Value-driven and asset-backed, it has used technological innovation to promote Skycoin's credit, allowing credit-based value Internet to run safely, stably, and efficiently in the Skycoin ecosystem After years of of continuous development and internal control testing, the flagship project of skycoin, Skywire, is ready to launch

Since its launch in 2011, Skycoin has worked quietly for seven years, patiently driving the development of Skycoin. Skycoin did not hurry to go on the major blockchain exchanges, but intensified every step of the Skycoin ecosystem.

Skywire is the new decentralized Internet, a wireless mesh network that pays for supporting it

Skywire is a peer-to-peer alternative network that takes control from ISPs and gives it back to the users. There are several components inside it - node manager, node and applications run on meshnet like vpn client, vpn server, socks client, socks server and so on.

Skywire will decentralize the Internet by motivating network nodes. In the future, by installing a mesh network antenna, you can get rid of the existing ISP infrastructure.

Skywire is based on the well-known open source networking project cjdns and OpenFlow protocols (also known as software-based networks).

It is said that Skywire's speed will greatly exceed any existing dedicated virtual networks and the Internet through channel binding and public/private key based DNS services.

The Objectives of Skywire are

• Increase broadband competition. Provide an alternative to existing ISPs. Span last mile.

• Enable communities to build ISPs running on user-operated infrastructure.

Skywire is a new darknet protocol.

• Low Latency (as fast as TCP/IP and theoretically faster on native network)

• High Performance (designed for video, file sharing and high throughput applications)

• Privacy Preserving

• Supports Operation Over Wi-Fi (Meshnet)

• Supports Clearnet Operation (Darknet/Overlay)

Skywire solves the incentive and leeching problem for network deployment

• Users receive Skycoins for providing network resources

• Users consume coins for consuming network resources

Skywire is open access.

• Anyone with a client is able to connect to any Skywire node

• Objective is to create a global open access meshnet

Skywire is privacy preserving.

• The traffic passing through your node cannot be traced back to your IP address

• Nodes forwarding traffic can only see the previous and next hop

• Third parties passively observing cannot link individual packets to a stream or user

• Third parties and forwarding nodes cannot read contents of traffic

To understand what is the nature of Skywire, we must first understand what ISP is.

ISP: The Internet Service Provider (ISP) is an Internet service provider. It provides dial-up services, online browsing, file downloads, and e-mail services. It is an entrance and bridge for Internet users to access the Internet.

With centralized systems like ISPs, we are all forced to trust other human beings to ‘do the right thing.’ But what if the right thing for them isn’t the right thing for you? Sure, we can hope that the people in power have integrity, but that isn’t always going to be the case. The most rational expectation to have of others is that they will act in their own best self-interest, as that’s what human beings do

Today, we rely completely on our ISPs to gain access to the internet, which works on aging protocols that are extremely vulnerable to snooping, and influenced by those with authority and money. In a time where our data and lives are increasingly online, the stakes of using Web 2.0 become increasingly risky.

From state-level political scheming to commercial abuse of user data, the internet has been become a potent tool for controlling the masses. Censorship is an equally worrying problem; opposition to net neutrality heralds a world where the government and service providers decide what and how we can do something on the internet. But rather than outright censor the Internet, censorship is being used against us to control our minds, a propagandistic tool that is both ideological and economical.

Recently Cambridge Analytica (CA) were involved with harvesting information on millions of Facebook profiles without user’s knowledge or consent. This information contained status updates, likes, profile content, their friend’s profile pages, etc. That information was then used to develop a propaganda message that would influence users’ perception to different political views. This is similar to micro targeting with various political messages so they vote for Trump for example or they believe Trump is a better candidate than others.

The company Cambridge Analytica may have possibly influenced more than 200 elections worldwide and there have been allegations that they may have also been involved with the Brexit campaign.

The power is squarely in the hand of service providers – not just ISPs, who control the information we can access and how much we pay for it, but the gateways of the internet that are Google, Facebook, Amazon and others



Skywire, which is the same kind of thing as ISP, is replacing the Skycoin ecosystem service provider that ISPs have created, creating a faster, more affordable, and more convenient incentive-type mesh network for Skycoin.

The mesh network is designed such that users pay, through Skywire’s currency Skycoin; for the amount of bandwidth they consume – nothing more, nothing less. The price will neither increase, as it does with traditional ISPs, nor will it be subject to a contractual period of any length. You pay based on how much bandwidth you need and consume.

