The Latest from ThreeFold - Foundation

🔗The neutrality of the current Internet is in danger.

Have you seen ‘The Great Hack’ on Netflix? It’s a documentary about the Cambridge Analytica hacking scandal, where personal data of millions of peoples’ Facebook profiles were harvested without their consent and used for political advertising purposes.

While watching it, I couldn’t help but think how unfair it is that in today’s digital society, people are being treated like products, because there is no such thing as a ‘free’ platform without YOU being the product. What did reassure me, is that people are sick of having their data used this way. But what they might not know, is that the internet problem is bigger than ‘just’ data protection.

The Internet is growing at an exponential rate. To service this demand, a few large companies (Google, Amazon, Alibaba, Facebook, etc.) have built and continue to build supersized, power-hungry and centralized data centers. These data centers make up the majority of all Internet capacity available today. However, the Internet is expanding much faster than datacenters and the planet can cope with.

In addition to that, the Internet is extremely centralized, with most of these data centers being located in the US. Think of it like electricity. If consumers in, for example, Turkey had to use electricity generated in the US, it would be too expensive and inefficient, because it is too far away. The transmission lines would be too strained and losses and repairs would make it unsustainable. Capacity is like electricity. When centralized, it becomes too expensive and wasteful for remote users.

🔗So what is the solution to these problems?

The Internet needs to be more distributed, cost-effective, neutral, and sustainable. ThreeFold has developed such a new technology, the ThreeFold Grid (Grid) and a token which enables all this to happen.

Combining the values of the ThreeFold Foundation (freedom, equality and fairness) with the technology developed by TFTech (Zero-OS, Zero-Chain, 3Bot) and a digital currency called the ThreeFold Token (a decentralized digital currency and means of payment to exchange autonomous and decentralized Internet services) we believe that we have all the tools in order to actually make a difference in tomorrow’s digital world. Question is, are you ready to join us?

Please visit our forum if you have any questions or would like to continue the conversation!

🔗Decentralization

In 1989, the Internet changed the world as we know it with the introduction of the World Wide Web. With time the Internet empowered people to share information in a decentralized way. Shortly after, big companies like Facebook, Google, and Apple emerged, providing many solutions that revolutionized the way we live. The “sharing economy” has grown exponentially over the last 5-10 years. This is thanks to a more simplified information flow and well-developed technology, which:

• Enables a much easier integration of independent players into the sharing economy.
• Eliminates the need for extensive management and structure of marketplace operators.
  
  We are entering a flat-structure economy. An economy where fewer managerial levels are needed for the system to function. New technologies such as blockchain and the Internet of Things facilitate this ongoing trend. Participants can now interact on a peer-to-peer basis, forming marketplaces and organizations according to pre-agreed, programmed contracts.

🔗The current Internet is centralized

Despite the growth in popularity for decentralized systems, organizations, and currencies, the Internet remains centralized. The centralization within the Internet industry brought many barriers to entry. Indeed, to compete in the highly competitive market of Internet capacity dominated by big IT companies, massive investment, and IT development are needed.

But what is really scary is that the current industry exploits the market tremendously. Data is officially the most valuable asset on earth for a few years, and about 20 companies rule over more than 80% of the cloud industry. In other words - these companies together have more than 80% of the world’s information. In recent years, we noticed the dangers that can arise with the wrong intentions within the data industry with the ‘Cambridge Analytica Scandal’, also highlighted in the movie ‘The Great Hack’.

ThreeFold has been developing technology that allows the decentralization of the Internet infrastructure - removing the need for data centers, and allowing anyone to take part in the Internet capacity market. Adding capacity to the ThreeFold Grid (TF Grid) makes you a ThreeFold Farmer (TF Farmer). The more decentralized the Internet gets, the more secure and effective it will become. The already is the largest grid of compute and storage in the world.

🔗How To Participate

The process of becoming a ThreeFold Farmer is very straightforward. Anyone can join the ThreeFold Grid by downloading the ThreeFold Zero-OS onto their nodes and connecting them to the ThreeFold Grid.

