If you’ve seen The Social Dilemma, you know all too well that today, people are being turned into products. Everything we do online – all of the data we upload and all of our digital activities – is tracked and oftentimes used against us. Targeted advertising is just the beginning.

Personal data is used by algorithms to make incredible important decisions, like whether someone should receive financial or health support or benefits. In China, people are now even receiving “scores” for their behaviors. It sounds like Black Mirror, but it’s real life.

That’s the scary part. The good news is that things don’t have to be this way. ThreeFold is building the engine for an Internet where people can finally be autonomous with their data.

With today’s Internet, infrastructure is centralized. Companies provide services in exchange for your personal data, which is stored on servers in hyper-scale data centers owned by private companies.

In ThreeFold’s model, those servers are called 3Nodes, and rather than sitting inside centralized data centers, they sit inside the homes or offices (or small data centers) owned by independent people and organizations called Farmers. But the data inside is owned by the person or persons who put it there. They maintain access right as well. From a technical standpoint, data is dispersed across 3Nodes by an algorithm that makes it such that nobody can access it. In addition, connections are peer-to-peer, meaning data goes directly between sender and recipient rather than passing through intermediaries as it does today – bringing further levels of security.

Thus, people can finally have data autonomy, knowing their data is safe, and truly theirs.

Just like a brain is an interconnected network of neurons, the Internet (or internet) is a global interconnected network of computers and devices that communicate with each other via the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). The communications infrastructure of the Internet consists of hardware components and a system of software layers that control various aspects of the architecture.

To create a new Internet from scratch, ThreeFold had to start at the operating system (OS) level. An operating system is a software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. And this is how Zero OS was born

🔗What makes Zero OS special?

Zero OS is a stateless and lightweight operating system. Given it has no shell, remote or server interface, it is much safer than the big majority of the OSs on the market. When storing your data on Zero OS, it is fingerprinted and made available only when requested by you or those you provide access to.

The state of an application represents its state of being in a given moment in time. Think of a stateless transaction as vending machines, a single request and a response. In ThreeFold’s Internet infrastructure, this can be represented as data being accessible only when requested. The only way to access data on Zero OS is via the private key (or fingerprint) of a user. In that sense, the data is not accessible unless the data owner requests access to it.

🔗How does Zero OS apply to developers?

Thanks to its lightweight architecture, Zero OS is a perfect fit to run microservice architectures and emerging IT workloads such as IoT, Blockchains, Big Data, and more. A key benefit of microservice architecture is the freedom it offers you to choose the best runtime for the task at hand.

Let’s take the example of decentralizing service-oriented developing teams. A common challenge there is that most of the time they don’t really understand the applications they are exposing. But no one knows the data infrastructure of the applications better than those who craft them.

ThreeFold permits decentralized developer teams with the ability to share keys (access) to the developing environment on Zero OS and the gateways to the world wide web within the secure peer-to-peer overlay network. This is game changing. Also with all the automation frameworks provided, it creates the perfect environment to develop current and emerging technologies.

Put shortly, decentralized development and integration is now officially an organizational or cultural change, not a technical one anymore.

🔗Zero OS allows anyone to provide sovereign capacity

Given stateless systems separate the OS configuration and user data, Zero OS simplifies the maintenance and the deployment of digital workloads, while making it impossible to hack into user data on a hardware level.

3Nodes provide all the storage, compute and network primitives for a new internet infrastructure. Given they are booted with Zero OS, anyone can now participate in the Internet economy without jeopardizing user data sovereignty and security.

Conclusively, Zero OS is ultra secure, perfect to develop current and future technologies, and enables anyone to take part in the planet positive and data sovereign Internet brought by ThreeFold.

Learn more about Zero OS and the grid primitives here.

