Its a myth that the whole chain is needed. Comes from BTC where you need the chain to recreate all transactions. It has zero practical use. If you would consider the current state of a blockchain to be "wrong" but everyone agreed to move forward anyway you may as well call it "correct" because by definition the majority decides what is right and what not in these systems. So you dont really need to validate the whole chain. All the splits and hard forks are well known and you can only agree or not use that particular chain. The accrual process of validating yourself is moot. Its not like you could find something new by running the exact same code thousands of other ran over that data before you.
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.
I guess there is not really a definition. Some would say PoS chains is the second generation but its arguably worse than FBA (Federated Byzantine Agreement) and its first implementation in public blockchain came way after the XRPL (FBA) already existed.
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.
My cofounder has been working on an upgrade for Sia that switches the core consensus engine to 'utreexo', which uses an accumulator rather than an entire blockchain history to verify new blocks and transactions. This brings down the effective size of the chain for users to just a couple of megabytes for the same history that currently takes 23 GB.
It would be cool if you can implement a light node (just enough to download files) in a browser extension, so people browse Skynet directly.
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.
Note: Taek is the same user that the SiaSetup website (the main source of documentation about the project) is criticizing as "unstable project management". Be warned about this man before sinking any significant amount of personal time or money into this project. Source: https://siasetup.info/concerns-about-sia-and-skynet#banned
We've banned this account. Single-purpose accounts are not allowed on HN, and creating one just to stir up the community against a rival project or (worse) some person is a bad sign. Regardless of who's right in this, there's clearly a pre-existing agenda and probably an internecine conflict being imported to the community here, and that sort of campaign isn't in the spirit of this site.
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.
That's the crazy thing about Skynet. You can do both "easy and decentralized".
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.
Sorry, but this is not decentralized at all, as you are at mercy of siasky.net serving you the right code. If siasky.net is compromised it will serve you code which steals the account. This is strictly inferior to normal web, as you need to trust both the app developer and the portal code is served from.
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).
I don't think you can achieve this without integrating with a browser.
We're closer than I think you give us credit. The only major component we're missing is that normal browsers don't have the ability to verify that the portal is serving you the right code - which is of course super important.
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.
The only missing piece is a browser plugin or a dedicated browser that verifies that each piece of content you are served corresponds to the hash you are requesting. This is on the global roadmap, as well as automatic portal switching. The philosophy of the project is absolutely in line with your thinking.
That's fine, you can switch if necessary. Like a backup, you don't need decentralization 99.9% of the time, but the 0.1% of time when you need it, it can save your ass.
I agree! Ethereum is already to big and too expensive to use. I hold a lot but worry about both BTC and Ethereum. Normal people can no longer use either chain for everyday transactions and at this rate Ethereum will never work as a global computer. To me only Bitcoin Cash and Monero really have their use cases and code sussed out. Sia (and filecoin) work great but both have issues with their insentives, in Sia's case they issue too many coins and it's not profitable to host content.
ETH has already solved scalability with Zero Knowledge Proofs and Optimistic Rollups. Some dapps are clocking 2000 transactions per second. Also, ETH 2's initial beacon chain has launched and when ETH2 fully rolls out, there will be 64x that available on the network.
I think you misunderstand the state that Eth2 is in. It's technically "released", but Eth2 cannot be used to transact. If you move money to Eth2, it must stay in the same wallet/address until more features are rolled out.
Everyone who uses Eth today is still on Eth1 because Eth2 is only good for having your coins sit there and accumulate interest.
No, they are making rapid progress on ETH2. The beacon chain is the root chain for the other 63 shards that will be launched. That is the chain that is currently running in parallel with the ETH1 chain.
You claim Sia issues too many coins. That is a myth. Inflation in 2021 will be no higher than 7%, declining every year after that. In case you are referring to the total supply, would it make you feel better to move the decimal to the left?
Hosts have been saving and serving content since the launch of the Sia network years ago. It is profitable if done at scale. For more information, https://siastats.info/storage_pricing
Lightning network is a joke tbh. It’s just gonna be a few large payment processors acting as banks (it can’t be decentralised cos the routing will just break.).
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.)
Disclosure: I mined Siacoin for years and have hundreds of thousands of tokens.
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.
No, they've made purpose-built silicon for sia mining and it is no longer viable to mine on general purpose compute. As far as storage mining - it may be. last check (november) filecoin was the most profitable to host your disk space for but required a rediculous amount of compute as well as disk space (latest gen GPUs, 128G ram, near-100% uptime).
It's relatively early days for filecoin though. I suspect that after "we've got space and availability, see?" period, the restrictions for hosting will be relaxed.
