The Latest from ThreeFold - Foundation

🔗Community updates:

• Earn a 500 TFT ‘cash back’  for testing the latest version of the TFT Fiat Gateway released as part of ThreeFold Grid V3 A5.

• Registered to become a validator? Follow the verification process to secure your spot!

• ThreeFold envisions a fully decentralized 3Node marketplace that connects buyers and sellers peer-to-peer. Join the discussion on how to achieve that vision.

• A community member will add ThreeFold branding to a coffee shop and is looking for feedback and ideas. Share your thoughts here.

• The ThreeFold Promotion Team is looking for community stories. We’d be grateful if you could share your story and/or be featured in ThreeFold content. Thank you for reaching out!

🔗Technology Developments: 

• The team is currently testing the ThreeFold Hub – the portal for validators and delegated stakers to take action and vote for the future developments of the ThreeFold ecosystem. More coming soon, so stay tuned!

🔗ThreeFold Grid:

• A Grid Enhancement Proposal to determine V3 Farming Price for June 2022 and discontinuing V2 Minting is currently open for voting. Make sure to participate!

• We urge you to migrate 3Nodes to V3 asap as described in the migration process.

• A Grid Enhancement Proposal on cloud unit pricing is currently open to determine utilization cost in the upcoming months.

• Global Titan shipping continues while Europe is facing provisioning delays. If you ordered a Tian, please fill in your information for your 3Node to be set up accordingly. For specific questions about your order, please reach out to the support team.

On another note: Fake accounts are currently inviting people to participate in airdrop campaigns under the name of ThreeFold. Unfortunately, scams are very common in the crypto space. In order to protect yourself, please treat PMs with care and read this article on how to spot scams.

See you next week, ThreeFolders!  🙌 

You can find the previous editions on our blog. For older editions of ThreeFold Weekly (Vol 1-11), go to our forum.

Once emitted, carbon can remain in our atmosphere for hundreds of years. To survive climate change, massive amounts of carbon emissions have to be offset – and fast. According to a UN report, 10 billion tons of carbon emissions will have to be removed on a yearly basis by 2050 to prevent the planet from moving past the 2 degree Celsius threshold. Allowing the climate to heat by just one more degree would have unprecedented consequences – including the sinking of islands and coastal areas, an accelerated rate of extinction (right now, estimations suggest that about 24 to 150 species go extinct every day) and much more. Our complacency towards climate change proves that we’re still in denial of the chain reaction and butterfly effects of our past and present actions.

Clearly, we’ve already crossed the threshold in the climate crisis where we had enough time for long debates on potential measures and policies. The time for those debates was in the 1960s, when a report by former US President Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee first warned about the risks and dangers of excessive carbon emissions. “Climate change is the result of more than a century of unsustainable energy and land use, lifestyles and patterns of consumption and production,” said Jim Skea, one of the IPCC Working Group III Co-Chairs in a press release published earlier this month. According to a report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we can still achieve our climate goals if we significantly reduce emissions across all economic sectors. However, we urgently need to take action to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Now is the time to act. Now is the time for bold moves. As Skea put it: “Without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors, it will be impossible.”

🔗The astonishing carbon footprint of the Internet

While people are legitimately obsessing about the emissions caused by air travel and whether to take that plane or not – bestowing us with concepts like ‘flight shaming’ – other industries’ significant impacts almost go unnoticed. One of them is the Internet.

Think about the chat messages and emails you send out every day. How many times do you ‘google’ things? How much time do you spend streaming music or videos? All of your online activities add to your carbon footprint. There are a couple grams of carbon emissions attached to the energy needed to power your devices and the wireless networks you connect to. On top of that comes the significant amount of energy required to support the infrastructure of today’s Internet, namely millions of data centers and the thousands of servers in each of them.

Even though the emissions caused by streaming one song or sending one email may seem insignificant, the accumulated use of the Internet by billions of people all over the world adds up. It actually leads to a collective carbon footprint amounting to a share of roughly 3.7% of global emissions caused by the Internet and its infrastructure – and these carbon emissions are estimated to double within the next three years. This 3.7% share of global emissions by the Internet almost makes the global aviation industry with its estimated 2.1% emissions look good.

The global pandemic – while decreasing emissions in aviation due to travel bans – has already accelerated Internet consumption and the resulting footprint due to increased streaming behaviour, remote work and more. With 1 billion people and 75 billion IoT devices expected to join the Internet economy by 2025, a more sustainable infrastructure than power-hungry data centers is urgently needed to meet the future growth of the Internet in an ethical and sustainable way.

