ThreeFold

What Is Peer-to-Peer and Why Is It so Important?

P2P systems are network, not linear or pyramidal hierarchies (though they may share some elements)..

🔗What is Peer-to-Peer?

Peer-to-peer (P2P) is a term that originated from the distributed computer application architecture where tasks and workloads are shared between peers, popularized by Napster, a revolutionary file storing system from the late 1990s.

The concept inspired new structures and philosophies in many areas of human interaction. P2P systems and groups are typically critical of authoritarian and centralized social structures and believe in equality, meritocracy, flat systems, participatory & circular economies, as the concept represents a concrete pathway to these outcomes or visions.

P2P systems are network, not linear or ‘pyramidal’ hierarchies (though they may share some elements). They are ‘distributed’, though they may have elements of ‘centralization’ and ‘decentralization.’ And intelligence is not located at any center, but everywhere within the system.

🔗How does ThreeFold relate to peer-to-peer?

ThreeFold’s Peer-to-Peer (P2P) computing network is a distributed architecture that splits tasks and workloads between its peers, ThreeFold Farmers. Farmers are equal participants in the network and together they form a peer-to-peer network of nodes, the ThreeFold Grid.

Farmers make their resources, such as processing power, disk storage or network bandwidth, directly available to other network participants, without the need for central coordination by servers or stable hosts. Farmers are both suppliers and consumers of resources, in contrast to the traditional client-server model in which the consumption and supply of resources is divided.

In the near future, ThreeFold will create Digital Twin, which will go beyond the era of peers doing similar things while sharing resources. It will actually enable much more than that. Digital Twin will create a complete new digital world with diverse peers that can bring in unique resources and capabilities to a virtual community on the ThreeFold Grid. This will empower the network of peers to engage in greater tasks beyond those that can be accomplished by individual peers, and are beneficial to all the peers.

🔗Why did ThreeFold choose peer-to-peer?

Everything starts (or should start) from the why, and the ThreeFold story started a long time ago. Before the inception of ThreeFold, many of the co-founders of the project used to work with the largest IT & Cloud actors. Throughout their experience working in the Industry, they realized that the complexity of the technology and the centralization of knowledge & power led to an inefficient, unsustainable, not scalable and unequally distributed infrastructure. So they decided to redesign the whole Internet and cloud infrastructure bottom-up with the vision of shaping a global internet economy that can scale anywhere efficiently, cost efficiently and sustainably.

🔗Why does the world needs peer-to-peer?

By developing the technology, the conviction that peer-to-peer was the best solution for humanity and the planet strengthened itself. Why? Well, put simply, a peer-to-peer system removes all forms of intermediaries, unnecessary steps and complexity from the picture. Therefore, it simplifies the architecture in an incredible way. The benefits are many but here are the most popular benefits:

Privacy: Our peer-to-peer environment means no middlemen or intermediaries, meaning data travels directly between peers and stored on the nodes of their choice rather than being sent through and stored by a third party.
Security: Data stored in data centers is susceptible to security breaches. In bypassing data centers and exchanging data directly between peers, we can achieve much greater security as it reduces code and back doors significantly.
Scalability: In a many-to-many system, scale is essentially unlimited. There is simply no bottleneck. And hardware (nodes) can be added at ease compared to current data center model.
Cost-efficiency & Sustainability: End-to-end (direct) connection between peers means a more efficient path for data and less energy is needed. Less energy means less cost, and less harm to our planet.

🔗In 2021 the world is going peer-to-peer!

We’re now in 4 years into the project, and it is clear that ThreeFold holds the most advanced technology and is probably the only tech company in the world that can achieve a peer-to-peer network & digital world as envisioned by the concept authors. The ThreeFold Grid is running and already at it’s 2.4 version and 2021 will bring various commercial opportunities for the public to partake in the peer-to-peer network, from hosting IT workloads to experiencing P2P end-user solutions. In other words, in 2021, the world will be able to go peer-to-peer.

Sacha Obeegadoo

December 15, 2020

A Better Solution for Our Planet

We believe IT can be sustainable. Actually, it should be! That's why energy efficiency has always been a key focus of ours..

Today, the global Internet and IT infrastructure requires enormous amounts of energy, responsible for about 10% of annual global energy consumption. This makes the IT industry amongst the most pollutive industries in the world (along with the often-discussed airline industry, for comparison).

We believe IT can be sustainable. Actually, it should be! That's why energy efficiency has always been a key focus of ours. With climate change and sustainability as some of the most pressing issues of our times, new green solutions need to be our priority. It has been key to ThreeFold since the very beginning of its story to enable a technological infrastructure that can reduce the Internet’s carbon footprint drastically.

