“This article was originally published by Roel Van Sabben, a former member of ThreeFold Foundation.”

The ThreeFold Foundation is changing the way how “we” as a whole approach the internet and its underlying technology. We believe building the internet back from the ground up is the only way to dismantle the monster it has grown into – a polluting greed-machine that allows people’s data to be abused for money all while just being accessible to just half of the earth’s inhabitants.

And the best part is, you can have a part in the global shift towards a more sustainable, inclusive, and respectful internet by becoming a ThreeFold Farmer.

So what are farmers?

Simply put: Farmers are people that add capacity to the ThreeFold Grid for anyone to use.

What is this “capacity”?

Capacity is the raw building blocks needed for any internet grid: CPU (processors), Hard Drives, Solid-state drives, memory, etc. Capacity can then be rented by developers and engineers that would like to run their applications on the ThreeFold Grid.

What is in it for me?

As mentioned in the previous paragraph, capacity is rented. This means people that put capacity on the ThreeFold Grid are getting paid by anybody that uses their capacity. But there is more, ThreeFold also incentivizes farmers to add capacity by giving them tokens simply for adding the capacity to the ThreeFold Grid. The amount they receive depends on the specifications of the capacity they put online (how much, how powerful, etc). These tokens are then gradually released over the course of 60 months. So in short, you get paid to do this.

What else?

Capacity for the ThreeFold Grid can be added in all shapes and sizes. It could be a small box no larger than a modem that you put in your office or home, or could be a fully-fledged data center node. The idea is that the grid becomes spread out as much as it can be, as this has some huge benefits for all users and the environment.

1. Less power waste: Less energy is needed to cool all these smaller nodes that are far away from each other, than putting the same resources in a giant room together and having them sit on top off, and beside each other (this is what happens now in large scale data centers).

2. Less bandwidth waste: The closer the capacity is to the end-user, the less unnecessary miles it has to travel. (e.g. a text message in a messaging app might travel from the Netherlands to a data center in America to then forward it to the person living down the street). When concentrating on decentralization and having nodes everywhere in the world this problem resolves itself. And data will take the shortest route possible.

3. More Privacy: This decentralized approach makes it so that there is no “all-seeing eye” within the network – unlike the current setup where tech giants basically own all their users’ data by putting it in their own data centers.

4. More Accessibility: Due to the fact that these resources can be added in small form-factors, it makes it possible to now put internet resources anywhere in the world where there’s a network to plug into (cables in the ground). And this makes it that now people that have limited-to-no funds have access to what the UN declared a human right: the internet. ut more than that, education, connection, entertainment, all the internet brought the western world over the past decade.
   
   

To find out more about how you can become a farmer, please visit ThreeFold’s website www.threefold.io. Our wiki or register to for first access to our next batch of 3Node here: https://pre-register.threefold.io/. We are currently collecting interest for all types of nodes that anyone can host in their home, office, or anywhere else with a power outlet and internet connection.