We’ve been using Skynet for all our decentralized web projects at Namebase.io ever since they added Handshake naming support[1] — it’s been fantastic. It now takes us days to build things that previously took our intern a month to do. With censorship entering the zeitgeist nowadays I wouldn’t be surprised if the next big decentralized social network is build on Skynet.
Be warned of the large post mine coming to SiaCoin soon (the crypto-currency that powers Skynet). Massive inflation is coming to SiaCoin because of this to pay off Skynet Labs as they exit development on the Sia core protocol. David (aka Taek), the original creator, is leaving the Sia project to become a third party dev (working for the new Skynet Labs VC funded company) and will no longer be working on making the Sia core protocol actually work better. Lots of outstanding issues in the Sia core protocol still and with Sia losing their founding dev it raises concerns if the Sia protocol will ever be able to mature. Read more at https://SiaSetup.info (and more specifically https://siasetup.info/concerns-about-sia-and-skynet)
The "post mine" is something that has been discussed in the community for many months, and is not something we are hiding - in fact it's stickied at the top of /r/siacoin and has appeared in all of our announcment channels and official newsletters.
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
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?
You've just made me realize network effects work both ways: If you can't receive any of your GMail friend's mail, you have a problem. If the last of your GMail friends can't receive any of their (in this example, Republican friend circle's) mail, they have a problem.
> Skynet's speeds rival centralized providers and surpass all decentralized offerings. A typical Skynet download starts in under 500 ms and can stream at rates as high as 1 Gbps!
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...
What's the difference between Sia and Skynet? This is the point that confuses me most.
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.
Yeah, there's actually organizational changes happening to help remedy this. At risk of over-simplifying:
- Sia is the blockchain project that lets renters and hosts create a market for storage space. (using SiaCoin as the cryptocurrency)
- Skynet uses this market to provide a data backend for a web ecosystem for developers and users. They access the ecosystem through "portals," which are actually just specialized hosts on the sia network.
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.
I had zero knowledge of what any of this was (Sia, Skynet, etc), tried looking it up on the page but the technical terms were too many and there was no glossary I could find. So I started searching, read the Readme on Sia's project on Gitlab, and then came upon this website [1] which harshly demonizes both Sia and Skynet due to maintainers banning a critic, and allegedly being generally toxic.
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.
I'm asking in earnest but since I'm not very savvy when it comes to blockchain and decentralised internet, can this be used for piracy (movies mp3 etc)? What about really nefarious stuff like CP? Do we know who is responsible and is it possible to report and take down links? Also does running a node involve you in anything unknowingly?
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.
Although this is a very fair question, I cannot help but notice that the first thing people associate with the word freedom today is with a negative angle. This is really troubling me, as it used to be a more cherished value.
True, unlimited freedom in this sense inevitably means the ethically very worst use cases, because this is the limit of freedom in any society: Material that is illegal and will have the authorities use all reasonable efforts to stop its spread. Whether that's political discussion or CP depends on the society.
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.
I think it’s because people end up asking “what can I functionally do on this platform that I can’t functionally do on another platform”, and it’s easier to think of these ‘negative’ examples.
I think this maps reasonably well to a rise of both technological abuse and accountability when producing things for the internet now, compared to what it used to be.
Yes, particularly after observing how poorly society is adapting to pervasive social media.
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.
I wish more schools taught us the tools to deal with 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.
The Internet is like we've suddenly invented sugar, alcohol or firearms, without any of the societal tools to limit its damage. Laws, norms, defense forces, taboos.
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.
One of these days, I'm going to actually sit down and read through Juvenal's Satires[0]. I've read Plato's Republic and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, but not any of the Roman classics.
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.
> It is possible for individual portals and hosts to take down links and stop serving that content, for example after accepting copyright infringement requests.
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?
As a user you have the ability to control what apps you use, what feeds you use, who you follow, etc. Decentralization doesn't mean it's completely free of moderation, it means users have the ability to pick their moderators and the ability to decide what is allowed on their feed and what is not.
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.
Nodes don't serve content. They serve blocks of encrypted data to other nodes. Portals run a node AND piece together content from blocks received from many nodes THEN serve the content.
You could also piece together content yourself by being your own portal. But running a node does not necessitate running a portal.
That is incorrect. Only files on the basic Sia client are all stored encrypted. Skynet stores all files by default in cleartext. It is up to Skynet users or app developers to ensure files that are uploaded are encrypted client side.
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.
It's not really correct to say that Skynet stores all files 'by default in cleartext'. Skynet is a platform for building applications. Whether data is encrypted or cleartext is up to the app developer.