🔗Simplicity is the key to unlock a better future

Over time, integration suites, middleware solutions, and enterprise service busses have been invented and implemented to cover integration challenges within the current internet. This has further complicated IT architectures, resulting in a loss of actual end user workload performance.

ThreeFold reworked the whole approach to IT architectures and eliminated the layers of complexity. The result is a cloud stack that presents minimal overhead and that requires less hardware – reducing heat generation and eventually cooling requirements. By reducing the need for power, the net result is an energy-efficient Internet grid.

🔗Improving resilience and efficiency through Self-Healing IT

Keeping systems up and running is a major requirement in modern day IT. Leading vendors earn most of their margin by selling maintenance contracts, performance guarantees, and professional services. Their business models bring no incentive to make things simple and efficient for consumers.

Creating a self-healing environment requires only minimal manual intervention to replace broken hardware components. Broken hardware components are inevitable, and the Zero-OS distributed node architecture deals with such failures by turning off broken components and provisioning unused capacity. By removing the need to ship broken parts back and forth, and linking to the corresponding installation knowledge (engineers), a lower carbon footprint can be achieved.

🔗“No painkiller” approach. We tackle the root issue

If a specific piece of software or hardware is not delivering the required performance or reliability, we should analyze the core design/algorithm and its usage of soft/hard components to determine the root causes of persistent issues to be solved.

Currently, most storage vendors follow the path of least resistance when trying to improve on performance. Their solution for meeting performance targets is to use faster components (CPU, memory, network card, proprietary acceleration) rather than looking at the core algorithms that drive the utilization of those components. Swapping components for faster ones perpetuates a cycle of cutting corners and focuses reliance on innovation from hardware component providers rather than solving the more fundamental and underlying issues. That’s a “painkiller” approach.

Zero-OS was designed to solve root problem issues by design. While still using high-performance hardware components on the ThreeFold Grid, the algorithm of Zero-OS maximizes utilization possibilities. This enables greater performance and sustainability. Some key examples how this is achieved:

🔗Eliminating unnecessary elements from standard architectures

Virtualization adds a layer of software between the actual end-user workload and physical hardware. It also allows for multiple workloads to run on the same hardware by using excess capacity. There is definitely merit in building a virtualization solution. Building an effective virtualization solution that does not require abundant context switching is key and this is why Zero-OS has been developed. Zero-OS uses a minimal Linux kernel that allows for a number of user spaces to co-exist. In these user spaces, containerized versions of software can be run, eliminating the need for hypervisors, virtual OS to fuel the virtual machines, and guest operating systems. This also minimizes the required overhead for the host OS.

🔗Minimizing network connections usage

Supercomputing delivered many new technologies. But, not all of them are usable solutions for everyday workloads. One technology invented to make supercomputers performant is the use of Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA). RDMA allowed physical CPU boards (containing both CPUs and memory) to access other CPU boards in memory stored data over a dedicated channel. This eliminated the need to transport data between CPU nodes over network connections (or other mainstream means to exchange data). The result was a considerable reduction in overhead created when allowing distributed end user workloads to operate over multiple physical cores. The leading server and storage solutions brands have never considered nor implemented such mechanisms. This resulted in an increased need for faster networks - increasing complexity, costs, efforts and resources needed to operate solutions.

RDMA is only used in certified farms and requires involvement of TFTech.

🔗Minimizing disk usage

The storage solution uses slow and big (the bigger the better) HDD disks which drive in rack density. As they spin slower they consume less power and need less cooling. But then, how can you deal with read/write intensive workloads? The storage algorithm uses a SSD cache to acknowledge Inputs/Outputs coming from the applications, fills the erasure coded data blocks in large (up to 64MB) storage containers and writes the big chunks of data on the big and slow HHDs. If you are familiar with HDD disks, you know they like to be streamed on instead of having a lot of small bits written in a scratchy way.

Continuous innovation in all of these areas are leading to an efficient technology stack.

Weynand Kuijpers

December 2, 2020

Zero People IT is the Future

Classic IT infrastructure setup is complex and is not cost-effective. Applications need a specific environment to operate in, built by integrating different technology components from different vendors. Elements of such a setup are operating systems, storage systems, networks, security systems, authentication systems, and more.

🔗Introduction

🔗The “cost” of complexity in traditional IT

Classic IT infrastructure setup is complex and is not cost-effective. Applications need a specific environment to operate in, built by integrating different technology components from different vendors. Elements of such a setup are operating systems, storage systems, networks, security systems, authentication systems, and more.

Putting components together is called (system) integration, and integration requires agreement on how these components will fit together and the knowledge to do it.