By doing this you will become an operator of a “micro data center” and with that earn ThreeFold Tokens. With or without experience in the field, anyone can become a ThreeFold Farmer. By becoming a ThreeFold Farmer, you empower a new neutral Internet that belongs to humanity - not corporations.

You can build your server (3node) and configure it, but also options for people with less technical knowledge are available. Please see pre-register.threefold.io to see how easy it is for anyone to become a ThreeFold Farmer.

Blog written in 2019, updated January 2021.

🔗Do you believe that the world needs change?

Do you believe in decentralization? Equality? Sustainability?

Do you believe in circular economies, where everyone is invited to partake and succeed?

The ThreeFold Token is the currency of the new Internet and brings true solutions to all the above questions.

It supports the ThreeFold Foundation - an open ecosystem that is shaping a better world by empowering game-changing technology. ThreeFold is growing a green and conscious peer-to-peer Internet that is available everywhere and owned by everyone – across geographical and cultural borders, empowering people to be autonomous, and providing equal chances to learn, partake and succeed.

🔗Ready to support a new Internet?

By buying and holding TFT, anyone can support the ThreeFold Foundation’s ability to achieve its next technological and growth milestones (see Token Distribution Event for use-cases). From funding the next technological innovations to supporting the growth of ThreeFold use-cases built on top of the ThreeFold Grid, TFT powers the expansion of the new Internet.

The time has come for us to step up and shape the world we believe is possible. Join us and lets co-create our futures together.

Get TFT on Liquid now.

Get TFT on BTC-Alpha now.

On behalf of our planet, humanity and the ThreeFold Community, we thank you for considering empowering a better world.

If you need more guidance on buying TFT, please head here.

🔗The world needs a new stable & green digital currency, which is usable globally

Digital currencies are on the way to global adoption. Today, there are approximately 130+ billion dollars worth of digital currencies in circulation and approximately 1 billion dollars traded on a daily basis on open market exchanges. Benefits of digital currencies include direct peer-to-peer transactions (requiring no intermediaries such as banks), greater trust (secured by cryptography and mathematics), lower friction charges, faster transaction times, and no single point of failure.

However, cryptocurrencies commonly face some major problems, such as:

• Lack of scalability: The main blockchains today are based on “proof of work” - generating very large and complex prime numbers called “hashes” to record ledger transactions. These proof of work blockchains cannot scale to meet the increasing blockchain transaction volumes. In fact, Ethereum, one of the most popular and well known blockchains has announced it will change from “proof of work” to “proof of stake.”
• Crazy energy requirements: Computing complex proof of work hashes requires enormous amounts of processing power. Actually, a large portion of today’s hashrate is produced by very large dedicated billion dollar data centers called miners. It is estimated that the energy consumed by digital currency mining is approximately equivalent to the power consumption of the entire country of Denmark.
• Certain perceived reputational issues: Numerous commentators - particularly in the early years of bitcoin - speculated that unregulated digital currencies could be used to fund illicit activities.
• A general absence of intrinsic value: The major digital currencies today are not backed by real assets - therefore their value is more surrounded by hype.
• Limited utility: Today digital currencies are predominantly held by miners and investors. There is very limited use of digital currencies to buy goods and services.
  
  These are some of the problems we see with cryptocurrencies. The world needs a new stable and green digital currency, which is usable globally. Enter ThreeFold Token.
  
  

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

🔗Use cases for the ThreeFold Peer-to-Peer Cloud

🔗Any Docker Service

ThreeFold nodes natively run containers - therefore they can run any Docker service. But it does so in a more efficient way than the current Docker engine - the most used and known container technology platform in the world.

🔗IAAS

The ThreeFold node technology enables hardware capabilities to be used for IAAS services in a very efficient way. Overhead is reduced to a minimum by stripping out unnecessary layers of software that have been implemented over the last decade to patch scaling and performance problems. Our engineers have always looked at the root cause of issues and by innovating at the core algorithm level, solved many issues. Examples are:

• Less is more: Scale down the operating system for a virtualization architecture to a minimum and boot it over the network - no local operating system files installed on local storage.
• Look at root causes, no painkiller approach: Step away from existing storage solutions that require proprietary acceleration hardware and use standard off the shelf, affordable and efficient components with a 100% software-based storage solution that can withstand hardware failures without requiring human intervention - creating a very efficient, reliable and performing storage solution that can operate standalone.
  