Can somebody explain what the difference between this and IPFS is? I see block chain mentioned so I assume you pay for storage but that page just allows you to upload anything right away without payment. Is this actually an alternative to FileCoin?
Didn't realize this was built on Sia. Interesting! I used to follow their development closely back in ~2017. I like how this product seems to be pretty straightforward to use. Hope it leads to more.
The Sia and Skynet projects are focused on achieving a vision of a decentralized future for the Internet. Pumping the token value has never been a priority. SC is a utility token, and you should buy it if you want to use the Sia network.
It's a paid network. https://siasky.net/ is free for the moment, but will be switching to a freemium model in the near future. As a portal, siasky will have the ability to ratelimit and block abusers.
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.
Cost. If this abuser was running his own Portal node to do so, he would simply be paying hosts to host his junk data. Hosts would be very happy to do so, as they set their own prices.
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
"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."
I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but most jurisdictions have strong protections for providers hosting third party content so long as the providers are not aware that the content is problematic. If a provider is notified that there is problematic content on their machine, they have an obligation to take it down in a reasonable timeframe.
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.
> I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but most jurisdictions have strong protections for providers hosting third party content so long as the providers are not aware that the content is problematic.
We cannot rely on that continuing to be the case. Neither Trump nor Biden want Section 230 to keep going as it is.
Portals and hosts manage abuse reports. It is their responsibility to filter content. Of course, anyone can spin up their own portal and pin content that is being censored. However, that is their private business.
No low size limitation on files is a feature, not a bug. Files on public portals are currently kept for 90 days on a best effort basis. If you want to make sure your files stay pinned, you will soon be able to sign up for a paid account.
We're just finishing up the database code to handle this, but most Skynet portals intend to operate on a freemium model. If you use Skynet for free, you get a certain amount of storage and a ratelimit on your usage of the platform, and if you upgrade to a flat monthly fee you get more storage and better access speeds.
* 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.*
Think about it this way. To be able to find who is hosting the file, we need a mutable shared data structure which can be updated with this information as it changes over time. In IPFS, this is fulfilled by the DHT, whereas in Skynet/Sia the blockchain takes over the role.
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.
To be a host on Skynet, you have to declare yourself on the Sia blockchain, which means users running a blockchain node (full node or lite node) are able to have a complete and limited list of all the possible hosts on the network. The Skylinks aren't just hashes, they contain a couple bytes extra of information as well.
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.
Most of the latency right now is software slowdowns, our production testing suggests that with some more optimization at the software level we should be able to get below 80ms with today's protocol and host network.
That's still not quite where the centralized CDNs are, but the numbers should only get better as the network grows and matures.
We get somewhere between dozens and hundreds of DMCA's per week, and we comply with all of them. We can't actually take content off of Skynet itself (similar to how you can't actually take content off of IPFS), but we can have our portal (https://siasky.net) refuse to serve content with known-infringing or known-abusive hashes.
GP was joking about the name of the project itself infringing on Disney trademarks, but (as a peer notes) Fox/Disney hasn't registered a trademark on Skynet.
Are you in Europe by any chance? We haven't finished setting up load balancing yet and the Europe server is getting hit really hard right now.
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/
Yep, I'm from Europe. After changing my vpn to the US, it started working m
Thanks for the HEADS-UP, really hope this project future is less sloppy than it's lunch on HN.
Look it’s Sia, the only non-vaporware ICO that quietly shipped a mostly working and usable version of what Filecoin raised 100X more to so far fail to ship (in a usable form).
Sia is also about to initiate a large post-mine which will go directly to cashing out the dev's work on the protocol for the last 6 years. To me a post-mine cashout is worse than a pre-mine ICO because it more closely resembles shady bait-and-switch tactics than being up front about where the money to fund development will come from.
Portal and renter nodes pay hosts for the data in Siacoin. These payments are managed by file contracts that renters and hosts agree on and sign cryptographically. These contracts involve periodic verification that the data is being hosted. Failure to verify involves an automatic financial loss for hosts.
I might be entirely wrong but I feel like I've seen multiple projects called Skynet in the past few years. I can't recall any others running currently because some of them might've become defunct and/or I've forgotten about them. I wonder what the appeal of the name is nowadays.
(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.
Well, it does provide a neat explanation for the Terminator franchise: the in-movie Skynet is an advanced version of this Skynet, which decided to conquer humanity because it was trained on data from all the fascists that are bound to flood Skynet with their rhetoric.
Among other things, the blockchain/crypto part ensures hosts and portals have a monetary incentive to host data, making their service scalable and sustainable.
I really hope these blockchain based projects can solve the sharding problem. These blockchains are getting so big.
[1] https://siastats.info/blockchain_size