🔗Data Centers are power hungry

Big tech corporations like Amazon, for example, have massive carbon footprints with their corporate facilities, power-hungry data centers, complex operations and more. One larger data center alone consumes up to 120 MW – and there are about 7.2 million data centers worldwide, according to Statista. Moreover, a data center’s energy consumption accounts for about 40% of its operating costs. In 2020, Amazon emitted more than 60 million metric tons of carbon dioxide up from about 51 million in 2019. Others like Google try to downplay their energy consumption by switching to renewable energy. While renewable energy is an improvement for sure, it does not change the fact that Google’s energy consumption could power entire countries.

Is that really a desirable way for us to use the still scarce supply of renewable energy? Shouldn’t we rather focus on the root problem and on becoming more energy efficient in the first place?

The first step should be to reduce the Internet’s energy consumption and overall carbon footprint. But even then: reducing that energy consumption and transitioning to clean energy will only get us so far – particularly when considering that there simply is not enough clean energy to achieve a complete transition. Those emissions that cannot be cut have to be compensated for. A holistic solution to today’s Internet’s inefficiencies and emissions is needed.

🔗An energy-efficient and regenerative Internet

In December 2021, ThreeFold announced its commitment to achieve a carbon double win for its open-source peer-to-peer Internet infrastructure, the ThreeFold Grid. The ThreeFold Grid is able to scale anywhere electricity and network exist, using about 10 times less energy than any comparable alternative while being more affordable as well. By starting from scratch at the operating system level, ThreeFold was able to build an Internet infrastructure that is highly energy efficient. This infrastructure is already made up of thousands of 3Nodes that are spread across 75 countries and counting.

Together with Take Action Global (TAG), an expert on climate education and action, ThreeFold aims to make the ThreeFold Grid planet-positive by removing its carbon emissions from the atmosphere three times in the form of Voluntary Carbon Credits. While the pilot for this initiative was announced to start in January 2022, ThreeFold and TAG were so eager to take action against climate change, they kicked-off the pilot one month early in December 2021. It is the first step in ThreeFold’s plan to support the use of ‘nature-based climate solutions’ like tree planting to absorb twice more carbon than the ThreeFold Grid emits by 2022. 

🔗A silver lining on the horizon

Every industry and organization has to pull their own weight. There is no way around it. Far-reaching actions and transformations are needed across industries to limit global warming to bearable levels. “The decisions we make now can secure a liveable future. We have the tools and know-how required to limit warming,” said Hoesung Lee, IPCC Chair, in an April 2022 press release. Together with TAG, ThreeFold leads the way by working on energy-efficient and sustainable solutions for the Internet. The new IPCC report gives us a reason to be optimistic about our future and have hope for the regeneration of our planet.

Really, all it takes right now is widespread support and adoption of more energy-efficient, sustainable alternatives across industries like ThreeFold for the Internet – something that is up to each and every one of us. Let us all take action for a fairer, more sustainable world.

• Join the global ThreeFold movement.
• Start farming today and support a greener Internet while regenerating the planet.

🔗Major ThreeFold News:

• We officially released ThreeFold Grid V3.0.0 Alpha-5! There are various upgrades, improvements and fixes to different ThreeFold Grid components like the TFT shop, Zero-OS, the Playground and more.

🔗Community updates:

• Watch the recording of the April 19th ThreeFold Community Call! We covered topics including ThreeFold’s strategic goals, the Paradise Hills model, the latest ThreeFold Grid release, what’s coming soon, and token activities.

• Only 7 L2 validator spots remain. As for L0 validator applicants, please follow the verification process to secure your spot!

• Have you joined our community-led ThreeFold Discord channel yet?

• We have a few new videos up on YouTube! Be sure to subscribe to our channel to stay in-the-know as new content is posted.

🔗Technology Developments: 

• As of ThreeFold Grid V3.0.0 Alpha-5, we are supporting the deployment of dedicated nodes.

• On the new TFT Shop release, we’re giving users the option to buy TFT with fiat currency via the integration of a mercuryo.io (third-party) widget.

• The new feature release of TF Connect App includes new features such as enabling users to sign documents on the app directly, and many other backend improvements.

• Read the full ThreeFold Grid V3.0.0 Alpha-5 update here!

🔗ThreeFold Grid:

• The deadline for V3 migration is set for the 1st of May, so we urge you to migrate all 3Nodes asap. The migration process is quite simple and fast.

• There has been a discussion about farming rewards V2 vs. V3. Take a look at this post for a comparison.

• The new global 3Node marketplace was launched. Check it out here!

