We had a real good set of questions of Florian in the ThreeFold telegram chat. In order to make them searchable and keep the information available. Here’s the responses:
Hello ThreeFold! We are a very excited group of young people about ThreeFold tech. In the near future we look to invest in the grid by becoming a validator and farmer and further down the line deploy our own blockchain (possibly on the grid).
We still have some questions going around and would really appreciate to see them answered. We will be attending tomorrow’s call again and will ask them there as well.
1-Question
Which problem is actually being solved here, why do we need a decentralized internet? Won’t the power be with the limited nodes you’ll provide?
1-Answer
On a macro level it allows countries to create self sovereign compute and storage services and applications. This enables countries with no presence of the market leading cloud providers to create their own local cloud, creating investment, value creation, entrepreneurship and learning capabilities to be build in country instead of relying foreign non sovereign companies to deliver on these needs.
Decentralized internet allows individuals to own their own data and usage breadcrumbs that are currently being harvested by the large social platforms everywhere. The decentralized internet allows people to deploy services and applications and store data in a sovereign manner.
The nodes can be small, medium or large. Any hardware with an Intel or AMD cpu is able to be / create / participate in building this grid. So the farmers (the people owning the hardware) decide what form factor
Please find more information here: https://library.threefold.me/info/threefold#/tfgrid/threefold__grid_concepts
2-Question
What happens when there is a zero-day exploit in the decentralized OS?
2-Answer
Zero - day exploits are hard as they are literally new exploits that have zero history in time. In the ThreeFold decentralized grid with the autonomous zero-OS operation there is a relatively simple solution to fix the exploit.
A very important aspect of zero-OS is that it is not installed on local hard-disks of the servers but it is securely booted over the network. The required fix can be agreed and deployed to the network boot facility and all nodes that can do a simple module restart (if the zero day exploit is in a zero-OS module). If and when the exploit is found in the kernel of zero-OS, a node reboot is required to get the exploit fix live. The applications and workloads running on the affected nodes will re-deploy as they are governed by “smart contracts for IT” and will be redeployed automatically after node reboot.
3-Question
What do you mean by The People’s internet?
3-Answer
The Threefold Internet is built by people for people. The production of internet capacity (compute and storage capacity) is done by people buying / owning some hardware and running zero-OS on it. This requires no IT (administration) knowledge to do and the server (3node) will run autonomously.
On the IT capacity consumption side, people are getting themselves a digital identity which allows them to manage digital currency (wallet) and sign “smart contracts for IT” to consume IT capacity and deploy applications in that manner.
This is why we call it a people’s internet, (capacity production) by people, (capacity consumption) by people.
4-Question
Node operators seem to be incentivized by the TFT rewards, the current ROI calculator assumes an increase of 33,000% in the coming 5 years, so what happens when this is not reached?
4-Answer
The TFT price prognosis is something that interested people have to formulate their own opinion on. We provide plenty of information on the project (https://library.threefold.me/info/threefold#/tfgrid/farming/threefold__farming_intro) and the potential of this project, TFT token appreciation and valuation has to be assessed by the (future) farmer. The numbers in the model are example figures.
5-Question
Why would I as a company deploy my software on infrastructure that is incentivized on the increase of a token instead of on aws or digital ocean?
5-Answer
The underlying technology is very different from standard cloud stacks. It’s too much to sum up here and there are some very good descriptions about how this is different can be found in the library: https://library.threefold.me/info/threefold#/cloud/threefold__cloud_home
6-Question
How will threefold enable control over my data and privacy, will the user database be publicly available?
6-Answer
Digital currency transactions are protected and enabled by public/private key pairs and cryptography. So individuals are linked and related to public / private key pairs. Private keys are held and controlled by users (capacity farmers or consumers) and public keys are available on the TFChain(s) for validation purposes.
Over time reputation will be added to the blockchain and everyone should be able to see and check this information. Access to data is only authorized by the owner / holder of the private key and is stored in such a way that is cannot be red, copied or stolen by others.
7-Question
How will threefold prevent the concentration of computing resources in datacenters, what is stopping amazon from converting all their servers to threefold nodes and what would this mean for threefold when they do?
7-Answer
At this point in time the Incentive is the same for creating capacity everywhere. Going forward when concentration is happening ThreeFold’s DAO could have differentiation proposals for making areas which have little capacity have a higher return than well serviced areas. All of the tooling for doing this are available and the DAO is being created to govern this process, so going forward I believe this will lead to less centralized capacity distribution than the current market leaders and cloud providers.
8-Question
How do I deploy an application? Am I dependent on threefold for deployment?
8-Answer
No - the power to deploy applications and data storage lies in the hands of the people. Anyone with a ThreeFold identity can use a deployment method of choice to deploy applications on any of the TF Grid 3nodes. We have worked hard on making cloud industry standard automation and deployment protocols available to developers, systems integrator and administrators. Available technologies are: Docker images, Kubernetes clusters and all the tooling that enables cluster deployments, Terraform scripts and java based weblets (simple deployment web element).
9-Question
Last but not least, do you have the team required to conquer 5% of the market?
9-Answer
Yes, we have a R&D and coding team that can build the required battle tested technology to make this possible, we have a business development and marketing team plus partners to make the world aware of this technology and build channels that will migrate and deploy solutions from the marketing leading clouds onto this cloud / grid / utility.
