ThreeFold

An Intro to the ThreeFold Token

The ThreeFold Token (TFT) is a decentralized digital currency used to buy autonomous and decentralized Internet services (compute, storage, and application) on the ThreeFold Grid.

The ThreeFold Token is the currency of the new Internet. It is a decentralized digital currency that represents a unit of reservation of capacity (compute, storage) on the largest peer-to-peer network of capacity on earth.

Capacity is a new high-demand market, and the TFT will be the medium of exchange for this commodity on the peer-to-peer internet brought by ThreeFold. TFT synergistically connects the world of cloud and blockchain markets to the most scalable universal substrate without compromising, performance, security and privacy.

🔗How are ThreeFold Tokens created?

No ThreeFold Tokens have ever been minted. ThreeFold Tokens are generated through a process called “Farming”. Farming happens when active internet capacity is added to the ThreeFold Grid. Independent farmers earn ThreeFold Tokens (TFT) by providing neutral and decentralized internet capacity, thus expending the usable Grid. Therefore no central entity controls the internet.

🔗5 good reasons to buy ThreeFold Tokens

TFTs are exclusively generated when new capacity is added to the TF Grid. There are no centralized issuers. Tokens have not been created out of thin air.
While the ThreeFold Grid can expand, a maximum of 4 Billion TFTs can ever be in circulation. This limit ensures stability of value and incentivization for all stakeholders.
TFT lives on the Stellar Blockchain. TFT holders benefit from a big ecosystem of proven wallets and mediums of exchange.
By employing Stellar technology, TFT transactions and smart contracts are powered by one of the most energy-efficient blockchains available. Furthermore, TFT is the medium of exchange on the greenest internet network in the world.
The market for farming, cultivating and trading TFT is open to all. Anyone with internet connection, power supply and necessary hardware can become a Farmer or trade ThreeFold tokens (TFT).
By buying, holding, and utilizing ThreeFold Tokens, you are actively supporting the expansion of the ThreeFold Grid and its use cases — creating a more sustainable, fair, and equally accessible Internet.

To learn more about the token, please dive into our wiki.

Important note: TFTs are not an investment instrument. It is the medium of exchange on the ThreeFold Grid, and is a mechanism to enable the Internet we believe is possible.

Sacha Obeegadoo

January 4, 2020

Internet is growing wild

The internet is growing at an extremely fast pace, but is that a good thing?

“This article was originally published by Andreas Hartl, a former member of ThreeFold Foundation.”

The current growth of internet needs 4000+ new large scale data centers of computer systems. The global data growth will reach more than 40 Zetabytes by 2020 which represents an average yearly growth of 42% starting at 4.5 Zetabytes in 2013. To host all this data, over 4000 new big data centers have to to be built. And to achieve this goal, $ 1 trillion USD investment capital is needed and land totalling the size of the UK would be needed.

The Internet is one of the fastest growing industries in the world. In this article we’ll explain why that’s not always such a good thing and where we see opportunities.

🔗Internet capacity needs to become localized

A big majority of users in the world connect to servers that are not present in their region and as such experience higher costs and low performance. According to a study by datacentermap.com, 80% of the data centers of the current Internet’s service providers are based in the U.S. and Europe. The rest of the world has scarce Internet resources dotted around territories.

As a consequence most Internet users use Internet-based services running on infrastructure which is located far away from their physical location and most likely outside their country’s borders. This decreases the general end-user experience (latency) but also adds unnecessary costs to transporting the information back and forth. Also, it adds legislation and compliance headaches to enterprises.

Our mission is to empower and inspire people to recognize abundance by living new experiences one hour at a time.

🔗The Internet needs to perform better

Compute and Storage vendors create poor-performing solutions. There have been yearly improvements in hardware following Moore’s law. While this has allowed ThreeFold to progress and innovate, it has also led to software developers taking these advances for granted; cutting corners where they can, creating sub-optimal code and allowing software components to be layered on top of each other to achieve certain behavioral functionalities.

The inefficiencies have now led to a situation where organically-grown IT architectures are immensely complex. They use a variety of components from different software and hardware vendors integrated by so called ‘integrators’. The overall effort and cost involved to create, operate and maintain such architectures is growing continuously and requiring an ever-increasing budget and resourcing to continue.

If we could go down to the core algorithms and take another look at these, and innovate at the heart of technology instead of applying patches and pain killers, we would be able to create much more end-user capacity than what systems provide today. Systems will last longer and will not have to be replaced by faster ones. Also, fewer engineers will be needed to create, operate and maintain these systems. Combined, these elements would present a more stable and reliable platform that can achieve higher levels of uptime.

Only upsides, right? Well a huge downside of such an approach is that vendors will make less revenue and more importantly less margin as systems will run for longer, be more stable and require less updates. So why would vendors innovate at the core of their solution?

🔗The Internet needs to become more sustainable

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.

Sam Taggart

December 5, 2019

You Are Unique

During a gathering with some friends, I noticed something that made me think about how important it is what we’re doing.

🔗You are unique

During a gathering with some friends, I noticed something that made me think about how important it is what we’re doing at ThreeFold.

One of my friends was complaining about how he couldn’t log in to one of his social media platforms, because all of his passwords are different and he forgot which one he used for this particular platform. Another friend was saying how she tagged her sister on a funny meme, but her sister couldn’t find it on Facebook. Turns out she tagged her on Instagram. And then one of them said something that I keep hearing more and more from people, “Why do we have so many apps, I can’t find anything anymore!”