This complexity and need for integration originate from the way the IT industry historically developed. With time more and more layers appeared to bring new possibilities. Additional layers masked existing problems. Instead of fixing the underlying issues, several third parties needed to be involved, adding complexity and increased costs (such as license costs, upgrades, updates, etc.). Complexity has become a business model.

🔗Where can we get inspiration to do it a different way?

What if we could build IT architectures in a different way. What if we would not accept component solution approaches anymore and start over with a completely blank sheet of paper? Would we then come up with a different way of actually building automation, architectures, and business models?

🔗Looking at nature for inspiration

Let’s start by looking for inspiration in nature. Suppose we consider IT systems to be a complex system. Are there parallels that we can draw between systems that exist in nature (and have evolved and improved over thousands of years) and those within the IT industry?

In nature, we see two kinds of systems (societies): centralized and decentralized systems. Examples of centralized systems are herds, groups, or schools of animals living together where there is a hierarchy in the way they organize themselves. For decentralized systems, we can look at beehives and anthills. Organizing efforts and benefits are distinct and come at a different cost.

🔗Centralized systems in nature

In centralized systems, there is governance of activities, wealth positions, and so forth. Think of a group of lions or chimpanzees. There is always an alpha male who is dominant in the whole group. He is the only that enjoys all of the benefits because the entire group/structure works towards his wishes. He gets to mate with most female group members because the system believes that he has the strongest genes to help the group to survive in the future. The dominant male also gets most of the food gathered by the group, and if he doesn’t get it, he will claim it by showing his dominance and fight for it. All the others are working towards this alpha male, and all the other males in the group will occasionally challenge the alpha male for dominance.

This is very similar to how the IT industry has been operating to date: there are a few alpha males in the industry - one for each sector that can be recognized (for example, in the Cloud Industry, you have Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and on the system integration front you have Dell, Siemens, CA Technologies). They end up with the majority of businesses available in their specific markets. When challenged by new companies, they fight them (in every way possible, including killing them or acquiring them). And in analogy to the animal group, these alpha male companies have a lot of organizations that work with them, usually called “partners” or “channels.”

🔗Decentralized systems in nature

For decentralized systems on Wikipedia, we learn; “One of the most well-known examples of a “natural” decentralized system is one used by insect colonies such as Ants. In these insect colonies, control is distributed among the biological agents who act upon local information and local interactions to create complex and universal behavior collectively. While individually exhibiting simple behaviors, these agents achieve universal goals such as feeding the colony or raising the brood using dynamical mechanisms like non-explicit communication and exploiting their closely coupled action and perception systems. Without any form of central authority, these insect colonies achieve their universal goals by performing required tasks and by responding to changing conditions in their external environment. They also adjust the number of workers performing each task to ensure the completion of all tasks. For example, ant colonies guide their global behavior (in terms of foraging, patrolling, brood care, and nest maintenance) using a pulsing, shifting web of Spatio-temporal patterned interactions that rely on antennal contact rate and olfactory sensing. While these interactions consist of both interactions with the environment and each other, ants do not direct the behavior of other ants. They thus never have a “central controller” dictating what is to be done to achieve global goals.“

So nature has provided us with solid examples of centralized and decentralized systems. For much of what works in the modern world, we have ended up using the centralized model governing enterprises and countries. Various industries have also adopted the centralized model where there is a pyramid structure, and everything works towards the alpha males.

🔗A different approach to creating and operating IT workloads

What if we can develop a new concept for creating, deploying, and operating IT workloads. What if we say goodbye to the centralized way of controlling IT workloads. Can we develop an idea that works in a decentralized way?

🔗The concept

To build this concept, we will draw the use of the human way of operating a large ship. The crew of a vessel has different roles, which we will call the coordinators. Some of these coordinators could be a captain, officers, engineers, and oilers. These coordinators have in-depth knowledge of their specific tasks but usually lack a detailed understanding of the other roles. In the “hive” of a ship, the specific requests to get tasks done are sent to coordinators who will receive, interpret, execute their particular tasks, and report the (non-) progress of these tasks or subtasks. For example, the captain will create and agree to a schedule of maintenance tasks for the engine room. These are daily, weekly and monthly tasks that should be completed by the engineers and oilers. The engineers and oilers do not get continuous input from the captain. They get one instruction to follow the schedule and know what needs to be done for every task. The intermediate state (what is complete and what still needs to be addressed) is stored by the coordinators executing the tasks. This is the most efficient way of accomplishing tasks.

🔗Jumping to the IT industry

If we bring this concept to the IT world, we conclude that today’s IT systems are built in a significantly different way. Most architectures (if not all) have a central facility that stores all information and all states of activity in a so-called central ‘database.’ A general norm within IT. However, these types of architectures are inefficient and are very complex - like the ship analogy - a central command room (database) is created where every coordinator needs to report back. (1) The current level of activity, (2) the completion (state) of tasks, (3) the proper understanding of upcoming tasks by the coordinator to accomplish tasks in-progress or future - hence leading to the undesirable outcome of complexity due to centralization.

