Skycoin and Skywire are two separate components of the Skycoin Project. Skycoin is the blockchain. Skywire is the mesh network.



Skywire itself can operate without Skycoin. It would not be the first meshnet software out there. There have been several attempts at building meshnets but none of them have grown very large because it has been an all-volunteer effort and lacking the right technology. By integrating Skycoin with Skywire, individuals can earn money for running the Internet, instead of large ISPs.

It is called the new Internet because it is designed to correct major flaws of the old Internet



The present Internet is beset with a lot of problems

First of all, you receive access to the Internet via an Internet service provider (ISP). In order to do that, you need to set up a contract with an ISP, meaning you have to give them personal data about you and arrange payments on a regular basis. What then happens is that these ISPs can track your online behaviour? They are basically able to see every website you visit. This surveillance can include up to every click you have made online during the past few years, with each one of these clicks coming along with a timestamp and the location of your device. Combining the tracked data with your personal data, it is absolutely possible for them to generate a very high-detailed personal profile about you.



Secondly due to the centralization of Internet service providing, it is fairly easy for governments and other influential actors to censor certain content. This can happen by simply deleting the content or by redirecting you to a different source, while you are trying to access censored content. Think about it as an approach similar to phishing websites, instead of seeing a website that was censored, you are seeing a similar looking site with alternated content, which tricks you into thinking that it is the site you wanted to visit, but apparently, it is not .

Thirdly the underlying Internet protocol routing is not the best solution available, because it lacks path control. Data could be transferred through a path, that is longer than the shortest path available, which will reduce the speed of a transmission and the effects of these could be catastrophic depending on what you are using the Internet .



All these lead to the development and re-invention of the new Internet been actualized in the skycoin project by SKYWIRE by the use of sky"miner".

Skywire uses blockchain technology to create a peer-to-peer community-driven market for Internet service. It’s fast, private, and secure. Best of all, it puts the user first

With Skywire, you benefit directly from your contributions to the network. Users can earn coins for running hardware nodes and providing bandwidth and storage. You can then spend your coins by consuming media or other network resources. This system makes Skywire self-sustaining and independent: the more you use it, the more robust the network becomes. Skywire is an incentivized mesh network.



Skywire is built for users, by users. Unlike networks under corporate ISPs, the community makes decisions on Skywire. Nodes function based on a web-of-trust system. Malicious nodes can be cut off by collective agreement, and trustworthy nodes strengthened. Web-of-trust consensus makes Skywire immune to attacks, exploitation, and manipulation. It creates a system where everyone has a say.

We need Skywire now more than ever. The FCC’s failure to promote net neutrality means that large ISPs will continue to tighten their grip until they achieve a stranglehold over Internet experience. Fees will rise. Throttling, censorship, and manipulation could become the norm. Users will have less power than they’ve ever had as their browsing data, privacy, and individuality is bought and sold by corporations looking for a profit.

Skywire will protect net neutrality at the hardware level, by taking control of network hardware from the ISPs and putting it the hands of the community. Its peer-to-peer network proves that we don’t have rely on corporate ISPs

In summary



SKYWIRE is a decentralized ISP where you earn coins for forwarding traffic/bandwidth (like Tor but faster, not backdoored by NSA and you are getting paid to run a node), that will give everyone nearly free internet access and will get a lot of users and actually be useful. Different networking protocol than TCP/IP, designed to be immune from literally all currently known network-based attacks.

• Uses public keys instead of IP addresses, with all of the traffic encrypted by default, making man in the middle attacks impossible.

• Nodes forwarding the traffic can only see the previous and next hop, not origin or destination, making it extremely private.

• Latency is superior to TCP/IP because ISPs use hot potato routing, while Sky wire doesn't.

• Speed is superior because bandwidth aggregation is possible, making it possible to share the unused bandwidth of your neighbours.

• Immune to ISP control tactics, such as throttling, censorship, outages, etc.

• Designed to run on skycoin's own open source hardware infrastructure.

• Works as an overlay over the current Internet as of now, but will be completely independent as soon as the network backhaul is in place.

• Incentivized for the first 14 years, you get paid for running a node and transferring packets for the network.

Skywire will be powered by “ skyminer” .



Skywire "miners" are the backbone of the new Internet. Skywire Miners are hardware specially designed to efficiently process encrypted, private data on Skywire and earn the operators of the miner passive Skycoin Coinhours income.

The official position is to utilize ARM processors, since they do not have known backdoors like the Intel ME or AMD PSP but Skywire can be executed on any processor out there.

Later on hardware specific for Skywire like PCB boards and FPGA chips for encryption will be produced, to achieve even higher network speed & security while keeping the costs low.



Skywire miners are nodes that forward traffic in the Skywire network to keep the decentralised internet (Skywire). They are called 'miners' because people using Skywire must pay coin hours in order to get the bandwidth from the Skywire Miners; the coin hours are then paid to the people running the Skywire Miner nodes. You also earn Skycoins by operating as your own ISP, as part of our distribution plan.

