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 data sovereign.

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 be data sovereign, knowing their data is safe, and truly theirs.

Lack of internet access isn’t always just an availability or affordability problem. Today’s internet can be limited or even shut down at any point, by the right people. Take a quick look at NetBlocks.org, an organization that reports on global internet disruptions or outages. Typically governments are enacting these measures during times of unrest or protest or  important political moments. Even in the United States, the Executive Branch of the government has the power to shut down the internet in a case of a national emergency.

Cutting the internet or restricting certain services based on region (a common practice as well) is not only not right, it’s dangerous. People rely on the internet for information and communication and no government or entity should have the ability to shut the internet down at their discretion.

The ThreeFold Solution: Fair & Neutral Internet for All

In 2016, the United Nations declared internet access to be a human right, yet today if you are reading this post, you are privileged. All humans deserve access to the internet and ThreeFold has the solution.

With the ThreeFold model, nodes can be set up anywhere in the world where an existing internet connection and electricity are present. By putting physical infrastructure at the edge (close to users), greater levels of access can be reached.

Further, the ThreeFold Grid cannot be shut down or manipulated. It is a neutral internet owned by the people, where autonomous technology heals and runs itself and requires minimal human intervention.

Today we are working with partners in the clean energy and network / connectivity to build the solutions that are needed to provide fair and uninterrupted internet access with all corners of the world.

Of course we will need new safe, secure, and private solutions for people to collaborate online. Many of these are already live and deployable via ThreeFold Now Community Solutions. We are working with partners in the education space as well to build toolsets for students to enrich their lives.

We need a more inclusive internet, and that is what we are building.

🔗What is Peer-to-Peer?

Peer-to-peer (P2P) is a term that originated from the distributed computer application architecture where tasks and workloads are shared between peers, popularized by Napster, a revolutionary file storing system from the late 1990s.

The concept inspired new structures and philosophies in many areas of human interaction. P2P systems and groups are typically critical of authoritarian and centralized social structures and believe in equality, meritocracy, flat systems, participatory & circular economies, as the concept represents a concrete pathway to these outcomes or visions.

P2P systems are network, not linear or ‘pyramidal’ hierarchies (though they may share some elements). They are ‘distributed’, though they may have elements of ‘centralization’ and ‘decentralization.’ And intelligence is not located at any center, but everywhere within the system.

🔗How does ThreeFold relate to peer-to-peer?

ThreeFold’s Peer-to-Peer (P2P) computing network is a distributed architecture that splits tasks and workloads between its peers, ThreeFold Farmers. Farmers are equal participants in the network and together they form a peer-to-peer network of nodes, the ThreeFold Grid.

Farmers make their resources, such as processing power, disk storage or network bandwidth, directly available to other network participants, without the need for central coordination by servers or stable hosts. Farmers are both suppliers and consumers of resources, in contrast to the traditional client-server model in which the consumption and supply of resources is divided.

In the near future, ThreeFold will create Digital Twin, which will go beyond the era of peers doing similar things while sharing resources. It will actually enable much more than that. Digital Twin will create a complete new digital world with diverse peers that can bring in unique resources and capabilities to a virtual community on the ThreeFold Grid. This will empower the network of peers to engage in greater tasks beyond those that can be accomplished by individual peers, and are beneficial to all the peers.

🔗Why did ThreeFold choose peer-to-peer? 

Everything starts (or should start) from the why, and the ThreeFold story started a long time ago. Before the inception of ThreeFold, many of the co-founders of the project used to work with the largest IT & Cloud actors. Throughout their experience working in the Industry, they realized that the complexity of the technology and the centralization of knowledge & power led to an inefficient, unsustainable, not scalable and unequally distributed infrastructure. So they decided to redesign the whole Internet and cloud infrastructure bottom-up with the vision of shaping a global internet economy that can scale anywhere efficiently, cost efficiently and sustainably. 

🔗Why does the world needs peer-to-peer? 

By developing the technology, the conviction that peer-to-peer was the best solution for humanity and the planet strengthened itself. Why? Well, put simply, a peer-to-peer system removes all forms of intermediaries, unnecessary steps and complexity from the picture. Therefore, it simplifies the architecture in an incredible way. The benefits are many but here are the most popular benefits:

• Privacy: Our peer-to-peer environment means no middlemen or intermediaries, meaning data travels directly between peers and stored on the nodes of their choice rather than being sent through and stored by a third party.
• Security: Data stored in data centers is susceptible to security breaches. In bypassing data centers and exchanging data directly between peers, we can achieve much greater security as it reduces code and back doors significantly. 
• Scalability: In a many-to-many system, scale is essentially unlimited. There is simply no bottleneck. And hardware (nodes) can be added at ease compared to current data center model.
• Cost-efficiency & Sustainability: End-to-end (direct) connection between peers means a more efficient path for data and less energy is needed. Less energy means less cost, and less harm to our planet.

Peer-to-peer systems, like ThreeFold’s decentralized network, represent a transformative step towards a more efficient, secure, and equitable digital world. By removing intermediaries and relying on distributed resources, P2P networks offer unmatched privacy, scalability, and sustainability. As the world continues to evolve, embracing peer-to-peer solutions will be essential for building a fairer, more resilient digital infrastructure—one that empowers individuals and communities to thrive without relying on traditional centralized models.

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.