A Skyminer Story

Joining the world’s first global mesh network

Somewhere on the Australian coast…

This is my Skyminer.

It was delivered in June 2018, a few days after I placed the order, which means it has been running for a full year now. During that time it hasn’t skipped a beat, with 99.9% uptime each month. It even powers itself up and gets straight back to work when I experience the occasional power outage.

Mine is an official eight-node model, one of the “2nd batch” of Skyminers dispatched by the Skycoin team. Thousands of community members have these official models, while thousands of others have built their own DIY Skyminers, ranging in capacity from one to eight nodes. A basic single-node Skyminer can be built for as little as $40.

Setting it up

A much anticipated parcel

My Skyminer arrived in this box, unassembled. I unpacked the contents, and then spent a couple of hours bolting together the frame, installing the Orange Pi cards and the router and power supply, and connecting the wires and cables. Then another couple of hours to configure the software. The included instructions were very clear and easy to follow. I always enjoyed playing with Meccano and Lego as a kid, and this was just like a grown-up version!

I only ran into one small complication. My home broadband router IP address range was locked by my ISP, and it clashed with the Skyminer’s default range. But this issue was quickly resolved by asking a few questions in the Skywire support group on Telegram, which is staffed 24x7 by experienced Skycoin developers and engineers. So after following their instructions and changing my Skyminer’s IP address range, I was ready to join Skywire.

Connecting to Skywire

Thousands of Skyminers around the world

When I first switched on my Skyminer twelve months ago, there were already approximately 5,000 nodes on the Skywire network. Mine was just the second node to be deployed in Sydney, NSW, Australia.

Today there are almost 13,000 nodes around the world. This means Skywire already has more nodes than XRP (1,000 nodes), more than Bitcoin (9,700 nodes), and more than the Tor network (7,700 nodes). This is an astonishing achievement after just one year (and the numbers continue to grow rapidly).

Skywire is the world’s first global peer-to-peer distributed mesh network. It’s a brand new Internet service that runs parallel to (and also interconnects with) the traditional Internet. But unlike the legacy Internet, access to Skywire is not controlled by monopolistic ISPs. It can’t be blocked or censored by any government. And your data on Skywire is by default fully encrypted end-to-end, so it can’t be spied on, tracked, or sold to advertisers.

Skywire nodes are carrier agnostic. They can communicate with each other via wireless, radio, laser, satellite or direct cable connections (as well as via regular ISP links of course). Anyone can buy a Skyminer and antenna, or build your own using inexpensive, readily available components. Then simply point it at a nearby node. You can even hide the antenna in your attic or behind a bush if you want, and nobody will ever know you have it.

Make money while you sleep

A sunny morning in Australia. Skywire nodes and antennas can also be solar powered.

My Skyminer has proven to be a zero-maintenance device. I haven’t had to touch it since I powered it up a year ago. It runs completely silently, because the Orange Pi cards don’t require cooling fans. And the cards consume less power than a mobile phone, meaning it costs only 10 cents per day to run.

This is a far cry from those noisy, electricity-guzzling ASIC miners that are used to mine Bitcoin and other Proof of Work cryptocurrencies.

The Skywire network has been in testnet phase for the past year, and official Skyminers have been earning approximately 80 $SKY per month. At the current value of AUD$2.50 per $SKY, that’s roughly AUD$2,400 that my Skyminer has earned so far. The hardware components that make up the device are valued at AUD$600, resulting in a 3X annual return on investment based on that metric.

Of course, when the Skycoin price returns to its previous all-time-high of AUD$60, then the rewards for the past year would be valued at AUD$57,600.

And there are many who expect the value of one Skycoin to increase into the hundreds or even thousands of dollars over the years ahead. It’s important to remember that early Bitcoin miners saw the value of one Bitcoin soar from a few cents to AUD$28,000 at the last peak.

(It’s also worth noting that running a Skyminer node is not the only way to earn money with the Skycoin project. This article discusses eight other ways to generate a reliable income stream with Skycoin.)

Escaping the scourge of censorship

In March this year, the major ISPs in Australia and New Zealand blocked all access to sites that hosted footage of the Christchurch massacre. The blocked websites include 4chan, ZeroHedge, 8chan, Voat, LiveLeak, Archive, Bitchute and KiwiFarms.

As a semi-regular visitor to ZeroHedge and 4chan/biz, I would have found this censorship inconvenient, were it not for my Skyminer. Fortunately I was able to use my Skyminer to access the Skywire VPN and hop off at an exit node in a country of my choosing. I generally use exit nodes in Japan, but I could have selected any country that wasn’t blocking access to the sites I wanted to visit.

Centralized ISPs are the gatekeepers to the current Internet. Governments use these ISPs to restrict our access as they see fit. ISPs can block specific websites, block traffic at the application or protocol level, or they can simply switch off our connections entirely. They also monitor our traffic, track the sites we visit, throttle our bandwidth, overcharge for subpar services, and sell our personal data to advertisers.

Even in a supposedly progressive country like Australia, draconian new anti-encryption laws allow the government to rule VPNs illegal. The government can easily misuse these laws, for example by instructing ISPs to block access to VPNs, or to block all encrypted traffic (which could include all blockchain-related traffic).

Skywire provides a means to break free from this increasingly dystopian Internet. By circumventing ISPs and government-controlled infrastructure, Skywire delivers true net neutrality and places control of the Internet back into the hands of the people, where it belongs.

Skycoin and Skywire infrastucture will also be used to create and host decentralized versions of Wikipedia, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook and other social networks, ending the scourge of censorship and shadowbanning that currently prevails on these centralized platforms.

Access to this new Internet is free if you have your own Skywire node, or if you hold Skycoin in your wallet (holding Skycoin generates Coin Hours which are used to pay for Skywire services). And since nodes can run indefinitely on solar power, the Skywire network will remain operational in the event of wars or natural disasters that shut down the local communications infrastructure.

Final thoughts

The Skyminer is an exceptionally well designed piece of hardware. It doesn’t cost much to build, it runs silently and consumes very little electricity, and it provides essential services like bandwidth, cloud storage and distributed computing power to the Skywire network. Skycoin is also close to releasing its second-generation Skyminer — a smaller plug-and-play version designed for global mass adoption.

But the Skyminer is just one of Skycoin’s hardware products. The company also designs and manufactures hardware wallets, antennas, and custom circuit boards and chips. In fact, Skycoin is the only blockchain platform with its own range of dedicated hardware.

And unbelievably, Skywire is simply one application running on the massive Skycoin ecosystem. Other components of the ecosystem include the Skycoin currency (fast, free, private transactions), the Coin Hours parallel currency, the CX programming language, the Skycoin Fiber blockchain platform, the numerous ICOs that have launched on Fiber, as well as the various games and apps built on top of this Skycoin infrastructure.

Despite being under the radar for now, the reality is Skywire has no serious competitors, and neither does the Skycoin platform as a whole. Soon the world will wake up to the potential of this revolutionary technology, and Skycoin will rise through the ranks on CoinMarketCap to take its rightful place among the top-10 blockchain projects.

If you’d like to learn more about the world’s most comprehensive blockchain ecosystem, then simply join one of these Skycoin telegram groups today.

Skycoin: https://t.me/Skycoin

Skywire: https://t.me/Skywire

Sky Fiber: https://t.me/Skyledger

CX General: https://t.me/Skycoin_CX

CX Labs: https://t.me/CXLabs

CX Game Dev: https://t.me/Skycoin_Game_Dev

Skycoin Rewards: https://t.me/SkycoinRewards

Price Discussion: https://t.me/SkycoinTrading