Skywire is Unstoppable

Some people may try. Those people will fail.

Skywire is the totally distributed new Internet developed by the Skycoin project. It is end-to-end encrypted and designed to be faster and more secure than the current Internet. When fully deployed, regular citizens will be incentivized to purchase or build Skyminers, which are essentially dedicated computers that contribute power, bandwidth, and storage space to the Skywire network. With the addition of a small, inexpensive antenna, those individuals will become literal Internet Service Providers (ISPs) for their communities and will earn cryptocurrency for the amount of traffic routed through their Skywire nodes. In fact, more than 10,000 such nodes are already deployed around the world, with more coming online every day.

Skywire is Here

Skywire is not a description of a theoretically ideal system to be deployed some distant future state. Integral components of this network are rolling out now, all over the world. You are free to route internet traffic through the Skywire network today, as a super-secure and anonymous VPN. Soon, antennas from one community will connect to those of another and ultimately, neighborhood-by-neighborhood, city-by-city, Skywire will become a global, wireless mesh network, providing faster and more secure internet access at a fraction of the cost people currently pay ISPs.

No one can spy on you, track you, or profile you on Skywire. No surveillance of the network is even possible, and because it is completely distributed, it is indestructible and uncensorable. There is no ISP intermediary to intercept traffic, keep logs, block websites, or throttle speed.

This incredible technological achievement has been quietly developed and rolled out over the past few years by the Skycoin project team. In addition to supplanting the imperfect privacy tools in use today, Skywire will provide hope for people living in areas where governments maintain a tight grip on the flow of information over the Internet.

TOR and VPNs: Imperfect Privacy Tools for an Imperfect Internet

There are a few alternatives for the privacy-conscious or people living in oppressive countries, and while they are better than nothing, but they are far less than ideal, and fall well short of the protection offered by Skywire. The Internet was simply not built for anonymity, and TOR and VPNs are ‘good-enough-for-now’ kludges running overtop of a broken system still using TCP/IP, a 30-year-old protocol. (Instead of TCP/IP, Skywire uses Multi-Protocol Label Switching, or MPLS, a faster and more modern approach to creating a scalable and efficient network.)

TOR, The Onion Router; so-named for its ‘layers’ of encryption. It has been good enough for the TCP/IP legacy Internet, but has been made obsolete by Skywire.

Eventually, the traffic on TOR needs to be decrypted and leave the TOR network, which it does through exit nodes. Thousands of email messages and passwords have been intercepted via exit nodes in the past. And TOR must be configured precisely so that JavaScript or other plugins do not leak your true IP address to websites. Thousands of BitTorrent users who thought they were anonymous by using TOR have had their IP addresses captured by researchers.

VPNs are likewise at risk for many of the same reasons, and can also leak one’s IP address if not configured correctly. A user must also trust that their data is not being logged by their VPN service provider, who may be obliged to disclose those logs when asked. VPNs also tend to also be either slow or expensive (and sometimes both).

Myth #1: Using Skywire for Evil

Tales are told of anonymous darknets accessed via the TOR network where drugs are sold in exchange for cryptocurrency, crimes are committed with reckless abandon, and illegal child exploitation material is freely disseminated. The illusion of anonymity convinces people that they can get away with these illicit activities without fear of getting caught. This, of course, is not true, and many people have been arrested for illegal activity conducted on the so-called dark web, including Ross Ulbricht, the head of Silk Road, a marketplace for illegal goods operating on a .onion darknet TOR website, along with many of its customers. (A copy-cat Silk Road 2.0 which sprang up in the wake of the original’s dissolution has also seen its purported leader arrested.)

Watch out! This hoodie-wearing hacker is crashing through your ones and zeros!

When people hear about Skywire, there are typically two primary concerns. The first is about the potential for the network to be used for illegal or illicit activity. This, of course, is the other side of the double-edged sword. What these people fail to realize, perhaps, is that the illicit activities they are imagining are already being conducted both on the open web through VPNs, and also through the TOR network. There have always been anonymous ways to communicate which predate the Internet, including cryptography and other spycraft. Even Apple’s “Messages” app and Facebook’s “WhatsApp” are end-to-end encrypted means of communicating.

There will always be people who use tools for nefarious purposes or purposes for which those tools were not intended. But Skywire will not cause bad behaviour, even if it may potentially be used to facilitate it. In this, it will be in good company with nearly every other technological innovation. But it is not prudent or necessary to throw our respective right to privacy out with the Silk Road bathwater.

Myth #2: Governments Will Outlaw Skywire

Naturally, there are some who hear about Skywire and become concerned about its political viability.

Specifically, people conjure the very real spectre of authoritarian regimes and corrupt governments around the world who already limit their citizens’ access to the Internet, or censor huge swaths of information they do not want their citizens to know. The infamous Great Firewall of China is just one egregious example of a government trying desperately to keep its citizens uninformed about certain unpleasant or inconvenient facts about the country in which they live.

These governments, some people argue, will never let a disruptive network like Skywire operate within their borders. Indeed, VPNs are limited or outlawed in several countries and anonymizing or encrypted web software like the TOR browser are likewise banned. So if Skywire were to try to get a foothold, it, too, would simply be banned along with all other technology that could be used to circumvent the law.

What these people are failing to understand is that Skywire is completely immune to this kind of censorship. The methods used to censor the legacy Internet do not apply to Skywire. There are no IP addresses to block. There is no ISP to intimidate, coerce, or force to block certain data.

If there are no technological means whereby governments can detect or prevent Skywire access, perhaps they will simply deploy police to search roofs for Skywire antennas and arrest anyone who is operating one. But Skywire antennas do not have to be roof-mounted in order to function.