  The platform is secured by using a network boot mechanism that makes it virtually hack resistant as there are no operating system files installed locally. Infrastructure as a service traditionally runs in hyper-scale data centers, remote from the businesses using it. ThreeFold node technology allows you to install, operate and run IAAS services close to your business locations operated by your local IT team. It operates on a peer-to-peer network - only transferring bits of data that need to be transported to avoid network congestion and traffic bottlenecks.

🔗Archive

Data generation is growing exponentially. More data has been generated in the last 2 years than ever before. This creates a big need to archive data. The ThreeFold node technology creates storage and archiving capabilities by using standard hardware and known interfaces (S3, FTP, WebDav, CIFS, and NFS) will be built by developers worldwide and made available. The low-level storage functionality supports version controlling of the archived data, which keeps all relevant changes without any limitation by using a small amount of actual storage capacity.

🔗Security

Data security and reliability are key aspects of any storage system. The ThreeFold node allows all data to be compressed and encrypted if and when needed. The distributed character of the storage system enables site redundant storage algorithms to be deployed while keeping large data volumes from being stored in a single location. This removes the risk of data being stolen (physically) and prevents a site outage to result in data outage. The distributed character of the system is in line with the increasing spread of actual data generation. ThreeFold has sensory equipment everywhere these days, and the overhead of storing all that information in a few central places is enormous. Data collection and storage happens once - reading data to use it for a particular workload happens many times.

🔗Data Mining

On traditional server architectures, every application has to set up its servers that run their code in isolated silos, making sharing of data hard. The distributed character of the ThreeFold node technology presents compute and storage capacity everywhere. This enables large data mining workloads to happen close to the source of the data. By storing data in a distributed manner, mining can be distributed as well. Distributed compute capacity next to storage capabilities creates the possibility to create data mining operations on local storage (which makes it very fast and efficient) by coding data mining algorithms in programming languages (such as Python, Lua, Javascript, and Golang). Data mining follows distributed data storage.

Never run into scalability problems again with the ThreeFold node. Data storage can expand horizontally using thousands of distributed nodes to create large storage volumes.

🔗Smart Contracts

Smart contracts are applications that run on a decentralized platform, exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud, or third-party interference. These applications run on a blockchain, a powerful shared global infrastructure that can move value around and represent the ownership of that value. Smart contracts enable developers to create markets, store registries of debts (or promises), move funds following past instructions (like a will or a futures contract), and many other things without a middleman or counterparty risk. ThreeFold nodes run based on smart-contracts.

🔗Self-Learning and AI

Blockchains can be seen as databases. By current database standards, traditional blockchains like Bitcoin are terrible: low throughout, low capacity, high latency, poor query support, and so on. But even with these terrible characteristics, blockchains introduced three new and important characteristics:

• Decentralized data and shared data control leads to more data and better qualitative data which results in better models. Shortening the machine learning time also enables AI to progress at a faster pace.
• Immutable audit trails improve the trustworthiness of the data, and improves the models’ provenance on training and testing results.
• Native assets and assets exchanges make training and testing models intellectual property (IP) assets easier - enhancing decentralized data and model exchanges.
  
  Blockchain technology allows more and better quality data to be presented to machine learning algorithms. It has been proven (Microsoft researchers - Banko and Brill) that more data — not just a bit more data but way more data — while using the same algorithms results in a lot better machine learning. Meaning that the future of machine learning is not in trying to create more sophisticated algorithms (which will happen). So by moving AI learning into a blockchain environment we speed up machine learning and in the end create AI.

🔗ThreeFold’s technology does not follow the traditional IT model

The Edge internet needs a different approach. So, we started from scratch and shaped a new approach. ThreeFold’s open-source technology addresses the scalability, security, storage, energy, and operating issues by simplifying architectures and not relying on third-party software. This drives down costs and improves efficiencies.