As opposed to this out-dated protocol, the Skywire project operates on what is called a “mesh network” – which is just another way of saying that Internet traffic, is routed through the users of the network. The mesh network is not a new idea, but previously lacked the economic incentive for sustained use. Blockchain technology answers that problem and gives users motivation to help build a new Internet.

The upshot of the mesh network is that there no central point of failure – should one node go down, the many other nodes still stand to support the internet.

Decentralized system like Skywire is designed so that every participant can act in their own best self-interest within the system without harming other participants. The corruption, greed and incompetence that pervade our ancient centralized systems simply don’t have as strong a place in decentralized ones

It is not necessary to trust anybody else to ‘do the right thing’ – this is called trustlessness. No individual has power or control over the system. This is what makes blockchain technology truly revolutionary

WHY SKYWIRE?

First, the ISP is a centralized service, that is, all people need to access the network through the ISP. It controls the entire network service. In case of any problems, the entire network will be affected.

In a mesh network constructed with Skywire, each user (node) can become an ISP and provide services for other nodes. It is a completely decentralized network system.

Skywire is more than just a meshnet. It is software defined networking, it is much more powerful than just meshnet. It’s a new type of networking and new completely new protocol and networking namespace, independent of the existing Internet.

It supports source routing, while the existing Internet does hot potato routing, so never achieves optimal latencies.

It supports multi-homing, which IPv6 does not (Which is critical for when we have gigabit or terabit networking and multi-redundant bandwidth paths)

It has default opportunistic crypto, both link layer and end-to-end; so everything is encrypted by default, unlike the current Internet.

It has store and forward networking and will operate in Africa or even under conditions where latencies are in the minutes or hours and packet loss is excessive. Where existing protocols cannot operate reliability. It is much more robust than IPv4/IPv6 or TCP/IP

It has improved privacy. If a packet takes a route that is 10 hops, each hop only knows the previous node in the route and the next node in the route. It is not like IPv4 where each packet gives the source and destination. The privacy level is something that does not exist on the current Internet.

IP addresses are replaced by public key and no one can read traffic to a destination, without knowing the private key of the public key that identifies the destination. The system does not need 3rd parties or certificate authorities. The design is a revolution.

Second, currently almost all Internet services use the TCP/IP communication protocol. There are two serious flaws:

One is that when the amount of data that needs to be transmitted in the network is too large, this protocol will delay the data transmission rate to reduce network transmission congestion, which may bring about delay or loss of information transmission.

Second, when a certain route data is congested, the data originally supposed to be transmitted through this route will be dropped to any other route. For example, originally, A has a message to pass to B, but because AB route is too crowded, it immediately passes to C, C may pass D after a few laps before returning to B, the efficiency is greatly reduced.

Skywire utilizes Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) to achieve scalability and performance. While current protocols run through a long chain of IPs before reaching its destination, the mesh network finds the optimal path to the destination, which increases speed while reducing network load.

In the Skywire mesh network, each node can provide bandwidth, can forward information, there is no data congestion, but also ensure that the data transmission always choose the most efficient and ideal line.

Third, Skywire adopted an innovative payment protocol and established a reward mechanism.

Since Skywire is provided by users (nodes) with bandwidth and storage space, more nodes can make the network performance more powerful, so Skywire rewards Skycoin and Coins according to the resources provided by each node, and has the power to provide more resources and improve the entire Network service quality.

HOW DOES SKYWIRE WORK

The work of the node is achieved through Skyminer.

Skyminer is hardware with computing power, network and storage capabilities. Based on the obelisk algorithm, traffic is forwarded and stored in the Skywire network, providing data transmission routing and implementing node accounting functions.

Skyminer specifications

The first generation of Skywire mining machine hardware configuration is as follows:

Custom PCB board

16-port OpenWRT router

16GB RAM (8 x 2GB DDR3)

ARM Cortex-A53 CPU

8 x 16GB Class-10 A1 Micro SD

Six-core Mali450 GPU

LAN bandwidth: 8 x 1000Mbps

Gigabit Ethernet, 8 + 1 Port Switch

64-bit Linux (Alpine Linux)

Basically it includes 8 Orange Pis, a router, Ethernet cable, and a power supply (total cost 600 USD). The use of cheap but efficient and easy-to-get hardware prevents issues such as ASIC computational concentration. At the same time, it also provides the hardware needed for unlimited horizontal scaling.

Interestingly, each Orange Pi will only act as a node for an application on Skywire. Segregating each application into its own blockchain will eliminate the systemic risk of the growing global blockchain.

