In a time where technology creates new possibilities at a faster rate than we have ever seen, governments and companies are in a rush to confine and misuse those possibilities as much as they can. The most telling example is their way to deal with the advances of the internet, where they exploit the data we create. Most technologies don't go further than to make people's life easier, but the internet gave people the possibility to extend their freedom to gather, speak and be to an extend no one ever thought was possible. Unfortunately, the current internet has a shadow side that can, is and will be exploited.

Our user data is owned by companies and our online life is getting more and more monitored by governments. People built VPN services in an effort to outrun the practices that reduce their privacy, but in the end, those efforts are only managing symptoms of a larger problem. The technology we rely on, the internet we live with, is vulnerable to forces that try to control people for their own interests.

The Great Firewall of China is keeping people from getting access to the internet that was made for them, net neutrality in the USA is a joke that renders smaller companies and initiatives powerless to the power of big corporations, and a lot of other countries are preventing people to access services that are a threat to their political agenda. All due to the way the current internet is build. Luckily there is a project that will change all of that.

About Skycoin's Skywire

I am not tech savvy enough to create an alternative for the centralized mess that is the internet, and I couldn't even imagine how such an alternative would look like until I found out about the Skycoin project about half a year ago. With Skywire, Skycoin will create an infrastructure that makes it impossible for a single party to control the internet and cannot be censored. Skycoin aims to replace the current internet. Where VPN services are build on top of the centralized internet, the decentralized Skywire network IS the VPN. And best of all, it truly is powered by the people.

People will provide the network using hardware nodes. These Skywire "miners" will provide bandwidth and storage to the users, creating a mesh-network. The people providing the bandwidth will in return receive Skycoin for their services. Skywire benefits from the Skycoin blockchain technology, which uses a Proof-of-Trust consensus algorithm. Proof-of-Trust is, other than Bitcoin's Proof-of-Work protocol, highly energy efficient. As such, Skywire miners use CPU's and even smartphones will be able to serve as nodes. With end-to-end encryption, the network will ensure a high level of privacy.

Skywire will work with a "freemium" model, which means that basic access to the network is free (which will probably be higher than the average bandwidth provided by current ISP's) and a fee is asked when you want to make use of extra bandwidth and extra services. The fees will be given to the providers of the nodes. Currently, a single official Skywire miner will be able to provide around 800 mbps of bandwidth, which is 100 mbps per Orange Pi Prime it uses. The Skycoin team is also working on antennas that are expected somewhere later this year.



Image: Skycoin miner, the hardware that keeps the network up and running.

For those interested in the project, you can find out more about it at Skycoin.net. For those interested in building their own Skywire miner, take a peek at the Skycoin forum and Skywire miner assembly manual.

The internet made a good start, but Skywire is the inevitable upgrade. Testnet will be up by the end of March and mainnet will follow soon after. You better get ready.