In the ship example, we deem this type of functioning/workflow inefficient; however, in the IT world, it is a common way of doing it. Furthermore, IT infrastructures usually have different databases to store “state” in different parts of the IT architecture. The analogy would translate to different command rooms that orchestrate different functions on the ship in our ship. This, in turn, introduces the need for another role in starting coordinating between the different command rooms to ensure that all information is shared and communicated. Taking this pattern forward leads to an endless loop of adding interfaces, layers, bridges between different parts of the system that all store information, multiple times, and in different ways.

🔗Datastores

By design, a decentralized IT architecture should not use centralized data storage (databases) for multiple tasks (roles). It instead should feature a similar approach to the way of functioning as in the ‘ship’ example. In this architecture, roles get short and precise instructions of the jobs to be completed and autonomously execute. We call these execution engines coordinators. Coordinators receive instructions, run on instructions and store all information about the current task locally. They store all the relevant information in a local storage facility (available to the individual coordinators only) and provide information about the state of execution if and when other coordinators ask for a state update.

🔗Magical Coordinator

🔗Requirements to let actor based management work

* Less complexity

State only with the actor itself (no-where else !!!)
Understood language between actors
Process = recipes of a cook, NOT IN A DB

🔗Actor based IT solutions

To simplify common IT architectures, we should look at a new way of creating such a system that takes the current standards into account:

No people involved in integrating different components into a single solution
- Which, as a consequence, means no revenue generation based on creating and managing complexity.
No central state / operational data storage
Individual automated actors with specific knowledge for specific tasks
Independent operating actors completing specific tasks

Such a system should ideally be owned by many (not just a single organization, bringing centralization back into the equations) that operate IT tasks for many. We have not seen such a system in existence, but we are as TFTech building and rolling out technology that can do this.

We believe that IT’s future is in decentralization where specific coordinators (bots) will roam a network of capacity looking for a task to do, making themselves available where needed, creating more of them when the system grows, and allowing the global population to deploy and operate IT workloads.

Weynand Kuijpers

August 17, 2020

ThreeFold's Long Story Short

The truth is that ThreeFold is a big project. Here we will try to make things a little simpler for you.

🔗So, ThreeFold is building a new internet. Why?

We strongly believe that a new internet is needed for our planet and for humanity. “If not now, when? If not us, who?”

What it boils down to is that currently the internet is only available to about 1/2 of the world (meaning billions are being left behind), it is centralized (a handful of large corporations own and profit off of our data), and it uses up to 10% of the world’s energy consumption. So, we’re building a new (peer-to-peer) internet that empowers equality (access), autonomy (data ownership, for example), and sustainability (reduces energy consumption). These values drive us forward.

🔗How does it work?

Everything on the internet – websites, apps, photos, videos, etc – uses up capacity and is stored in huge data centers owned by big companies, mainly in North America, Europe, and some in Asia. In our solution, centralized data centers are replaced with a grid of “nodes” distributed around the world.

These nodes are owned by ThreeFold Farmers – but only the physical hardware – the data inside of the nodes belongs to the people or organizations who put it there. So, “farmers” plug in hardware and start to create capacity that can be used by people.

Farmers come in all shapes and sizes. Some farmers run small data centers while others simply run a node out of their living room.

When Farmers connect active hardware (add capacity) to the ThreeFold Grid, ThreeFold Tokens are created. Farmers can then sell those tokens to people who want to use capacity (e.g. a developer that wants to build or host a website, or a person who wants to store some photos). More on tokens down below.

🔗Seems quite lofty. How will you build it?

It’s true that rebuilding the internet is not so simple. But a lot of infrastructure has already been built and the technology is quite advanced. Over the past 2+ years (as of May 2020), independent ThreeFold Farmers have already plugged in more than 40,000,000 GigaBytes worth of storage and 15,000 CPU Cores across 21+ countries. That might not mean a lot to non-technical folks but it is quite a significant amount.

🔗21+ countries? What happened to equality?

As far along as we are, we still have work to do. One of our biggest goals in the near future is to expand the grid to Africa, South America, and parts of Asia where currently the Internet is too expensive or not available. Currently, we farming is incentivized around these key geographies.

🔗And what do you mean by peer-to-peer?

Peer-to-peer means no middlemen – direct exchange of information and/or value between equal participants. Peer-to-peer means decentralization – breaking away from pyramid-based systems, greed-based systems – and putting people back in the center of their own (digital) lives.

