How The Threefold Grid Decentralizes and Rebirths the Internet
You don’t have to read far into the Threefold documentation to see many mentions of a new decentralized internet. The scale of this project and the many critical moving parts can make it difficult to picture how a collection of servers can create a new internet. The Threefold Project is a movement of people with skill-sets in every technology from networking to hardware manufacturing working together to create the tools needed to make today’s internet decentralized.
Todays internet system functions similarly to the mail, in the sense that once you have sent your packets, generally speaking, they are out of your control and accessible by the person carrying them to and from their destinations. This has allowed I.S.Ps to use that access to control what you do with your data transmission capacity, whether that be through blocking p2p file sharing, enforcing political censorship, or preventing certain users from hosting public facing resources on their connections. The problem with this, is that as the digital world advances these limitations unduly lead to centralization, as the resources necessary truly communicate freely in the digital environment have barriers to access for some and are simply unreachable for others.
What you see today of the Threefold Grid are the basic building blocks of providing anyone in the world the tools to be able to communicate freely in the digital world.
- The Grid: Provides a world wide network of routers that have access to the transmission capabilities of thousands of traditional I.S.Ps across the world. There are multiple Multi-gig capable sites on the grid currently, as well as multiple farms hosted in traditional data center environment holding ISO certification such as the farm operated by @Danysing and the team from GreenEdge
- The Planetary Network: Harnesses the compute power and networking infrastructure provided by the nodes to create layer on top of modern transmission platforms, where every device has a Static Public I.P Address, and communicates through End to End Encrypted Tunnels.
At full Deployment the Grid offer the ability for the Planetary Network to overlay nearly every traditional I.S.P network in the world and allow every individual device connected to the Planetary Network to have a public IP address that belongs to the device and remains unchanged regardless of what network it is connected to. The Threefold team has already made this possible by allowing connection of any Mac, Pc or Linux to the Planetary Network with the Threefold Network Connector, or Any mobile Device can use the Threefold connect app available for Android and IOS, its also notable that the Yggdrasil module for OpenWrt can be configured to connect to the Planetary Network. All connections on the Planetary network are end-to-end encrypted, But implementing it at the home-router level allows the encryption/decryption load to be handled by a firewall style device lessening the impact to performance seen by end users.
As our grid grows, utilization expands, and our community develops new technologies we will see more and more current providers of centralized resources being incentivized to the move their capacity to the grid and create applications that natively deploy on the grid. When the grid is said to be designed for anyone to farm Capacity, that is truly what’s meant, there’s is nothing to stop a major cloud provider or a DC operator from choosing to move their capacity to the Threefold Grid and make it accessible to anyone in any country through a fully automated process with no licensing fess for their hypervisor environment. Every Device, Farm, Router, running a planetary client is bringing our network one location closer to encompassing all of the Internet. The grid is designed so that all of the work that has been done by everyone building data transmission lines and centers can be brought together with the work of 1000s of individuals across the world and mutually advanced as one single entity moving to provide a better digital future for all.