Sky miners will be able to plug in to the legacy Internet and create a VPN. Once enough nodes have been established and direct node-to-node connections are in place, the legacy Internet will no longer be required. End user devices will be able to connect to the miners via Wi-Fi or LAN .



It is not a miner per se because skycoin does not have mining. Skycoin has consensus and minting, not mining. Since there is no mining and no block rewards, it is mathematically impossible that the coins are created in any way except the genesis block.

The “skyminer is not really mining, it gives a reward for providing bandwidth for the skywire project .

The Skywire “miner” is meticulously designed and configured to provide a backbone for the new Internet. Its custom-built hardware exceeds technical specifications to deliver maximum power and performance. Skywire functions as a “miner” for Skycoins. It acts as a specialized VPN, using the following hardware configuration:

• 8 CPU boards

• 2 GB of RAM per board

• 4 CPU cores per board

• 64 GB of storage per board

• 64-bit Linux (Alpine Linux)

• Gigabit Ethernet, 8+1 port switch

Each board features an ARM processor, 2 GB of RAM, and anywhere from 32 to 256 GB flash storage. The hardware is segmented in such a way that even if one service is compromised, the other services on the same machine can’t be. An OpenWRT router with strict packet forwarding rules and access control increases security. The setup can be further customized to consist of 4, 8, 16, or 32 boards



People have asked questions like supposing the government decides to block skywire traffic ? How do we connect the "Skyminer" to the fibre infrastructure without going through an ISP ? Which also begs the question of how speed / bandwidth can ever be greater than what the ISP is providing to the "Skyminer" or Node? Does it mean that the Skyminer operators will need to get ISP licences from their relevant governments to directly connect to the fiber infrastructure?

The simple answers to these questions are even with the great "firewall" of China, people are able to get out across VPNs and skywire is a specialized VPN. One of the creation of Skywire is the fastest VPN that has ever existed on Earth.



In terms of bandwidth, you’re going to hit the limits of what your hardware can decide before you hit the limits of what Skywire can provide

For the mesh net, the only way to block it is to remove all license free radio bands (2.4/5Ghz, etc.). If they did that, all baby monitors and other wireless products would need a special license.

Skywire will use radio frequencies that do not require a license and is available on the consumer market now.

Additionally, Skywire will be developing new wireless hardware technology.

The beauty with skywire is if you’re running a node for Skywire, you don’t see the data and it’s contents. You only see the bits total being sent through your node. So you don’t need to worry about forwarding illegal data, as you can’t see it and you’re therefore not liable. Only the sender and the receiver know what they’re communicating.



You can choose to unsubscribe from nodes that you think are running illegal content. You also only replicate the data that you want on your computer, like your friends’ feeds.

End to end encryption protects nodes passing on data; they have no liability, as they can’t see what the data is.

As per connecting to connecting to fiber infrastructure without going through an ISP,

Skywire is backwards compatible with current ISPs, but will eventually break free and be entirely independent by building it’s own wireless mesh internet. While Skywire runs over the legacy network, ISPs can’t throttle the traffic or observe it via DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) because Skywire uses pluggable transport, therefore it can be masked as any other protocol out there. This mesh Internet is possible now with current unlicensed consumer technology.



However, the Skycoin team is manufacturing his or her own wireless hardware that will be plug and play with the miner, soon to be released.

skywire nodes will use actual infrastructure initially but as more nodes are connected to each other, mesh network will be evolved and you will not need "Internet Connection" to transfer data



There would be no need for connecting to the fibre backbone if the content you want is connected directly to a node like ipfs and that node is reachable by your node via the mesh network. Of course this would initially be a more like a LAN not a WAN, but over time if adopted widely it would become an Internet of sorts by process described above



In addition to this you will be able to “mine” with any device that can run the Skywire application. Right now, it is built for all Unix platforms. Any device that can run Unix should also be able to run Skywire. There will be support for more operating systems, and platforms in the future. Due to the fact that Skywire “Mining” is not actually ‘mining’ in the sense of solving difficult math problems, but rather forwarding Internet traffic, it does not take a lot of computing power or electricity to get the job done. Therefore, DIY miners are commonly built with Orange Pi’s or Raspberry Pis because of the low power consumption and hardware costs



Skywire will be pennies on the dollar cheaper than current ISPs, and will even have basic access for free. This is a huge breakthrough in technology. The Skywire platform will bring free Internet to the entire world. Specific use cases where low latency and high data rates are required, users will be able to pay with coin hours to get priority service. This is a far more efficient system than the current Internet, and will be much cheaper even for high demand users. Additional to that Skywire is designed to provide a scalable solution for the growing demand of the Iota & VR market.

Users of Skywire will be able to choose what content they subscribe to, and therefore will not have to view any content they do not want to.