🔗So how can I access / use your internet today? What can I do on it?

By June, some of the first experiences will be live. This includes file storage and communication tools and a virtual browser, all with the advantages of being more sustainable for our planet and with full control of your own data. And over time, more and more experiences will come to this internet. We’ll be updating here and on our communication platforms as they come. But don’t worry, as a user it doesn’t change much – no coding required. :)

🔗Will [enter website or app here] be available on your internet?

There are some tremendous reasons for a website or app to use our internet, but that will really be up to the website or the app. In the end, we are providing a responsible solution for responsible people and organizations. We would love to host anybody who believes in what we are doing!

🔗How are you making sure it’s safe?

Hacking has become a part of life and is almost impossible to avoid in the current systems – they are too complex and require too many people to operate. This results in less security which results in lots of security breaches. We took a look at the existing Internet (seven layers) and simplified it down to three layers. By simplifying the architecture and instead creating technology that is self-driving & self-healing, we removed the human requirement and therefore vastly minimized the possibility for hacking or human error. Then we also developed a storage algorithm which makes it such that if some of the information gets lost or stolen (somehow) or if some hardware goes down, it is all retrievable. Long story short, we flipped the existing system on its head.

🔗What about the data ownership part?

That has a bit to do with the security as well. Since you own your data, you decide who gets access. Which means your data isn’t just out “there” for the taking. Basically, we put you at the center of your digital life, where the applications and experiences you use serve you, not the other way around.

🔗And how is it better for the planet?

There are a few reasons for us being more sustainable. Data centers are super unsustainable, so the simple (but incomplete) answer is “no more huge data centers.” But if you want more detail:

We use up to 3x less hardware for the same output, and using hardware at least 2x longer while maintaining good performance
Having capacity everywhere, local to where users are – this reduces network requirements (and can even improve security)
Using new algorithms (e.g. the one mentioned above for storage) which have dramatic efficiency improvement
Re-using hardware where possible – let’s not throw away

🔗How much will it cost?

In the end we want to provide sustainable access to the internet and all of its solutions for less than a dollar per month per person but for now the cost will depend on what you choose to do. Certain experiences will cost money. Storing photos or videos, for example. But all at a fair price.

🔗Speaking of money – so what’s up with the ThreeFold Token?

As we mentioned above, tokens are generated when ThreeFold Farmers adds capacity to the ThreeFold Grid.

Essentially, the ThreeFold Token is the medium of exchange on the new internet. So, if a developer wants to build something (e.g. a website or an app) or a user wants to store something (e.g. photos), he/she/they use(s) ThreeFold Tokens.

🔗Need more answers?

We hope that helps explains things. Obviously there is a whole wiki to dive in to. If you don’t find what you’re looking for, please ask us on our forum!

Photo by Nong Vang on Unsplash.

Sam Taggart

May 15, 2020

Why Anyone Should Consider Becoming A (ThreeFold) Farmer

The ThreeFold Foundation is changing the way how "we" as a whole approach the internet and its underlying technology..

The ThreeFold Foundation is changing the way how "we" as a whole approach the internet and its underlying technology. We believe building the internet back from the ground up is the only way to dismantle the monster it has grown into – a polluting greed-machine that allows people’s data to be abused for money all while just being accessible to just half of the earth’s inhabitants.

And the best part is, you can have a part in the global shift towards a more sustainable, inclusive, and respectful internet by becoming a ThreeFold Farmer.

🔗So what are farmers?

Simply put: Farmers are people that add capacity to the ThreeFold Grid for anyone to use.

🔗What is this “capacity”?

Capacity is the raw building blocks needed for any internet grid: CPU (processors), Hard Drives, Solid-state drives, memory, etc. Capacity can then be rented by developers and engineers that would like to run their applications on the ThreeFold Grid.

🔗What is in it for me?

As mentioned in the previous paragraph, capacity is rented. This means people that put capacity on the ThreeFold Grid are getting paid by anybody that uses their capacity. But there is more, ThreeFold also incentivizes farmers to add capacity by giving them tokens simply for adding the capacity to the ThreeFold Grid. The amount they receive depends on the specifications of the capacity they put online (how much, how powerful, etc). These tokens are then gradually released over the course of 60 months. So in short, you get paid to do this.

🔗What else?

Capacity for the ThreeFold Grid can be added in all shapes and sizes. It could be a small box no larger than a modem that you put in your office or home, or could be a fully-fledged data center node. The idea is that the grid becomes spread out as much as it can be, as this has some huge benefits for all users and the environment.