• The global shipping of Titan orders continues, although there is a pause in Europe due to provisioning delays. For specific questions about your order, please reach out to the support team.

Until next time, ThreeFolders!  🙌 

If you’re a community member interested in sharing your story or being featured in ThreeFold content, please reach out!

You can find the previous editions on our blog. For older editions of ThreeFold Weekly (Vol 1-11), go to our forum.

In October 2008, when the financial crisis was in full swing, an anonymous individual or group under the pseudonym ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ published a white paper on Bitcoin, a “peer-to-peer electronic cash system” that ended up disrupting the financial system and sparked the creation of an entirely new industry: crypto mining.

Considering that many people view Bitcoin as a commodity, similar to gold, it only makes sense that the process of generating new Bitcoins would become referred to as ‘mining’. In a way, mining is an incentive mechanism to reach consensus in the verification of transactions in a decentralized network. While crypto mining originated from Bitcoin, the system has spread quite widely across the blockchain space.

More than a decade later, Bitcoin keeps intriguing individuals and organizations all around the world, and has become one of the most popular financial assets. Nevertheless, criticism and doubts around Bitcoin and crypto mining remain. The most popular cryptocurrency is also frequently brought to the spotlight around its potential affiliations to money laundering, financing of terrorism and cybercrime, as well as the energy the mining process of its cryptocurrency consumes. 

According to the Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index of the University of Cambridge, the annual consumption of Bitcoin is currently estimated to amount to nearly 140 TWh. The United Arab Emirates (113 TWh) or the Netherlands (109 TWh) had a lower annual energy consumption than Bitcoin in 2020. Moreover, news outlets like The Guardian or BBC News reported on Bitcoin exceeding the energy consumption of further countries, including Ireland and Argentina. Within the last year, headlines like “Bitcoin Uses More Electricity Than Many Countries” in the New York Times or “Bitcoin’s growing energy problem: ‘It’s a dirty currency’” in the Financial Times were in no short supply.

Among the most popular quotes on the topic is Bill Gates’ statement in the New York Times in March 2021: “Bitcoin uses more electricity per transaction than any other method known to mankind, and so it’s not a great climate thing.” Not that this statement or the awareness of the issue would have prevented Microsoft from launching ION, a decentralized digital identity system, to run on the Bitcoin network.

🔗But why is Bitcoin mining so energy intensive anyways?

At the heart of Bitcoin’s energy-intensive model is the Proof-of-Work (PoW) protocol. Bitcoin mining, the process of creating new Bitcoins using PoW, requires solving complex cryptographic equations to receive the rewards associated with the creation of the next block in the blockchain. PoW is carried out by computers, known as ‘miners’. 

In the early days, a simple computer was enough to mine Bitcoin. However, the difficulty of the mining algorithm increased as the network grew larger and more people started competing to earn the next block’s rewards. On average, it takes about 10 minutes to solve such an equation and to mine a new block. Today, Bitcoin mining has become a costly and elaborate endeavour – accessible only to large investors that can support powerful supercomputers – at the cost of local communities.

It’s only sensible that miners are beefing up their machines to increase their chances. In fact, the sector became so competitive that Intel created dedicated chips and specialized manufacturers for mining servers like Bitmain were established. With up to 3,250 Watts indicated by manufacturers, the power consumption of such devices averages 28,470 kWh per year if operated continuously. In comparison, the annual consumption of a freezer is estimated between 200 and 500 kWh per year. 

Additionally, operating a single mining machine is hardly the way to succeed. The biggest Bitcoin miners have fleets of hundreds of machines in so-called ‘mining farms’, carefully maintained and constantly ventilated, to prevent them from overheating. Some of the largest, like Northern Data in Texas, have an energy consumption of 1 GWh per year, the equivalent of the energy produced by about 3.1 million photovoltaic (solar) panels. 

In critical times where humanity is facing serious global challenges in relation to climate change and the collapse of biodiversity, we must rethink the basics of how to decentralize our world. 

🔗Are there more energy-conscious solutions?

Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanisms have proven to be less energy intensive than PoW. With PoS, miners lock up (‘stake’) a blockchain’s cryptocurrency on escrow accounts to be granted mining rights. In exchange for this participation, miners receive an interest proportional to their stake as reward. 

PoS-based blockchains are faster and much more energy efficient than PoW-based blockchains. However, the implementation of a PoS protocol poses its own challenges. For example, it is known for incentivizing hoarding, rather than utilization, and driving centralization. The mining industry is attempting to shift perceptions and move away from its climate-polluting, power-hungry image by powering large mining activities with renewable energies or by offsetting their emissions with carbon credits.