For decentralized systems on Wikipedia, we learn; “One of the most well-known examples of a “natural” decentralized system is one used by insect colonies such as Ants. In these insect colonies, control is distributed among the biological agents who act upon local information and local interactions to create complex and universal behavior collectively. While individually exhibiting simple behaviors, these agents achieve universal goals such as feeding the colony or raising the brood using dynamical mechanisms like non-explicit communication and exploiting their closely coupled action and perception systems. Without any form of central authority, these insect colonies achieve their universal goals by performing required tasks and by responding to changing conditions in their external environment. They also adjust the number of workers performing each task to ensure the completion of all tasks. For example, ant colonies guide their global behavior (in terms of foraging, patrolling, brood care, and nest maintenance) using a pulsing, shifting web of Spatio-temporal patterned interactions that rely on antennal contact rate and olfactory sensing. While these interactions consist of both interactions with the environment and each other, ants do not direct the behavior of other ants. They thus never have a “central controller” dictating what is to be done to achieve global goals.“

So nature has provided us with solid examples of centralized and decentralized systems. For much of what works in the modern world, we have ended up using the centralized model governing enterprises and countries. Various industries have also adopted the centralized model where there is a pyramid structure, and everything works towards the alpha males.

A different approach to creating and operating IT workloads

What if we can develop a new concept for creating, deploying, and operating IT workloads. What if we say goodbye to the centralized way of controlling IT workloads. Can we develop an idea that works in a decentralized way?

The concept

To build this concept, we will draw the use of the human way of operating a large ship. The crew of a vessel has different roles, which we will call the coordinators. Some of these coordinators could be a captain, officers, engineers, and oilers. These coordinators have in-depth knowledge of their specific tasks but usually lack a detailed understanding of the other roles. In the “hive” of a ship, the specific requests to get tasks done are sent to coordinators who will receive, interpret, execute their particular tasks, and report the (non-) progress of these tasks or subtasks. For example, the captain will create and agree to a schedule of maintenance tasks for the engine room. These are daily, weekly and monthly tasks that should be completed by the engineers and oilers. The engineers and oilers do not get continuous input from the captain. They get one instruction to follow the schedule and know what needs to be done for every task. The intermediate state (what is complete and what still needs to be addressed) is stored by the coordinators executing the tasks. This is the most efficient way of accomplishing tasks.

Jumping to the IT industry

If we bring this concept to the IT world, we conclude that today’s IT systems are built in a significantly different way. Most architectures (if not all) have a central facility that stores all information and all states of activity in a so-called central ‘database.’ A general norm within IT. However, these types of architectures are inefficient and are very complex - like the ship analogy - a central command room (database) is created where every coordinator needs to report back. (1) The current level of activity, (2) the completion (state) of tasks, (3) the proper understanding of upcoming tasks by the coordinator to accomplish tasks in-progress or future - hence leading to the undesirable outcome of complexity due to centralization.

In the ship example, we deem this type of functioning/workflow inefficient; however, in the IT world, it is a common way of doing it. Furthermore, IT infrastructures usually have different databases to store “state” in different parts of the IT architecture. The analogy would translate to different command rooms that orchestrate different functions on the ship in our ship. This, in turn, introduces the need for another role in starting coordinating between the different command rooms to ensure that all information is shared and communicated. Taking this pattern forward leads to an endless loop of adding interfaces, layers, bridges between different parts of the system that all store information, multiple times, and in different ways.

Datastores

By design, a decentralized IT architecture should not use centralized data storage (databases) for multiple tasks (roles). It instead should feature a similar approach to the way of functioning as in the ‘ship’ example. In this architecture, roles get short and precise instructions of the jobs to be completed and autonomously execute. We call these execution engines coordinators. Coordinators receive instructions, run on instructions and store all information about the current task locally. They store all the relevant information in a local storage facility (available to the individual coordinators only) and provide information about the state of execution if and when other coordinators ask for a state update.

Magical Coordinator

Requirements to let actor based management work

• State only with the actor itself (no-where else !!!)

• Understood language between actors

• Process = recipes of a cook, NOT IN A DB
  
  

Actor based IT solutions

To simplify common IT architectures, we should look at a new way of creating such a system that takes the current standards into account:

• No people involved in integrating different components into a single solution

  • Which, as a consequence, means no revenue generation based on creating and managing complexity.

• No central state / operational data storage

• Individual automated actors with specific knowledge for specific tasks

• Independent operating actors completing specific tasks
  
  Such a system should ideally be owned by many (not just a single organization, bringing centralization back into the equations) that operate IT tasks for many. We have not seen such a system in existence, but we are as TFTech building and rolling out technology that can do this.
  
