Recent article in Cointelegraph

I was happy to see this article on Cointelegraph, overall people seem to be more interested in what we are doing at ThreeFold: https://cointelegraph.com/news/peer-to-peer-internet-has-lofty-goal-to-bring-true-decentralization

In the article, some questions are raised that I would like to forward to our devs to have a look at.

Can you explain what is ThreeFolds technological approach to these issues?

“ThreeFold claims that you can run a ‘capacity’ node (aka ‘farming’) on pretty much any hardware, but without very careful design using special secure processors, I don’t see how they can stop node operators (who as far as I can tell, could be anyone and certainly may not be trusted) from accessing both the data and the software being run on their grid when a workload is active.”

“This model may only work for ‘open’ computation, like their example of running a Bitcoin node, where it doesn’t matter that everything happening is visible to the owner of the node (and possibly publicly). If workloads are limited in this way, it is perhaps more like a competing blockchain or smart contract platform, rather than a generalized ‘decentralized AWS."

:pray: Thank you already :vulcan_salute:

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Hi Max - yes - great article with certainly valid points raised. My (positive) take on the whole article is that our project is not significant enough to have an opinion on and comment. That’s great!

I am not a dev but a person that knows a bit about the datacenter, cloud and in general internet space. Spend the millennium New Years eve (and night) in a datacenter, expecting it to disintegrate (well, the applications running in it). Not much happened BTW while the industry spend billions on the Y2K problem… doom scenarios generate fear and sell.

I this case the two comments also fall IMHO in that category (creating fear). Farmers can access nodes physically. Very true. So can datacenter engineers in any datacenter and POP creating the internet services we all use daily. Concentrated servers and networking equipment in datacenters are a much more interesting target to attack that single servers in a distributed (decentralised) grid of capacity. Especially since the storage technology used stores fragments of data objects on single devices and not the whole object.

So the statement of farmer having access (with malicious intentions) is true, but is it really more of a risk than what we already trust? I think it presents a lower risk.

The second comment I disagree with. The grid is a true peer2peer grid in every possible way, including the actual container deployments having peer2peer encrypted connections to all the other containers in the private overlay network (which you can consider to be a private virtual datacenter on the grid). It is the perfect way to build high performance application architectures (high performance requires the capacity to be geographically close, distance adds latency) or super resilient and reliable operating environments (distance adds resilience as natural disasters, and risks of loss of connectivity to facilities are mitigated).

So again IMHO it is a very good way to provide capacity for any type of workload. It allows for complete flexibility to meet the end customers requirements. My 2 cents.

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Also correct me if I’m wrong – but with the dispersed storage algorithm, considering data is split amongst several nodes, even if a node operator would access the data, only a piece of a puzzle would be accessed right? Hence, the data remains safe.

Indeed, the dispersed storage algorithm makes that data storage is split over different farmers, making the data that is available on the storage infrastructure of one farmer is totally meaningless. And thus not interesting for hackers to attack, as they should attack different nodes at a time, but they don’t even know which ones. And moreover, data is encrypted and can only be decrypted by the user that controls the workload.
The critics mentioned are not justified: data storage is encrypted, the network is encrypted. There is no hacking surface whatsoever, even not for farmers who’d like to see what happens on their own node.

I read the article, it also mixes up the BCDB and the Stellar network. The Stellar network is only there for the payment side of the story, not for making data w.r.t. IT workload immutable.
And it seems Mr Mannerings hasn’t found the whitepapers about the technology, where there is plenty of information available. Maybe we should give them a more prominent place ?

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And send an email to coin-telegraph and the author to point out the incorrect statements. Even your (OSX) laptop data is encrypted, should be common knowledge.

Thanks everyone for their input.

@aernoud
Cointelegraph confirmed to us yesterday to update the parts about BCDB and our upcoming partnerships.

I kinda had the impression that Mannerings did not do a lot of homework prior to making his statements - he was kind of shooting from the hip based on embedded skepticism.

But it is obviously nothing new that when one is disruptive that not everybody is cheering, nor taking the time to understand prior to react/judge! One can even consider it proof that ThreeFold is on the right track.

Great to see all these new partnerships (who btw did a lot more homework on the ThreeFold’s tech) thrive on what ThreeFold is building!

Just a matter of keeping up the good work and the critics will eventually also have to give in and embrace this new milestone that ThreeFold represents!

Maybe we should invite Mannerings to an online tech session and enlighten him!