresses for ad servers and tracking servers and so on. There is a different VPN end point for each device on the Ian and you can rotate them out automatically.  Eventually all the torrent sites and communities (80% of internet traffic is on torrent type sites) will be driven underground - they are already being shut down now. When that happens the downloads will eventually be blocked or slowed by ISPs and you will need a “new internet’ to really get a lot of the content that is available to people now. Five years ago there was no point in doing this. today the motivations are emerging that will drive people to something new. 

**Social media steemit type application but with you deciding on the algorithm that drives your feed**
The social media appp will address the fact thatreddit has been overrun with bots controlling the up votes and content. And corporations have completely taken over and subverted facebook and twitter. People are going to be looking for decentralised platforms and there will be a mass movement to the platforms that can solve the bot manipulation problem, the shilling problem and the company owned by corporate money whore sellout problem.  There were previous attempts at building decentralised twitters and facebooks but five years ago there was not a need. The skycoin project is building the base layer . Then the communities are building their own projects . we just give them the tools. Today on twitter Hilary Clinton paid twitter for brand management and if 300 people you follow said something negative about her you won’t see any of the tweets. And 1 person in 4000 says something positive and everyone in that person’s followers will see the tweet in the feed.  The companies are controlling what people see and what information is allowed into their feeds. Its not organic anymore. Its not based upon your preferences. Its based on making the platform friendly to advertisers who can pull their money out. They are pushing social agendas and requiring the companies they are giving money to to censor particular people and movements to keep the advertising money.

Decentralised social media means that you won your own data. It means you control it on your computer the algorithm used to sort and priorities your feed. Instead of allowing it to be controlled and manipulated by a third party .

To solve the Bot problem people building the BBS had a real cool filtering algorithm. Everyone is identified by their public key and can build out a web of trust. Its’ like a page rank of users. It is a decentralised form of moderation that is automatic. 

**Competitors**
- Skycoin similar to maidsafe in the objective but it has a different approach and architecture and primitives. I wrote a post yesterday on Maidsafe's  apparent readiness for launch in 2018 https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@katythompson/is-maidsafe-the-next-under-promoted-antshares 

- While there will be many project, few teams/companies will be able to work in the time horizon necessary to build a new internet. Skycoin has already been working on it for 6 years (Look how long Maidsafe has taken too.)


**Skycoin network**
- Distributed storage but this is just one piece of the network i.e. it is much bigger than Sia, Sorjx or other storage initiatives.
- Software defined networking (not mesh net). New type of networking and completely new protocol and networking namespace independent of the existing internet.
- Supports source routing, while the existing internet does hot potato routing, so never achieves optimal latencies
- Can support multi-homing which IPV6 doesn’t and which will be critical for when we have gigabit or terabit networking and multi-redundant bandwidth paths
- It has a store an forward mode and will operate in Africa or even under conditions where latencies are in the minutes or hours and packet loss is excessive. Where existing protocols cannot operate reliability. It is much more robust than IPv4/IPv6 or TCP/IP
- Improved privacy If a packet takes a route that is 10 hops, each hop only knows the previous node and the next node in the route. It is not IPv4 where each packet gives the source and destination. The privacy level is something that does not exist on the current internet
- IP addresses are replaced by public key and no one can read traffic to a destination without knowing the private key of the publi key that identifies the destination. The system does not need 3rd parties or certificate authorities
- The person making the connection chooses the type for example lowest latency path for video games or the highest throughput paths for video downloads. Or for security (they have intelligence agency people from several countries who have been advising on what they want out of the sky network!!) you can choose paths through specific nodes or facilities or countries to minimise the number of points that the traffic could be intercepted at

**Principle Monetization: freemium**
- “we want to have some kind of freemium thing. If you are not paying  coins, the nodes will allocate 20% of bandwidth to the free tier” 
- Although they provide decentralised storage called CXO, it is the bandwidth rather than the storage that is monetised beyond freemium use so that “everything that should be free is free”. On top of that there will be applications. The first is a steemit type social media application to launch in Q3 2017 (not according to the reddit but to sky coin’s website)