Any data passing through a node will be entirely encrypted, so there is no way for nodes to know what they are forwarding. However if they know another node is a bad actor, they can blacklist that node from their connections, and no longer send or receive data from them

Like I pointed out earlier on Skywire will not be the first meshnet software out there but a lot of them have failed and since skycoin is a third generation cryptocurrency designed to correct the flaws of the previous block chain projects it has come with a solution to meshnet projects that didn’t survive

WUGs (Wireless User Groups) are not for profit wireless communities. The network works like a smaller version of the Internet. Many houses, buildings and high sites make up a mesh of interconnected nodes able to pass traffic along to the next, making it possible to connect all nodes on the network.



All equipment is standard Wi-Fi equipment, operating under 802.11 standards, which makes it affordable to anyone

However Skywire is not 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.



The hardworking skycoin team is already developing second-generation skyminers

These second-generation hardware, which will include an OLED screen that displays RAM/CPU/Bandwidth and Skycoins per hour, an OpenWRT router, SATA ports on the board for at least 4 CPU boards, and 32 and 64 board models. The network runs on its own internal Internet with dedicated hardware. In the future, the above hardware configuration will be extended to support physical wireless mesh networks.

Second gen official miners will also have motorized antenna attached. Then we will look at storage capabilities for companies like Spaco (now called Spo).

REWARDS OF HAVING A "SKYMINER" TO RUN SKYWIRE



Skycoin will reward people with skyminer for setting up and registering the mesh nodes

20% to 30% distribution of the coins, through network will be incentives for people running Skywire nodes, consensus nodes and services via the "skyminer "



People, who got an official Miner, bought it with 1BTC and got a bunch of Skycoin as rebate, are also going get a lot of rewards

The testnet will give a little bonus reward to the people who bought the skyminers, because the money goes back to skycoin hardware development to produce more hardware products.

The mining rewards are so obscene that no engineering cost should be spared.

To properly scale the network, all of the DIY miners will get whitelisted and will eventually get the same rewards.

Skycoin is going to make sure that the miners they ship (are the best), will continually upgrade them. (Inferring that at some point DIY miners will not be able to have the same performance as Official miners due to the custom and dedicated hardware)

DIY miners will get rewards but it is based on its performance.

Skycoin is whitelisting specific hardware and specific software for testing on testnet.

Testnet aiming to be ready end of March.

You can earn in the testnet. Bandwidth is priced in coinhours.

Developers paying people in coinhours for running the testnet.

Developers then have a pool of Skycoin to buy back the coinhours.

Accumulated coinhours can then be cashed out into Skycoin.



Everyone that is in before the 6000th Miner will be extremely delighted with the rewards as a result of first mover advantage .

Looking at the formula for how many coins Skycoin have allocated for the first year of distribution, and how many miners they currently have in the queue, and the miner reward is going to be obscene (extremely high) coming from the developer wallet.

Speaking with one of the developers in confidence, this is what he had to say

"If they pay 10k for a miner, then get 6x that amount back from the mining rewards, then that is 70k in Skycoin total. Then if they price goes up 15x, then the 70k turns into $1,050,000 dollars.

Everyone one who bought the first 2000 Skyminers is going to have 1 million dollars per Skyminer. Worse case, if skycoin burns to ground, they only lose $10,000; but they easily could make a minimum of 1 million dollars, for just buying a box, assembling it and plugging it in. Without doing any real work.

It’s just insane. It makes me feel like we are in a bubble. It does not feel real, but that is how mining works."

The test nest net will determine the actual reward structure of skywire

Part of the testnet’s purpose is to determine the reward structure. Various reward algorithms will be tested after launch, and whatever works best will be used for mainnet.

Skywire provides a utility purpose for Skycoins, and Skycoin provides a financial incentive to expand the Skywire network.

Skycoin is a very large project and already has +7 years of development. Different parts of the project have different objectives.



Skycoin Blockchain is Free, Instant, Infinite transactions



Skycoin is an entire ecosystem aside from Skycoin and Skywire, some of our other products include; Sky Messenger (core networking library used for node discovery in Skywire and eventually as an instant messaging platform), Sky BBS (Subscription platform to replace Reddit/4Chan/Etc). We also have our Skyledger program where other businesses can build their own blockchain on the Skycoin platform.



Businesses currently on Skyledger include:

Spaco (https://spaco.online)

MDL Talent Hub (http://mdl.life)

Metalicoin (https://metalicoin.com ) and

Solar Bankers (https://solarbankers.com/ ).

The bottom line of this project was to replace and produce a better Bitcoin . If you are still in doubt, do your due diligence and do not waste time in joining this train . This project is a game changer .

You can sign up for a miner following this link and check " I am interested in a miner"

https://www.skycoin.net/mailing-list/

The first 300 miners have been shipped out and yours truly is a recipient of one and is being configured as i write



You can follow this revolution at www.skycoin.net

Skycoin telegram at https://t.me/Skycoin

Skywire telegram https://t.me/Skywire

To build your own sky miner visit : https://skywug.net/forum/

Skycoin Twitter: https://twitter.com/Skycoinproject

follow me at twitter https://twitter.com/bivins1

if you find the article interesting , please upvote and you can send your skycoin donation to

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