Compared to Bitcoin's miner, Skyminer is not designed to compete for block package rights, but to encrypt, decrypt, transfer content, and transfer traffic. Eliminating a large amount of computation that has no practical value in order to compete for the package right, its hardware cost is lower and more efficient

The bitcoin mining machine is based on the POW algorithm, and carries a lot of calculations without actual value for accounting purposes. Skyminer's hardware costs are lower, the efficiency is higher, the selling price is lower, and the energy consumption for running is less.

Skyminer is also more convenient to use, and is currently developing "plug and play" capabilities designed to help unskilled users easily deploy their own nodes so that everyone can become a member of the decentralized network.

Because Skyminer provides bandwidth and storage space as physical resources, Skywire has more practical value.

In the future, Skywire will not only be used in the Skycoin ecosystem, but it will also replace ISPs to provide better services for the current Internet.

Skyminer is a small hardware device that is a working node in the Skywire mesh network. Skywire provides network services through Skyminer.

A Skyminer is similar in size to a small safe. The current specification has 8 boards, 64 boards, and 256 board boards with internal embedded computer chips that provide bandwidth, operation and storage .

It has only one power supply and can power multiple groups of devices, such as powering 24 computing nodes. Rather than having a single power supply for each computer, we only need one power supply to power dozens of nodes, reducing cost and complexity.

Assuming that you and the neighbour’s Skyminer have been connected via the antenna, you will be able to use the neighbour’s path as the bandwidth. For example, your network bandwidth is 100 megabits, and you have connected five neighbours. Each of them has a 100-megabit connection speed and your connection speed will reach 500 megabytes .

When the bandwidth, storage, or computing power of a Skyminer is not enough, another Skyminer's resources can be connected and used, and tokens can then be paid to it. Skyminers providing resources can obtain tokens, which form in the Skycoin ecosystem. A closed-loop economy.

Skyminer processes 100 megabits per second per chip .

Each chip is equivalent to a mobile phone processor, cost about 20 US dollars, you only need to configure the number of chips according to their needs, do not need to buy an expensive mineral machine like other blockchain platform.

Skycoin is producing antennas. Skyminer can access Ethernet and plug in the antennas. These antennas can be connected to other Skyminers in a peer-to-peer manner.

The number and function of Skyminer can be configured according to your needs, and it can be increased indefinitely. If you want more bandwidth, you only need to install more antennas; if you want more power, you only need to install more compute nodes; if you want more storage, you only Need to install more storage nodes.

After you purchase Skyminer, you can start running as soon as you access the circuit board to register. It is plug and play .

Skyminer provides hardware support for enterprise and personal blockchain applications, while the CX programming language addresses software-level difficulties. After years of development iterations, we designed the CX programming language to easily implement blockchain application writing

This means that companies do not have to go out and hire a blockchain consultant and pay them exorbitant amount of money. No matter what the current scripting language is, companies can let their existing programmers train after four or five hours to write blockchain applications.

It is also possible to build a knowledge-sharing platform where people who provide learning materials can get tokens, and those who use learning materials pay tokens.

The way to achieve this is actually quite simple: purchase several Skyminers (you can even buy them, use tokens to use other people's resources), connect to Skywire plug-and-play, and apply your application via the easy-to-learn CX. Deploy it so that it builds its own blockchain application and begins operations

When you release a token on Skywire, you will also have a mobile wallet, a PC wallet, and a hardware wallet. You will have a blockchain application hardware platform that is your own.

If you want to use Skywire, you must first become a node on the network. The nodes that forward traffic will encrypt the traffic directly and they cannot know the final direction of the encrypted packet. You only know to connect your previous and next nodes.

At the same time, encrypting data packets will also prevent you from viewing the data. You will receive credit as a reward for forwarding packets. The file can only be unlocked and viewed by the requester's private key after reaching the target public key.

You can think of it as a peer-to-peer seed network where data is encrypted and can only be seen by the downloader. Providers, or providers of interconnected nodes, will be paid according to the provider's bandwidth.

With Skyminer basic hardware and Skywire distributed internetwork, in a user-driven, free and open-to-public blockchain ecosystem, all participants have the opportunity to work together to promote and reshape the entire the Internet

Skyminer has now entered 41 countries and regions, and they are almost all over the world. What Skycoin needs to do is to really move into millions of homes so that everyone can connect to Skycoin's network and develop more powerful Meshwork.

The skycoin foundation has assured its community that the DIY mining machine would all be approved as long as they can provide enough bandwidth to maintain enough online time. The computing power guarantees that the encryption and decryption will work stably during communication and everything will be accepted. Below shows the state of the skywire during internal testing