Less power waste: Less energy is needed to cool all these smaller nodes that are far away from each other, than putting the same resources in a giant room together and having them sit on top off, and beside each other (this is what happens now in large scale data centers).
Less bandwidth waste: The closer the capacity is to the end-user, the less unnecessary miles it has to travel. (e.g. a text message in a messaging app might travel from the Netherlands to a data center in America to then forward it to the person living down the street). When concentrating on decentralization and having nodes everywhere in the world this problem resolves itself. And data will take the shortest route possible.
More Privacy: This decentralized approach makes it so that there is no “all-seeing eye” within the network – unlike the current setup where tech giants basically own all their users’ data by putting it in their own data centers.
More Accessibility: Due to the fact that these resources can be added in small form-factors, it makes it possible to now put internet resources anywhere in the world where there’s a network to plug into (cables in the ground). And this makes it that now people that have limited-to-no funds have access to what the UN declared a human right: the internet. ut more than that, education, connection, entertainment, all the internet brought the western world over the past decade.

To find out more about how you can become a farmer, please visit ThreeFold’s website www.threefold.io. Our wiki or register to for first access to our next batch of 3Node here: https://pre-register.threefold.io/. We are currently collecting interest for all types of nodes that anyone can host in their home, office, or anywhere else with a power outlet and internet connection.

May 3, 2020

Why We Do What We Do

If not now, when? If not us, who?

We are growing a green and responsible peer-to-peer Internet that is available everywhere and owned by everyone — across geographical and cultural borders, empowering people to be digitally independent and providing equal chances to learn, partake and succeed.

🔗Values-First

At ThreeFold, we are driven by three main values:

Equality is the foundation for a fair world where everyone is given the opportunity to be empowered and to achieve their full potential.
Freedom of thought, opinion, creativity and faith are fundamentals to achieve peace and fulfillment of humankind’s potential.
Sustainability ensures the future of life on earth. It is about adopting the behavior and mindset to minimize our footprint.

Let’s take a deeper look.

🔗Internet Access | A Human Right

In 2016, the United Nations officially declared Internet access to be a human right. The right to internet access aims to protect people’s freedom of expression and opinion, as well as other fundamentals such as access to knowledge and information.

Yet as of today, about 48% of humanity remains unconnected to the Internet, creating huge inequalities in the access to information and knowledge. It is important that the right steps are taken to improve the relationship between governments and citizens and to uphold all human rights.

To make the new internet accessible and equal to all, ThreeFold built with ThreeFold Farmers an infrastructure that is affordable to all and collectively owned by the network peers. To ensure a fair and equal distribution of the internet to everyone, fully sponsored capacity will be deployed in remote regions of our world.

🔗Digital Freedom | For Everyone

The Internet evolved to become the world’s largest database of information and knowledge, opening up exponential growth on personal, organizational and economic levels. Yet it is owned by large international companies that exploits users data.

The current approach of many governments and countries is to cut the Internet into pieces by limiting its accessibility and enforcing regulations. We need an internet that protects our digital freedom and fair access to global information for everyone, everywhere.

ThreeFold is a peer-to-peer internet — owned by the users. All the technology of this new internet is open-source and the whole experience is built around the fundamentals of a peer-to-peer network. On this new internet, everyone owns their data and experiences — digital freedom.

🔗A Green Internet | For Our Planet

The current internet consumes about 10% of global energy production. With the imminent boom of emerging technologies such as Blockchain, Internet of Things, Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence and 5G, the Internet’s energy consumption is expected to increase exponentially.

The current industry solutions focuses on increasing the use of renewable energies to power data centers. However this is not a viable solution as data centers consume enormous amounts of energy. Therefore, a new solution that can drastically reduce the global internet’s energy consumption is needed.

ThreeFold is the first true peer-to-peer Internet. It uses pioneering technologies that remove the need for centralized and power-hungry data centers, consumes 90% less energy, and uses 90% less international fibre network capacity.

If not now, when? If not us, who?

Photo by Yannis H on Unsplash.

Sam Taggart

April 8, 2020

An intro to ThreeFold Farming

We probably don’t need to tell you that the invention of Blockchain technology changed the world dramatically..

February 3, 2020

An Intro to the ThreeFold Token

The ThreeFold Token (TFT) is a decentralized digital currency used to buy autonomous and decentralized Internet services (compute, storage, and application) on the ThreeFold Grid.

The ThreeFold Token is the currency of the new Internet. It is a decentralized digital currency that represents a unit of reservation of capacity (compute, storage) on the largest peer-to-peer network of capacity on earth.

Capacity is a new high-demand market, and the TFT will be the medium of exchange for this commodity on the peer-to-peer internet brought by ThreeFold. TFT synergistically connects the world of cloud and blockchain markets to the most scalable universal substrate without compromising, performance, security and privacy.

🔗How are ThreeFold Tokens created?

