Skynet – Build a Free Internet
siasky.net
siasky.net
I really hope these blockchain based projects can solve the sharding problem. These blockchains are getting so big.
Plenty newer DTLs have ditched the chain validation process completely and you can start at any point in time with the ledger state of that time and start going forward to the present. Whether that is years or seconds doesn't really matter. It all depend of whether you have an accentual use case for historical transaction data or not.
This is really important because second generation blockchains have way higher transaction throughput, integrated decentral exchanges (DEX) and other advanced feature that requires way more storage. Some already have reached uncompressed sizes of several TBs for the complete history.
See technical documentation for the XRPL https://xrpl.org/ledger-history.html
Curious: beyond XRPL, what are examples of such blockchains?
There is Stellar which is kinda a re-implementation of the XRPL with many smaller changes but its also using a FBA.
There is Flare (only test net exists at time of writing) its the first Turing-complete Federated Byzantine Agreement blockchain. Kinda the ETH 3.0. but it a new project that just used the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) for code compatibility reasons.
Then there are DAG based "blockchains" but these are more experimental, as in no one really know if they "work" from a mathematical point of view. I would consider them to be the third generation if someone manages to fully implement it and run a public blockchain.
Otherwise, if people mostly use web portals, then it's not really free and decentralized, as people are essentially at mercy of portals they use. In fact, if application code itself is served through a portal, it is less secure than normal web.
What would be in the spirit of this site is open, thoughtful critique that explained what the problems or criticisms are so that readers could make up their minds for themselves. "Be warned about this man" is a long way down from that. Please don't do that here, and especially please don't create accounts to do it with.
curl -A "Sia-Agent" "localhost:9980/skynet/portals"
So with Skynet, you can either do "easy" or "decentralized", but not "easy and decentralized", right?
For example, let's say you go to https://skyfeed.hns.siasky.net/ and you make an account (SkyFeed is a decentralized alternative to Twitter built on Skynet). You make some posts, follow some people, then siasky goes down.
So now you go to https://skyfeed.hns.skyportal.xyz/ - skyportal is another Skynet portal run by an independent party. When you log into Skyfeed, all of your previous activity is still visible. Your account and all of its information is hosted on the Sia network, which means siasky is nothing more than an access point, and you don't get any penalties as a user for switching access points.
Having multiple mirrors is NOT decentralization.
My criteria for "decentralized web" candidates are:
* credentials are managed by a trusted component outside of controls of apps, let alone mirrors
* content integrity is checked before it is used
* switching between nodes happens automatically in
background, there should be no SPoF (i.e. if download
through node 1 fails client should automatically retry
from node 2 and so on).
Once you have that though, the rest can be done within the webapp itself. Credentials are managed by a separate webapp like https://sky-id.hns.siasky.net/, and some apps already have built in failover to try other portals if one is not responding.
With the advent of utreexo, it's even possible to run full blockchain nodes inside of a webapp. Again you need an integrity check on the code served by the portal, but if you have that you can independently do everything else.
Also when will ETH2 roll out?
Everyone who uses Eth today is still on Eth1 because Eth2 is only good for having your coins sit there and accumulate interest.
See Vitalik's blog on rollups: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html
As the original post said BCH and Monero are real world ways to transact right now.
Although I figure long term the whole cryptocurrency space will implode (due to greed, infighting, technical problems etc.)
Wouldn't it need to very each individual shard?
Sia is an amazing project with a team who is extremely talented and passionate, but Skynet is the future. They've built a fully decentralized CDN and it's incredible. Ten years from now, I can see it being the norm for startups and maybe even larger companies to use decentralized CDN's like this. I hope Coinbase adds Siacoin for trading soon, since they participated in integrating Rosetta.
https://www.reddit.com/r/siacoin/comments/iox6ly/proposal_th...
It is also not correct to say I am "leaving" the Sia project, I will continue to work on Sia and Skynet as I always have, but administrative control over the codebase is being handed over to a non-profit foundation with a mandate of placing the community health and vision as its primary priority.
My own primary responsibility is to the bottom line of my company, and to the extent that Skynet Labs' bottom line is no longer perfectly aligned with the community's interests, we have created a foundation to ensure the community has a voice in how development progresses for the base layer.