While this might sound great at first, it does not resolve the underlying issue of incredibly high energy consumption. Should we really allocate relatively scarce renewable energy resources to such energy-intensive endeavours? Or should we rather look for more efficient alternatives – considering we have all the technology to create more energy-efficient models from scratch – and then support what energy consumption remains with renewable energy? 

🔗ThreeFold Farming offers a greener paradigm

ThreeFold Farming is a decentralized, energy-efficient and meaningful alternative to mining. ThreeFold Tokens (TFT) are minted whenever new Internet capacity in terms of compute, storage or network is added to the ThreeFold Grid by connecting computers, known as 3Nodes. 

By contributing decentralized Internet capacity to the ThreeFold Grid, independent people and organizations called ‘farmers’ earn TFT in return – based on a Proof-of-Capacity  (PoC) algorithm. PoC is autonomously carried out by ThreeFold’s extremely efficient operating system. First, Zero-OS scans the computer’s resources. Then the operating system registers the computing power and Internet storage on the ThreeFold Blockchain, making the resources available to the entire network – thereby creating a decentralized model for Internet capacity provisioning. The energy consumption of a 3Node can vary, depending on the amount of Compute Units (CUs) and Storage Units (SUs) it holds. “The average consumption for a Titan 3Node is around 26.71 KwH per hour”, says ThreeFold’s Alexandre Hannelas. 

Farming supports the realization of an open-source peer-to-peer Internet free from centralized servers and authorities. Similarly to Bitcoin, the management of transactions and the issuing of TFT is carried out collectively by the network to create a decentralized Internet economy. In a way, what Bitcoin did to money, ThreeFold does to the Internet – while using much less energy. 

“By using blockchain for what it’s good at and other pioneering technologies, such as peer-to-peer networking, to complement it, we built the most efficient Internet infrastructure in the world, and by far.” – Kristof de Spiegeleer.

Developing sustainable solutions for our planet is essential to ThreeFold’s ethos which puts our planet and people first. A famous quote, we love and frequently refer to at ThreeFold, is Albert Einstein’s “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we create them.”

Our planet needs regenerative solutions at a large scale, and ThreeFold aims to deliver on our promise providing better solutions for our planet and people through our technology. Based on the ThreeFold Grid’s average energy consumption, we’re planting trees with our partner Take Action Global to offset the Grid’s carbon emissions three times in the form of Voluntary Carbon Credits (VCC). Our VCC system was implemented in the PoC algorithm, so every 3Node mints additional TFT to offset its own carbon emissions based on the power utilization of the individual 3Node per month. The process is fully automated and executed by the ThreeFold Blockchain.

ThreeFold’s global community of farmers is on a mission to regenerate our planet through the planet-positive ThreeFold Farming which supports tree planting and other impact initiatives by default. We’re on track to provide a planet-positive Internet and support our partners in their initiatives in fields like climate education, climate action and economic inclusion worldwide.

Farming is about so much more than crypto mining. It’s about building a better Internet and shaping the world we want to live in. Together with a community of like-minded people, we’re taking action for a better world.

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

• Join the global ThreeFold movement.
• Start farming today and become a part of the new Internet while regenerating the planet.

🔗Major ThreeFold News:

• ThreeFold was hand-picked as one of 5 top Web 3 startups by StartUs Insights – standing out from about 300 startups analyzed for this report!

🔗Community updates:

• Are any of you in Amsterdam this week? Join the community-organized ThreeFold gathering during Amsterdam Blockchain Week!

• Members of the ThreeFold community gathered in Miami during Bitcoin 2022 to evangelize the People’s Internet with the Blockchain space and the Americas.

• Weynand participated in the Fair Data Initiative hosted by Solidaridad along with about 25 agricultural innovators, NGOs, banks and large tech companies. Read the full update here!

• Get to know Nelson and Dan, both ThreeFold Farmers and soon-to-be Validators, a little better. Also check out this unique node setup from Athus in Brazil!

• Another star Farmer Mik (aka idrnd) and other ThreeFolders built a second part of FAQs here.

• We invite you to learn more about our outreach strategy and to share how you can support ThreeFold in reaching new frontiers in cyberspace.

• Only 7 L2 validator spots remain. L0 validators are oversubscribed, so hurry up and follow the verification process to secure your spot!

• A community-led ThreeFold Discord channel was recently launched – join in!

🔗ThreeFold Grid: 

• A deadline has been set for the 1st of May for V3 migration, so make sure your 3Nodes are all migrated asap. Simply follow the migration process.