  We believe that IT’s future is in decentralization where specific coordinators (bots) will roam a network of capacity looking for a task to do, making themselves available where needed, creating more of them when the system grows, and allowing the global population to deploy and operate IT workloads.

Everything on the internet – websites, apps, photos, videos, etc – uses up capacity and is stored in huge data centers owned by big companies, mainly in North America, Europe, and some in Asia. In our solution, centralized data centers are replaced with a grid of “nodes” distributed around the world.

These nodes are owned by ThreeFold Farmers – but only the physical hardware – the data inside of the nodes belongs to the people or organizations who put it there. So, “farmers” plug in hardware and start to create capacity that can be used by people.

Farmers come in all shapes and sizes. Some farmers run small data centers while others simply run a node out of their living room.

When Farmers connect active hardware (add capacity) to the ThreeFold Grid, ThreeFold Tokens are created. Farmers can then sell those tokens to people who want to use capacity (e.g. a developer that wants to build or host a website, or a person who wants to store some photos). More on tokens down below.

Seems quite lofty. How will you build it?

It’s true that rebuilding the internet is not so simple. But a lot of infrastructure has already been built and the technology is quite advanced. Over the past 2+ years (as of May 2020), independent ThreeFold Farmers have already plugged in more than 40,000,000 GigaBytes worth of storage and 15,000 CPU Cores across 21+ countries. That might not mean a lot to non-technical folks but it is quite a significant amount.

21+ countries? What happened to equality?

As far along as we are, we still have work to do. One of our biggest goals in the near future is to expand the grid to Africa, South America, and parts of Asia where currently the Internet is too expensive or not available. Currently, we farming is incentivized around these key geographies.

And what do you mean by peer-to-peer?

Peer-to-peer means no middlemen – direct exchange of information and/or value between equal participants. Peer-to-peer means decentralization – breaking away from pyramid-based systems, greed-based systems – and putting people back in the center of their own (digital) lives.

So how can I access / use your internet today? What can I do on it?

By June, some of the first experiences will be live. This includes file storage and communication tools and a virtual browser, all with the advantages of being more sustainable for our planet and with full control of your own data. And over time, more and more experiences will come to this internet. We’ll be updating here and on our communication platforms as they come. But don’t worry, as a user it doesn’t change much – no coding required. :)

Will [enter website or app here] be available on your internet?

There are some tremendous reasons for a website or app to use our internet, but that will really be up to the website or the app. In the end, we are providing a responsible solution for responsible people and organizations. We would love to host anybody who believes in what we are doing!

How are you making sure it’s safe?

Hacking has become a part of life and is almost impossible to avoid in the current systems – they are too complex and require too many people to operate. This results in less security which results in lots of security breaches. We took a look at the existing Internet (seven layers) and simplified it down to three layers. By simplifying the architecture and instead creating technology that is self-driving & self-healing, we removed the human requirement and therefore vastly minimized the possibility for hacking or human error. Then we also developed a storage algorithm which makes it such that if some of the information gets lost or stolen (somehow) or if some hardware goes down, it is all retrievable. Long story short, we flipped the existing system on its head.

What about the data ownership part?

That has a bit to do with the security as well. Since you own your data, you decide who gets access. Which means your data isn’t just out “there” for the taking. Basically, we put you at the center of your digital life, where the applications and experiences you use serve you, not the other way around.

And how is it better for the planet?

There are a few reasons for us being more sustainable. Data centers are super unsustainable, so the simple (but incomplete) answer is “no more huge data centers.” But if you want more detail:

• We use up to 3x less hardware for the same output, and using hardware at least 2x longer while maintaining good performance
• Having capacity everywhere, local to where users are – this reduces network requirements (and can even improve security)
• Using new algorithms (e.g. the one mentioned above for storage) which have dramatic efficiency improvement
• Re-using hardware where possible – let’s not throw away

How much will it cost?

In the end we want to provide sustainable access to the internet and all of its solutions for less than a dollar per month per person but for now the cost will depend on what you choose to do. Certain experiences will cost money. Storing photos or videos, for example. But all at a fair price.