🔗What is ThreeFold’s Technology Toolbox?

ThreeFold’s technology is based on three primary building blocks: Stateless Computing, Self-Healing Technology, and Blockchain technology - this is the core of our “Technology Toolbox“.

• Stateless Computing: a stateless operating system, Zero-OS, enabling distributed hardware to form an Edge Internet grid generating IT storage and compute capacity
• Self-Healing Technology: controls and operates a distributed cloud and reserves, procures, and executes workloads on the grid using our Jumpscale platform. It delivers autoscaling and automation frameworks that enable self-healing and can be adapted for any kind of IT workload.
• Blockchain Technology: Via Rivine - our secure, scalable “proof of stake” blockchain, along with our identity management platform, ItsYou.online. Our blockchain technology enables user authentication, access controls, secure workloads, and heightened security.

🔗Enabling Stateless Computing

The global decentralized internet will be composed of thousands (millions?) of nodes distributed geographically. This means the decentralized internet must be powered by a stateless operating system that can be booted via the Internet (as opposed to living on the node locally). This removes the complexity of upgrades, truck rolls, etc.

Open-source components have been developed, Zero-OS, for the deployment of bare metal machines functioning as Internet nodes and application hosts. Our Zero-OS platform runs containerized applications and software code on secure and distributed IT infrastructure. Zero-OS can be deployed on off-the-shelf hardware by anyone willing to make server and storage capacity available in their markets and within our network.

🔗The benefits of Stateless Computing are substantial, including:

• Performance: lightweight OS without overhead for running bare-metal machines.
• Free: finds the optimal performance of server & storage nodes at no cost.
• Private: no data footprint remains while workloads move from one node to another.
• Distributed: capacity is generated without the need for data centers: At The Edge.
• High-available: easy creation of clusters while applications run in fragmented segments.
• Portability: moving software from one node to another within the grid is instant.
• Secure: open-source distributed software with transparent code. No security backdoors
• Sustainable: energy-efficient OS resulting in very low node power consumption.

🔗Technology that is self-healing & self-driving

ThreeFold’s Jumpscale framework and ZeroBot allow the creation of blueprints to auto-deploy applications within the compute environment. The bots are constantly checking the health and uptime of the infrastructure, and runtime environments, to guarantee the performance and availability of applications at all times.

🔗The benefits of our self-healing technology protocols include the following:

• Self-Healing: the platform regenerates when health issues that cause downtime for infrastructure and applications are detected.
• Intelligence: agents capture information from the grid and make intelligent decisions to provide an ideal and optimal host environment for software code and containerized applications.
• Lifecycle Management: the status of the infrastructure and the lifecycle of running applications are constantly checked and recorded.
• Autoscaling: the platform automatically scales to meet application and infrastructure performance.

🔗Blockchain Technology to execute workloads and applications via smart contracts

The engineers developed new blockchain algorithms based on proof of stake for validation purposes and turned this into our Rivine open-source blockchain software.

Unlike the “proof of work” blockchains that currently dominate the space, our Rivine blockchain is scalable, green, and secure - and does not rely on huge mining resources. We run our blockchain on approximately 200 dedicated nodes and do not rely on any third-party software.

In addition to our blockchain technology, we have also developed ItsYou.Online, an identity, and access management platform. Itsyou. online uses three-factor authentication to manage access on our network and facilitate execution.

🔗The benefits of TF blockchain technology and identity management platform include:

• Sustainable: our algorithms to reach consensus use a minimal amount of energy and electricity compared to other blockchain software and networks.
• Lowest possible cost: of transactions make it an efficient and fast payment system.
• Neutral: state of the network and applications are recorded in a transparent and immutable manner.
• Payment fulfillment: transactions are automatically paid using ThreeFold Tokens.
• Smart Contracts: fully automated execution of contracts from customers buying Internet IT capacity.
  
  All of our technology is open-source and can be accessed in the following Github Repos:
  
  

• Zero-OS: https://github.com/threefoldtech/zos
• Jumpscale: https://github.com/threefoldtech/js-ng
• BCDB : https://github.com/threefoldtech/bcdb