• Titan orders continue to be delivered, although there is a delay in Europe due to provisioning delays. In case of any specific questions, please reach out to the support team.

We shared new videos of our Knowledge Base series explaining ThreeFold and the technology behind it. Watch the latest additions on Zero-OS, TF Chain, the Planetary Network and more!

See you next week, ThreeFolders!  🙌 

If you’re a community member interested in sharing your story or being featured in ThreeFold content, please reach out!

You can find the previous editions on our blog. For older editions of ThreeFold Weekly (Vol 1-11), go to our forum.

🔗The “aha” moment

For the past twenty years, Adnan and Shaher have maintained a strong relationship, and on this day, they are gathering to find a way to work together – to bring things full circle. They discuss how the real estate market is making a strong comeback, and various types of value propositions for future Paradise Hills residents, when the incredible “aha” moment drops. Instead of a standard one-time gift or fee write-off, why don’t we add a 3Node to each residence? A gift that keeps on giving! The room is filled with excitement. They realize that a new dawn in the property and homeownership market is born, combining the unified empowerment of digital and physical assets.

Together, ThreeFold and Paradise Hills will collaborate on a historic partnership to create the world’s first neighborhood cloud network, living on top of the ThreeFold Grid. Dedicated servers called 3Nodes will be installed into 170 homes, providing the edge computing and Internet storage needed to run decentralized applications and Internet services. This will give residents, businesses, developers, and the government a secure and highly-available sovereign cloud infrastructure to store and process their data locally. And homeowners will be rewarded in the form of ThreeFold Tokens (TFT) simply by having these 3Nodes connected.

🔗No time to waste

Quickly the team puts the idea to paper, and by February the deal is done. In March, the collaboration is announced and makes the rounds in publications like Yahoo! Finance and on plenty of regional properties. Adnan even begins training the Paradise Hills sales team on how to present the opportunity to potential residents. The speed of the collaboration is proof of a collective commitment to take this leap of faith, and a high-level of trust in each other and the possibilities. Another big reason for confidence: once the modeling was done, it was clear that this could be a massive financial opportunity for residents, one which could even pay off the cost of the house in a relatively short number of years.

The ThreeFold 3Node will be a standard “appliance” in each Paradise Hills residence, much like a refrigerator or an oven. But this appliance is anything but “standard” – it provides and connects decentralized Internet capacity owned by the Paradise Hills community, and comes with an onboarding guide to welcome each resident into the much larger ThreeFold community.

Further, Paradise Hills is adamant about building tools on top of the ThreeFold Grid – digital storefronts for local businesses, peer-to-peer marketplaces and forums or chats for the residents, and whatever else is deemed to be needed. The collaboration with ThreeFold essentially turns Paradise Hills into a sovereign “smart” community, where even the footage from the security cameras on premise can be stored locally and privately.

🔗The community comes together

Flash forward to a few weeks ago, the early Paradise Hills community gathers together for a gala. ThreeFold co-founder and tech guru Weynand Kuijpers has the chance to speak in front of the group. He speaks about the early days of the Internet, how it was hijacked by Big Tech turning people into products, and how now there is a new model for the Internet by people, for people. “You are some of the first to do this,” he says to the crowd.

Afterwards, residents come up and express their excitement, even if they don’t quite understand all the details. One woman in particular asks, “Can you please explain to me how having this device in my home won’t impact my privacy or security?” Adnan goes on to describe how the 3Node is actually there to preserve privacy and security. “A 3Node is just like a solar panel, only instead of electricity, it provides Internet capacity for local usage. In fact, any data that’s in your home is just a fragment of a piece of a puzzle, so it’s inaccessible to you or anyone else for that matter.” Overall, there is a clear feeling that contributing to this new Internet Grid will bring a unifying force to the community, and a deeper sense of meaning for what it means to be a resident of Paradise Hills.

🔗Bringing Paradise to the world

Paradise Hills is a first of its kind partnership, but it is only the first. We at ThreeFold see incredible opportunities to scale this model across the world, and not only in real estate developments. Imagine if we apply this to lower-income and affordable housing communities, or colleges and universities. Hardware gifted to residents that connect together to form a localized part of a truly sovereign Internet Grid, on top of which useful community tools can be built – all while generating passive token rewards for the residents. A ground-up model. A global concept, applied locally.

If the Paradise Hills story inspires you, and you have an idea for how to bring this model elsewhere, we invite you to take action. Head to the ThreeFold Forum, create a topic under the Paradise Hills Model category, and let’s spread this to the world.