I know that the 18,000 word letter you linked raises a lot of concerns about the project - from the history, to the speed of developemnt, to the core codebase, to the new Skynet initiative, to the economic model, to the team behind the project and the leadership behind the project, to the documentation, to the new initiative to hand over the project to the community, to the communtiy itself - but I don't believe the letter was written from a place of good faith, and I don't believe that most of the arguments hold up to scrutiny, especially if you compare the progress and decision making of the Sia project to competitors like Filecoin, Maidsafe, and Storj
AKA email.
If Trump has been kicked off Twitter, there's nothing stopping him from providing an email newsletter where people can sign-up and recieve his crazy ramblings.
Seriously wondering why people don't do this. Perhaps I shouldn't be giving Trump any ideas?
[0] https://disrn.com/news/email-provider-suspends-trump-campaig...
Although there's nothing stopping him or anyone else running their own email provider.
Which is what is so great about email.
Which happens to normal people all the time.
I tried to download the PDF sample on the frontpage and the download never actually started. It kept waiting for the server to begin transmitting the file...
I thought Sia is the low-level layer and Skynet is the high-level layer, but one of the comments says that Sia encrypts data and Skynet doesn't, so that makes no sense.
Too many names that aren't clearly explained in a very obvious place is a plague that many otherwise cool projects suffer from.
Data on the Sia network is encrypted at a storage layer (as part of splitting it up to send it to hosts), but Skynet files are accessible to anyone who has its hash (portals, ISP, etc could see this info when you access the URL). The file contents are not encrypted by default because they're meant to be widely-accessible, but you can encrypt files on the client-side before sending the, to Skynet, which is what https://skysend.hns.siasky.net/ and some other projects do.
This is very much not a good look at all for the whole thing, and I suggest the developers should both solve this problem amicably ASAP, and also add very clear 'WHAT THIS IS AND HOW IT WORKS' links on every page related to the project, with many real world examples of how/why use this and with nearly no use of specific jargon that's not introduced clearly during explanations.
Or does it have nothing to do with anonymity/bullet-proof links and is merely just a very cheap storage?
P.S. Sorry if this sounds like noob questions but i wasn't able to answer it by looking at their homepage.
If I had asked this question, it would be to gauge how far along the freedom spectrum this service has been designed to operate. There are distribution systems that are capable of even evading the most capable authorities, but their user experience is absolutely horrible.
Any system like this will strike a balance, maybe also designing provisions for removing "material that is really bad". Either out of an ethical obligation, or in order to not risk being shut down wholesale.
A system that was truly free and unlimited, would be the tool of an anarchist. Few people wish the implication of such a technology.
3-4 years ago, I was nearly a free speech maximalist. I hope we figure out a way to properly educate middle school and high school students about cognitive biases, logical fallacies, statistical fallacies, and other tools needed to properly deal with social media. Right now, society is just adjusting very poorly to the advent of social media.
At my school we're just given stale advice about cyberbullying and about posting things we'd regret.
People don't even question the legitimacy of things often or think critically about it. It's as if their critical thinking is numbed. I don't know how else to put it, but it's rather interesting.
It's really something straight out of singularity-related philosophy. A technology with massive benefits and dangers that's rolled out worldwide in only a couple of decades. If you look at social media as a whole, let's say it was in effect a single decade.
I'm sure we'll get a handle on social media eventually, with some damage along the way. But the underlying driver, fast technological change, won't disappear. This is not the last time we'll get into similar trouble.
"Don’t want the world to work like you want it to work. Love how it actually works and you will be happy."
Public facing portals and hosts serving unencrypted data are of course responsible for the content they serve.
People can upload content in two ways: either by using a public facing portal such as siasky.net or by spinning up their own portal client (Sia node) and communicating with hosts directly via the distributed network.
It is possible for individual portals and hosts to take down links and stop serving that content, for example after accepting copyright infringement requests.
It it also possible for anyone to spin up their own portal and keep content pinned as long as any host on the network will accept it. For example, skyportal.xyz is another public portal. Same goes for hosts.
The Skynet (Sia) model aims for thousands and thousands of hosts spread geographically. It becomes extremely difficult to delete any piece of data from the network entirely as long as someone wants to make sure it stays up.
Erasure coding redundancy ensures very high resilience from any single host going offline.
I think this needs to be solved at the protocol level. What if the portal is hosted in a DGAF jurisdiction, but I'm running my node in a different jurisdiction? What forces the portal to keep my interest in mind?