No ThreeFold Tokens have ever been minted. ThreeFold Tokens are generated through a process called “Farming”. Farming happens when active internet capacity is added to the ThreeFold Grid. Independent farmers earn ThreeFold Tokens (TFT) by providing neutral and decentralized internet capacity, thus expending the usable Grid. Therefore no central entity controls the internet.

🔗5 good reasons to buy ThreeFold Tokens

TFTs are exclusively generated when new capacity is added to the TF Grid. There are no centralized issuers. Tokens have not been created out of thin air.
While the ThreeFold Grid can expand, a maximum of 4 Billion TFTs can ever be in circulation. This limit ensures stability of value and incentivization for all stakeholders.
TFT lives on the Stellar Blockchain. TFT holders benefit from a big ecosystem of proven wallets and mediums of exchange.
By employing Stellar technology, TFT transactions and smart contracts are powered by one of the most energy-efficient blockchains available. Furthermore, TFT is the medium of exchange on the greenest internet network in the world.
The market for farming, cultivating and trading TFT is open to all. Anyone with internet connection, power supply and necessary hardware can become a Farmer or trade ThreeFold tokens (TFT).
By buying, holding, and utilizing ThreeFold Tokens, you are actively supporting the expansion of the ThreeFold Grid and its use cases — creating a more sustainable, fair, and equally accessible Internet.

To learn more about the token, please dive into our wiki.

Important note: TFTs are not an investment instrument. It is the medium of exchange on the ThreeFold Grid, and is a mechanism to enable the Internet we believe is possible.

Sacha Obeegadoo

January 4, 2020

Internet is growing wild

The internet is growing at an extremely fast pace, but is that a good thing?

The current growth of internet needs 4000+ new large scale data centers of computer systems. The global data growth will reach more than 40 Zetabytes by 2020 which represents an average yearly growth of 42% starting at 4.5 Zetabytes in 2013. To host all this data, over 4000 new big data centers have to to be built. And to achieve this goal, $ 1 trillion USD investment capital is needed and land totalling the size of the UK would be needed.

The Internet is one of the fastest growing industries in the world. In this article we'll explain why that's not always such a good thing and where we see opportunities.

🔗Internet capacity needs to become localized

A big majority of users in the world connect to servers that are not present in their region and as such experience higher costs and low performance. According to a study by datacentermap.com, 80% of the data centers of the current Internet’s service providers are based in the U.S. and Europe. The rest of the world has scarce Internet resources dotted around territories.

As a consequence most Internet users use Internet-based services running on infrastructure which is located far away from their physical location and most likely outside their country’s borders. This decreases the general end-user experience (latency) but also adds unnecessary costs to transporting the information back and forth. Also, it adds legislation and compliance headaches to enterprises.

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🔗The Internet needs to perform better

Compute and Storage vendors create poor-performing solutions. There have been yearly improvements in hardware following Moore’s law. While this has allowed ThreeFold to progress and innovate, it has also led to software developers taking these advances for granted; cutting corners where they can, creating sub-optimal code and allowing software components to be layered on top of each other to achieve certain behavioral functionalities.

The inefficiencies have now led to a situation where organically-grown IT architectures are immensely complex. They use a variety of components from different software and hardware vendors integrated by so called ‘integrators’. The overall effort and cost involved to create, operate and maintain such architectures is growing continuously and requiring an ever-increasing budget and resourcing to continue.

If we could go down to the core algorithms and take another look at these, and innovate at the heart of technology instead of applying patches and pain killers, we would be able to create much more end-user capacity than what systems provide today. Systems will last longer and will not have to be replaced by faster ones. Also, fewer engineers will be needed to create, operate and maintain these systems. Combined, these elements would present a more stable and reliable platform that can achieve higher levels of uptime.

Only upsides, right? Well a huge downside of such an approach is that vendors will make less revenue and more importantly less margin as systems will run for longer, be more stable and require less updates. So why would vendors innovate at the core of their solution?

🔗The Internet needs to become more sustainable

Did you know that the current Internet is responsible for between 5 and 10% of global energy consumptions? Making it more harmful to our planet than the airline Industry. The good news is that we can achieve 10x more power efficiency by addressing certain areas such as storage.

ThreeFold believes IT can do a much better job at being more sustainable - in fact ThreeFold believes it can reduce the Internet’s carbon footprint by 10 times compared to other industry standards in IT capacity producing solutions.

Power consumption is a function of better compute and storage performance that in theory would require more racks and cooling. ThreeFold’s architectural approach brought solutions that enables it’s Farmers to achieve roughly 3 times the performance per rack (so it uses fewer racks) and the racks require less energy than typical racks in the industry.

Read more about how ThreeFold achieves sustainability in the following blog.