**The coin (Skycoin)**
   -  Fixed number of 100m coins released gradually by smart contract after 
	the initial ICOs
- Faster than bitcoin (can handle 300 transactions per second) with less reliance on minters and with applications to drive adoption of the coin
- Consensus method sounds like it is proof of resources coin where its value is backed by provision of a useful service (initially private and secure networking, but later other applications). No block awards, no new coins, so no inflation. Algorithm based on Ben-Or’s randomisation procedure for achieving consensus in a distributed system with some improvements for detecting adversarial or malicious odes who are trying to prevent the consensus process. 
- the network consensus uses a sort of web of trust where if the poet creating blocks are doing a bad job or attacking the network then the community can get rid of them. At the same time, the people who control the network do not have an y real power to attack the network except by slowing down transactions so even if they become malicious the only issue is how to get rid of them and select new people
- For a coin to have value people need to use it. A number of applications are in development but the first to be launched will be Q3 2017 and which is a mesh network (private VPN). You run your internet traffic through a VPN that tunnels over Skywire. 
- Those coins not in supply are locked (set up in contracts a bit like Ripple has now done?) to make sure that no more than 5% per year are released until all are in circulation. Skywire (the network) is also designed to pull coins out of circulation for reuse through a sort of tithe the on the network activity. 
- Coin holders get a coin hour dividend (sounds like Antshares/antcoins? soon to be Neo/neo coins). If you don’t have enough coin hours you sell skycoin for coin hours at the market rate to purchase bandwidth.  but if you have a lot of icons then you have enough coin hours for donwlaoding movies or VPN or whatever you are doing and it is essentially free


**Incentive to run a node**
-	Doesn’t cost anything - can run on a raspberry pi
-	You don’t have to hold coins to run sky wire nodes ore consensus nodes 	like master nodes from other coins
-	And there will be network incentives to run nodes and servcies


**Programming language**
- There is no scripting language on the skycoin blockchain. 
- However there is a language called CX in development which is a next generation language beyond smart contracts and beyond ethereum. It uses immutable data structures and is something completely new. 
- Most of the skycoin “smart contracts” will probably be off blockchain or in personal blockchains we we avoid shoving all the data onto the main chain and orcing everyone to download everyone els’e contract which is just spamming the blockchain to death.


**Corporate structure**
 -  The interviewee was asked if it was a company or what it was but there wasn’t a reply so the answer is unclear.

**Team**
- Started as a darkness project
- Over 60 people have worked on or made major contributions. Many of these are anonymous. Some of them have security clearances and were in military/industrial complexes and one worked at the San Diego Naval Defence Research lab . A lot of the ideas for the networking protocols came out of public sector academic research funded from there
- Also have a lot of very early Bitcoin people, harcdcore crypto people that predate Bitcoin and an ethereum core developer
- On the Chinese side they have an early investor in Alibaba and telecom investor. Doing a pilot with China Aviation group that owns four public traded airline companies and Sinopec (which is the 2nd largest publicly traded corporation in the world)
- Includes people who are part of Israeli and US intelligence and are probably doing some sort of money laundering or pyschooloigcal operations background who just showed up for some reason. This group seems very interested in the “applications” of the coins and how to improve transaction privacy and the specifics of the CoinJoin protocol implementation. The project got a lot of advice from people experienced in forensic accounting and what they wanted to see and what they felt Bitcoin was deficient in and where it leaked metadata
- A number of PHD level people doing research into distributed atabase consensus algorithms and into programming language research
- A lot of people from the deep darkness and bittorrent communities. Also some from the Russian darkened community. 
- Skycoin contributors are private or hiding themselves. They don’t want to be known or promoted or advertised so we can’t put them on the website. They also want to avoid taxes and being targeted for theft and do not want attention from government. So Skycoin cannot have a “team or “advisor board” on website.. 