Speaking of money – so what’s up with the ThreeFold Token?

As we mentioned above, tokens are generated when ThreeFold Farmers adds capacity to the ThreeFold Grid.

Essentially, the ThreeFold Token is the medium of exchange on the new internet. So, if a developer wants to build something (e.g. a website or an app) or a user wants to store something (e.g. photos), he/she/they use(s) ThreeFold Tokens.

Need more answers?

We hope that helps explains things. Obviously there is a whole wiki to dive in to. If you don’t find what you’re looking for, please ask us on our forum!

Photo by Nong Vang on Unsplash.

Did you know that the current Internet is responsible for between 5 and 10% of global energy consumptions? Making it more harmful to our planet than the airline Industry. The good news is that we can achieve 10x more power efficiency by addressing certain areas such as storage.

ThreeFold believes IT can do a much better job at being more sustainable - in fact ThreeFold believes it can reduce the Internet’s carbon footprint by 10 times compared to other industry standards in IT capacity producing solutions.

Power consumption is a function of better compute and storage performance that in theory would require more racks and cooling. ThreeFold’s architectural approach brought solutions that enables it’s Farmers to achieve roughly 3 times the performance per rack (so it uses fewer racks) and the racks require less energy than typical racks in the industry.

Read more about how ThreeFold achieves sustainability in the following blog.

The Internet needs to become more affordable

The biggest cost in running IT architectures is the human cost. Today’s complex systems, built out of ‘band aid and patches’ point solutions, organically-grown and badly documented IT infrastructures, need an armada of people to keep them ticking. Even though this is an example, one can learn a lot from the trends that are presented:

• On average an IT budget takes 5% of overall revenues
• IT consumes 6.5% of the total number of Full-time equivalent in the company, of which 85% are insourced and 15% on payroll. This means that the enterprise doesn’t retain internal know-how to operate their IT.
• About 50% of IT budgets are spent on Infrastructure ane operations. Similarly, a big part goes to applications. A mere 5% is considered to be internal overhead within the IT department.
• Around 65% of the IT budget is spent on resources and services, around 35% is spent on hardware and software.
  
  These figures present industry average numbers and paint a troubling picture that IT is a sizeable part of an overall budget, and that most spending is going to have the right knowledge skills insourced to the organisation to run the core IT architecture it relies on. For any other discipline in any organisation this would present an unacceptable risk to the business and its continuity - strangely not for IT.

The Internet needs to become self-healing

The biggest source of downtime in computer systems is people. Getting people involved in fixing infrastructure problems creates the risk of accidentally causing more system downtime. A very recent example on this hit a large organisation cloud service provider.

20+ years ago when Internet data centers came into existence next to telecom points of presence (POP), the level of complication in architecting, and building and maintaining these infrastructures exploded. From an already reasonable complicated technology setup to transport packets of data around the globe, these information warehouses were created where data was uploaded to, processed, and the obtained results sent back to end users on the other side of the globe.

Managing a data center that contains solutions for information transportation, storage and processing is not an easy task and the growth of data volume uploaded, stored and processed has exponentially increased. The number of technologies invented and implemented in regards to the processing and storing of information has also exploded. This resulted in a double exponential growth in complexity to architect, build, operate and maintain these IT systems.

The time has come that we no longer rely on people to do the right thing in case of emergency - the complexity is overwhelming and the dependency on the availability of that information is huge. Having people to do manual deployments and operational responsibilities does not provide the agility and speed to keep up with the continuous exponential growth of the industry. It is time to take the human element out of IT and let smart and autonomous systems to take over. This will also let people focus on more creative activities.

The world needs a responsible internet

On a humanitarian level the opportunities for creativity, learning and development are currently negatively influenced by a lack of access to performant and affordable Internet services. Since Internet access is a human right, it should protect the status quo between the developed and less-developed regions of our world.

The Internet is growing fast, with the wrong solutions

It is evident that the current solutions are super unsustainable and make no sense. Luckily, ThreeFold and many other start-ups are deploying new solutions.

Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash.