Skyminer Hardware

The current generation Skyminer is designed to house 8 small computers, all operating as nodes connected to a router. This enables each computer, or node, to run a blockchain application securely and independently. Within a Skyminer, one node could run Skywire VPN, whilst others can run as an SPO Node, a Skycoin node, a Sky-Messenger Node, etc. Therefore, each application will have its own dedicated hardware.

The second generation of the Skywire miner will feature a custom in-house designed OpenWRT router with 16 ports for nodes and two Gigabit ports. We are also working on 64 and 256 node Skyminers. These are necessary steps as we are building an automated platform to deploy millions of blockchain applications in parallel on the Skycoin Fiber architecture, which in turn will increase the demand for nodes to deploy these applications.

Zero Configuration Hardware Platform & Personal Cloud

We have been approached by many companies who want to deploy tens to hundreds of their own blockchains and blockchain applications. The plug-and-play Skyminers give these companies an easy hardware platform on which they can deploy their own applications. Essentially, the platform grants you your own personal cloud.

To facilitate the growing corporate use of blockchain technology, even to industry sectors outside software development, we will make the zero-configuration Skyminers accessible through a web-GUI so that applications can be launched instantly without any programming necessary. One of the use cases for this could be verifiable stock ownership and other corporate records on the blockchain made especially relevant with the amendments to the Delaware General Corporation Law by the Delaware Blockchain Initiative. Not only would the company want to keep redundant copies of its own blockchain, but a law firm might need to keep copies of all their clients’ blockchains. Larger companies might need many more specific blockchains for smaller record keeping tasks. Some companies might need to keep track of other companies’ public records. In this environment, the number of blockchains and nodes would grow exponentially and Fiber will support that growth.

CX Programming Language

Another feature of our platform is the CX programming language. It’s written from the ground up to make it easy to write blockchain applications. Considering the current scarcity of blockchain developers, and the cost associated with them, we designed CX so that any Python or Golang developer can start writing applications in CX with only a few hours of training. Therefore, the pool of blockchain application developers just expanded to the hundreds of thousands of developers who already know Python and Golang. We think this is necessary so that blockchain can be adopted en masse by corporations as well as individuals.

Skywire Monetization & Mesh Networking

Skywire in its current iteration monetizes bandwidth. Later iterations will bring about the addition of monetized computation power and data storage. This will allow anyone with idle cards or excess storage to be able to rent that underutilized asset and receive coins in return. This is similar to other projects like Golem and Storj, however, Skycoin aims to be able to provide all the components of a personal cloud, bandwidth through peep-to-peer networking, storage and computation. This is the reason the second generation Skyminers will feature two gigabit ports, which enable the addition of antennae and mass data storage modules. The antennae will allow the Skyminers to exchange data peer-to-peer and, as a result, create a mesh network.

If several miners are in proximity to each other, they can use all the available paths of bandwidth concurrently from all the connected Skyminers, resulting in the Skyminer having more bandwidth than it would have access to on its own. This aggregation of bandwidth, called channel bonding, is possible because most bandwidth is rarely used at its maximum capacity and the Skywire protocol is designed to use all possible paths for data transmission.

Skyminer Design

We have designed the Skyminers to be very power- and cost-efficient by using mobile processors. We have one power supply that runs dozens of nodes, reducing the electricity consumption, the cost and the complexity of the Skyminer. Further, none of the Skycoin Fiber applications use costly Proof of Work consensus. As low-power mobile processors are inexpensive, adding more nodes to an existing platform won’t incur high costs.

Since the Skyminers are built out of component nodes and modules, if you require more computation, storage, or bandwidth, you can easily install additional computing nodes or storage.

This modular platform facilitates scaling the platform horizontally, from one Skyminer to data center capacities. This will be needed for future applications such as decentralized virtual reality streaming services which would need millions of terabytes of decentralized storage, decentralized caching, and a lightning-fast network. With this horizontal scaling ability, there is no upper boundary to the network. If a future application needs a hundred thousand gigabits per second networking, it would be achievable by adding more modules. We built this platform to be able to handle the requirements of future applications and by doing so we made it the most advanced platform in existence.