I was assuming that if I run a node serving content, I do not deal with curating that content at all. I just offer my bandwidth/storage for compensation, like a CDN.
I don't want to be involved in curation or moderation at all, I just don't want to be held liable in case I inadvertently serve something that is illegal in my jurisdiction.
You could also piece together content yourself by being your own portal. But running a node does not necessitate running a portal.
Edit: Above is about Sia. Apparently Skynet is different.
On a side note, child pornography is not the intended or primary use case for Skynet and is condemned by the dev team and the community at large. There is no evidence to suggest anyone is using Sia or Skynet for this type of content, and portal operators aggressively censor such content and report it to authorities.
Skynet is intended for privacy and data ownership while also offering users unprecedented features in terms of portability and composability.
The files uploaded via https://siasky.net/ are cleartext, but the files uploaded via https://skysend.hns.siasky.net/ are encrypted. There are also entire dropbox-like apps that are encrypted by default, for example https://marstorage.hns.siasky.net/
Most Skynet usage is app-driven, and therefore whether or not things are "encrypted by default" will depend on the apps that are used.
https://skyfeed-beta.hns.siasky.net/#/ is a social media built upon Sia and Skynet :)
If you "abuse" the network using your own node, you will have to pay for everything you upload and download, which means the people storing it won't really think of it as abuse, you're just another paying customer.
If this abuser was trying to use a public Skynet portal, the same abuse prevention measures apply as for any other data storage service out there. IP banning, filtering, etc
https://siasetup.info/concerns-about-sia-and-skynet
"Sia hosts have always had questionable liability over what they store as hosts. These concerns are likely to amplify with Skynet, where a host may hold a whole unencrypted file and serve it to a portal or public users, exposing the host as being the one that holds a file that may infringe copyright or be illegal in some other way."
Sia hosts already have tooling for complying with DCMAs and abuse notices. To the best of my knowledge, no Sia host has yet received one, but we are prepared for when that moment happens.
Most of the rest of the issues in that letter are overstated and ungenerous. Sia/Skynet is an early project, with a small team and a limited budget. Of course it is not as polished as its centralized alternatives, but if you compare to better funded projects like Storj and Filecoin, I believe it's very difficult to say in good faith that our team is not up for the task.
We cannot rely on that continuing to be the case. Neither Trump nor Biden want Section 230 to keep going as it is.
* Skynet uses a point-to-point protocol rather than a DHT, which not only makes it faster, it's also more robust to abuse. DHTs are pretty famously fragile to things like DDoS and active subversion, and Skynet has been designed to be robust and high performance even when malicious actors are trying to interrupt the network.*
How is P2P used rather than DHT
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~srini/15-441/F11/lectures/21-p2p.pdf
I have had to deal with routing when building the Intercoin project. And spoke to several of the teams including at MaidSAFE. One way of selecting nodes from the global network is to have everyone’s IP addresses. But them you make the entire network susceptible to DDOS attacks. One of the advantages of an additional search layer (DNS, DHT etc.) on top of IP is that it can mitigate DDOS. The other is if the IP actually changes.
Just one of many discussions about the economics of fetching files: https://safenetforum.org/t/how-does-maidsafe-prevent-ddos-at...
Between the explicit list of potential hosts and a small amount of hinting in the Skylink, you can narrow down the number of potential places a file is stored to be small enough that you can just ping all of them in parallel with a request for the data. You don't have to do any multi-hop routing to find the data.
This saves latency.
One of the roles of a good DHT is to localize any DDOS and refuse to propagate it further.
That's still not quite where the centralized CDNs are, but the numbers should only get better as the network grows and matures.
(Disney owns 20th Century Studios, formerly 20th Century Fox, owner of the Terminator franchise.)
The dapp sample was blocked because it was mistaken for a phishing attempt (it's the Uniswap frontend) and Namecheap required us to block the link. Sloppy of us not to change the link to an unblocked example, we'll do that on Monday. In the meantime, here's a dapp sample: https://marstorage.hns.siasky.net/
(I have seen Terminator and am familiar with the origins of the name)
I should clarify: It is another company's trademark or whatever as far as I know (again, could be wrong. Don't know how Disney litigates things in this domain).
Again, I could also be wrong about this not being the only thing called Skynet in the past few years.
I welcome responses!
names tainted.
I mean aside from the "we use blockchain herp derp".