Bitcoing Global News (BGN)
May 24, 2018 -- ADVFN Crypto NewsWire -- While it is not even in
the top 50 coins as of now, Skycoin has grown by 45% in the last 24
hours and bears some mentioning. If you’ve been
watching Silicon Valley’s latest season,
then you’ve seen that they’re essentially turning their startup
into a Blockchain version of the new internet.
Skycoin’s going for the same
vision. One trip to the landing page of their website yields
the vision of building “the new internet for the new
world.” In explaining what they want this to be, Skycoin makes
clear that their platform has been developed by people who worked
on Bitcoin and Ethereum in their early stages.
What’s even more interesting is
that Skycoin claims to be the platform that “is built to fulfill
Satoshi’s original vision.” It wants to be a better and grander
version of Bitcoin and Ethereum, all at once. So, with this in
mind, how do they plan for their sweeping, grand vision to play
out?
In a blog post on the subject of
their future goals, Skycoin attempts to go over their overall
vision in more targeted detail. What is perhaps their most
illuminating and promising admission here is that they seem to have
“a distributed internet infrastructure,” at the ready.
Going back to our example of
“Silicon Valley,” if you’ve been watching the show, then you know
that the characters are doing the same thing and a distributed
internet infrastructure means the foundation for a completely p2p
or peer to peer internet.
Both the fictional “Pied Piper”
internet and Skywire, which is Skycoin’s
internet, aim to also put customers’ data back into their hands.
Inside of this promise, they mention several of the most high
profile instances of cloud servers being hacked, including Yahoo in
2014, the IRS in 2015, the U.S. Department of Justice database in
2016, and Verizon in 2017, among others.
On top of these instances, the
Skycoin team speaks about the issue of businesses doing almost
anything for customer data, which brings to mind the
ongoing scandal with Facebook and Cambridge
Analytica. In short, businesses have been frequently accused of
caring about profits above all, especially in recent
times.
What does Skycoin plan to do about
this with Skywire? First and foremost, since Skywire plans to be
akin to a Blockchain version of the existing internet, the
principal aim of the product is to cut internet service providers
out of the equation. Skywire wants to be an internet without a
middle man.
In terms of its future performance,
nearly all of Skywire’s uniqueness seems to be based on the
underlying technology of the protocols that will run it. In other
words, the network depends on a technology called “Multi-Protocol
Label Switching” or “MPLS.”
For the purposes of clarity, we’ll
stick to this and the concept of Skyminers as the possibly key
differentiators for Skycoin. Even so, it should be made clear that
Skycoin has even more uniqueness to offer, which bears separate
pieces. NetworkWorld calls MPLS “reliable but expensive,” and adds
that it is currently being limited at the enterprise level due to
its high costs.
Apparently, businesses are now
trying to figure out how to lower these costs but currently, the
existing internet is largely a cheaper way to get
connected.
These claims stand in contrast to
Skywire’s statements akin to it being the new and improved version
of the internet. Even so, MLPS is not an old technology.
Apparently, it’s been actively running since 1999, although of
course, this doesn’t include running on the Blockchain.
One challenge that MLPS reportedly
could handle better than the technology that our current internet
uses is dealing with the movement of information or “information
packets.” With its present reliance on IP addresses, NetworkWorld
says that the current internet only gives directions on the level
of point a to point b. No specifications are made as to how the
information should travel, including what levels of latency or
delay the information should be exposed to. In other words, it
isn’t usually given any kind of priority.
On top of using MLPS to attempt to
fix the current internet, Skywire has also already started selling
its own proprietary miners called “Skyminers.” One can
conceptualize them in terms of being the foundational energy to
keep the Skywire network running. More precisely, they are the
source of processing power, storage space and anonymity that makes
Skywire what it is.
Skywire hopes that MLPS as well as
its other unique features will solve these issues and more. As of
now, it’s been in its testnet phase since this April and plans to
release its mainnet later on this year. With MPLS and its own
proprietary miners, Skywire may seem like the biggest project of
the year. Even so, if MLPS fails to overcome its shortcomings,
nothing may come of this high-reaching platform.
By: BGN Editorial Staff
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