**Funding**
- Early funding came from early bitcoin and deep crypto people who were unhappy with the fact Bitcoin and other alt coins didn’t seem concerned about the core issues. They invested 1200 bitcoin over several years and asked for nothing in return. later four ICOs followed .The first was at $0.10 per coin.
- Next ICo is around the 20th July for 1% to 10% of the skycoin. Probably at a fixed price. It will be mainly for marketing. We cannot spend more than $50m so selling an insane number makes no sense. 10-15 millions is probably reasonable for the next 3 years.This would provide a really good full time marketing team and tripling the number of develops and funding several parallel hardware projects.  “EOS is going to raise a billion dollars but I’ve no idea what they will do with the money except use it to buy EOS and drive the price up or some scam”. the coin is currently around $4 and it will be at least $5 by ICO . The market cap has doubled every 40 days for a while now.  10m points at $5 per coin is $50m. We will distribute coin via the sky wire nodes to make it fair as ICo is not a good way to get coins in to the hands of users - its only good for fund raising and for whales.  There are people who own a large percentage of ETH and they want to diversify. they can gamble 20m in an ICo and could make 50x more but if they lose it then it is a slightly loss; they have so much ETH that they cannot even sell it or convert it without tanking the market.
- We have also been doing OTC sales at market price with a cap of 10 BTC. But we have single whales that want to put in 700 BTC and each one individually is larger than all the  individuals doing the OTC sales
- we can distribute coins to top content producers, to people doing bountries (like skyline logo), to people who want to do development (e.g. mobile wallet) and over time to people running the skycoin nodes. Then to nodes hosting content on CXO. Then to people coming onto the platform who are bringing user communities with millions of people (we have been talking to these people for years and they do not have real developers so we have to help them - they only have web designers and curators and community managers)

**Skycoin architecture, bandwidth and cluster (hardware**
  -   Minamilst: much lower on resource usage than bitcoin or ethereum. 
       Bandwidth used is less than 10kb/s
- 8 CPU boards
- 4 cores per CPU
- 2GB of ram per CPU and a 65 bit ARM processor
- Only one program will run on each individual board so there is compartmentalisation and a physical gap so that compromising one process on a system does not allow all other processes on the system to be compromised. 
- Hardware does not have qualm backdoors and is actually chinese equipment. Backdoors are normally at the kernel level (because they are not at hardware backdoors yet)
- Eventually will have an ARM open router too
- Model does not have SAATA but we will have a model with it where you could hook up 16x2TB drives and download half the pirate bay to a cluster
- The clusters are designed for running across 300+ computers with one node deployed per computer. There are many types of node: i CXO storage node, or a sky wire SDN/meshnet node, or  AVPN end point node or a consensus network, or skycoin node. 
- will eventually be a board with an array of M.2 sockets to run SSD arrays without all the cables and have the buses shied in the circuit board. Using a microSSD for storage and its 48MB/s
- The ARM boards are $30 each and the memory for solid state is more than the cost of the CPU/RAM/board now “which is insane”
- there’s more in the reddit but I gave up as I don’t understand any of this….!

** Should you invest?Katy's view** 
See my recent post that hardly anyone has seen but got good feedback from the few that did:  https://steemit.com/crypto-news/@katythompson/5-criteria-for-choosing-a-winning-long-term-crypto-portfolio   It isn't too late to up vote it as I can still get some benefit within 30 days of writing it! problem was I only had about 4 followers when I published it. I now have 1000 so Im hoping some of you will up vote all of my posts from this week if they are valuable as they took a lot of time to create 

If it is true they are about to launch and that they have been developing this for six years and have the range of people they claim contributing to the team then their current market cap of $21m (afternoon 10th July)  feels ridiculously low compared with some of the top 20 cryptocurrencies that have market caps more than 10 x that with often far less to show for it. This is not investment advice nor am I qualified to give any. But I can tell you I went shopping for more of it today when all the crypto markets were down

However please note I'm not giving financial advice and am not qualified to do so. I'm simply suggesting you look at it for yourself and make up your own mind. 

**where do I buy skycoin?**
Not many exchanges have it yet. I (Katy) presume the price will increase when more do. I had to open an account on cryptopia ,a new zealand exchange to get my skycoin. I sent bitcoin there and used it to buy the skycoin.  Cryptopia offer referral incentives to so if you are going to set up a cryptopia account would you be kind enough to support my blogging by using this link below to set it up? I have to say I wouldn't use the site for most of my trading but it did the job for the skycoin given the exchanges I mainly use don't yet support skycoin.

https://www.cryptopia.co.nz/Register?referrer=Tastymonsterjosephine2469

The reddit interview also suggests skycoin will do OTC trades of up to 10BTC but I don't know how you get hold of them or how you ensure your funds are safe while you do such a transaction. I'd be a bit nervous of this. But perhaps others have more experience of OTC.

_____
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/ArkEcosystem/comments/6kb4wz/log_of_ama_with_skycoin/