🔗The Internet needs to become more affordable

The biggest cost in running IT architectures is the human cost. Today’s complex systems, built out of ‘band aid and patches’ point solutions, organically-grown and badly documented IT infrastructures, need an armada of people to keep them ticking. Even though this is an example, one can learn a lot from the trends that are presented:

On average an IT budget takes 5% of overall revenues
IT consumes 6.5% of the total number of Full-time equivalent in the company, of which 85% are insourced and 15% on payroll. This means that the enterprise doesn’t retain internal know-how to operate their IT.
About 50% of IT budgets are spent on Infrastructure ane operations. Similarly, a big part goes to applications. A mere 5% is considered to be internal overhead within the IT department.
Around 65% of the IT budget is spent on resources and services, around 35% is spent on hardware and software.

These figures present industry average numbers and paint a troubling picture that IT is a sizeable part of an overall budget, and that most spending is going to have the right knowledge skills insourced to the organisation to run the core IT architecture it relies on. For any other discipline in any organisation this would present an unacceptable risk to the business and its continuity - strangely not for IT.

🔗The Internet needs to become self-healing

The biggest source of downtime in computer systems is people. Getting people involved in fixing infrastructure problems creates the risk of accidentally causing more system downtime. A very recent example on this hit a large organisation cloud service provider.

20+ years ago when Internet data centers came into existence next to telecom points of presence (POP), the level of complication in architecting, and building and maintaining these infrastructures exploded. From an already reasonable complicated technology setup to transport packets of data around the globe, these information warehouses were created where data was uploaded to, processed, and the obtained results sent back to end users on the other side of the globe.

Managing a data center that contains solutions for information transportation, storage and processing is not an easy task and the growth of data volume uploaded, stored and processed has exponentially increased. The number of technologies invented and implemented in regards to the processing and storing of information has also exploded. This resulted in a double exponential growth in complexity to architect, build, operate and maintain these IT systems.

The time has come that we no longer rely on people to do the right thing in case of emergency - the complexity is overwhelming and the dependency on the availability of that information is huge. Having people to do manual deployments and operational responsibilities does not provide the agility and speed to keep up with the continuous exponential growth of the industry. It is time to take the human element out of IT and let smart and autonomous systems to take over. This will also let people focus on more creative activities.

🔗The world needs a responsible internet

On a humanitarian level the opportunities for creativity, learning and development are currently negatively influenced by a lack of access to performant and affordable Internet services. Since Internet access is a human right, it should protect the status quo between the developed and less-developed regions of our world.

🔗The Internet is growing fast, with the wrong solutions

It is evident that the current solutions are super unsustainable and make no sense. Luckily, ThreeFold and many other start-ups are deploying new solutions.

Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash.

December 5, 2019

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ThreeFold Today, Tomorrow, & Beyond

January 11, 2023 -

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🔗How does ThreeFold relate to peer-to-peer?

🔗Why did ThreeFold choose peer-to-peer?

🔗Why does the world needs peer-to-peer?

🔗In 2021 the world is going peer-to-peer!

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🔗Simplicity is the key to unlock a better future

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🔗Introduction

🔗The “cost” of complexity in traditional IT

🔗Where can we get inspiration to do it a different way?

🔗Looking at nature for inspiration

🔗Centralized systems in nature

🔗Decentralized systems in nature

🔗A different approach to creating and operating IT workloads

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🔗Jumping to the IT industry

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🔗So, ThreeFold is building a new internet. Why?

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🔗Seems quite lofty. How will you build it?

🔗21+ countries? What happened to equality?

🔗And what do you mean by peer-to-peer?

🔗So how can I access / use your internet today? What can I do on it?

🔗Will [enter website or app here] be available on your internet?

🔗How are you making sure it’s safe?

🔗What about the data ownership part?

🔗And how is it better for the planet?

🔗How much will it cost?

🔗Speaking of money – so what’s up with the ThreeFold Token?

🔗Need more answers?

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🔗So what are farmers?

🔗What is this “capacity”?

🔗What is in it for me?

🔗What else?

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🔗Values-First

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🔗Digital Freedom | For Everyone

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An intro to ThreeFold Farming

🔗The problem

🔗The solution

🔗The ecosystem

An Intro to the ThreeFold Token

🔗How are ThreeFold Tokens created?

🔗5 good reasons to buy ThreeFold Tokens

Internet is growing wild

🔗Internet capacity needs to become localized

🔗The Internet needs to perform better

🔗The Internet needs to become more sustainable

🔗The Internet needs to become more affordable

🔗The Internet needs to become self-healing

🔗The world needs a responsible internet

🔗The Internet is growing fast, with the wrong solutions

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