We exist so many times online, but why? There is only one me in the real world. Why should there not be only one me online? Why should I have 25 different profiles on 25 different platforms, with 25 different logins, when I am unique?

That is another dilemma that ThreeFold has a solution for, with its autonomous technology. 3Bot - a digital avatar like no other, that basically handles your entire online life. The focus lies on digital privacy, where only you can access your data, and no one else. The 3Bot has all the functionalities you need to interact and exchange information and value, there will be no need for that many applications on your device anymore. With 3Bot, everything changes.

The 3Bot is built on the ThreeFold Grid, and has the same values as ThreeFold. Freedom, Equality, and Sustainability. It is important that your data is safe, and what can be safer than you being the only one who not only has access to it, but also the only one who owns that data? Your online world should not be that different from your offline world. In your offline world, you are the center of your own life. That is what ThreeFold is doing with the 3Bot, putting you in the center of your online life, too.

One decentralized application, one digital wallet, one login and one you. Because you’re unique.

Have questions? Feel free to ask us on our forum!

Photo by Jessica Ruscello on Unsplash.

Sabrina Sadik

December 5, 2019

An escape from the Great Hack

I can’t help but think how unfair it is that in today’s digital society, people are being treated like products, because there is no such thing as a ‘free’ platform without YOU being the product.

🔗The neutrality of the current Internet is in danger.

Have you seen ‘The Great Hack’ on Netflix? It’s a documentary about the Cambridge Analytica hacking scandal, where personal data of millions of peoples’ Facebook profiles were harvested without their consent and used for political advertising purposes.

While watching it, I couldn’t help but think how unfair it is that in today’s digital society, people are being treated like products, because there is no such thing as a ‘free’ platform without YOU being the product. What did reassure me, is that people are sick of having their data used this way. But what they might not know, is that the internet problem is bigger than ‘just’ data protection.

The Internet is growing at an exponential rate. To service this demand, a few large companies (Google, Amazon, Alibaba, Facebook, etc.) have built and continue to build supersized, power-hungry and centralized data centers. These data centers make up the majority of all Internet capacity available today. However, the Internet is expanding much faster than datacenters and the planet can cope with.

In addition to that, the Internet is extremely centralized, with most of these data centers being located in the US. Think of it like electricity. If consumers in, for example, Turkey had to use electricity generated in the US, it would be too expensive and inefficient, because it is too far away. The transmission lines would be too strained and losses and repairs would make it unsustainable. Capacity is like electricity. When centralized, it becomes too expensive and wasteful for remote users.

🔗So what is the solution to these problems?

The Internet needs to be more distributed, cost-effective, neutral, and sustainable. ThreeFold has developed such a new technology, the ThreeFold Grid (Grid) and a token which enables all this to happen.

Combining the values of the ThreeFold Foundation (freedom, equality and fairness) with the technology developed by TFTech (Zero-OS, Zero-Chain, 3Bot) and a digital currency called the ThreeFold Token (a decentralized digital currency and means of payment to exchange autonomous and decentralized Internet services) we believe that we have all the tools in order to actually make a difference in tomorrow’s digital world. Question is, are you ready to join us?

Please visit our forum if you have any questions or would like to continue the conversation!

Sabrina Sadik

November 21, 2019

Decentralizing the Internet

In this article, we discuss the general concept of a ‘decentralized grid’ and how anyone can plug-in capacity to the ThreeFold Grid.

“This article was originally published by Roel Van Sabben, a former member of ThreeFold Foundation.”

🔗Decentralization

In 1989, the Internet changed the world as we know it with the introduction of the World Wide Web. With time the Internet empowered people to share information in a decentralized way. Shortly after, big companies like Facebook, Google, and Apple emerged, providing many solutions that revolutionized the way we live. The “sharing economy” has grown exponentially over the last 5-10 years. This is thanks to a more simplified information flow and well-developed technology, which:

Enables a much easier integration of independent players into the sharing economy.
Eliminates the need for extensive management and structure of marketplace operators.

We are entering a flat-structure economy. An economy where fewer managerial levels are needed for the system to function. New technologies such as blockchain and the Internet of Things facilitate this ongoing trend. Participants can now interact on a peer-to-peer basis, forming marketplaces and organizations according to pre-agreed, programmed contracts.

🔗The current Internet is centralized

Despite the growth in popularity for decentralized systems, organizations, and currencies, the Internet remains centralized. The centralization within the Internet industry brought many barriers to entry. Indeed, to compete in the highly competitive market of Internet capacity dominated by big IT companies, massive investment, and IT development are needed.

But what is really scary is that the current industry exploits the market tremendously. Data is officially the most valuable asset on earth for a few years, and about 20 companies rule over more than 80% of the cloud industry. In other words - these companies together have more than 80% of the world’s information. In recent years, we noticed the dangers that can arise with the wrong intentions within the data industry with the ‘Cambridge Analytica Scandal’, also highlighted in the movie ‘The Great Hack’.

ThreeFold has been developing technology that allows the decentralization of the Internet infrastructure - removing the need for data centers, and allowing anyone to take part in the Internet capacity market. Adding capacity to the ThreeFold Grid (TF Grid) makes you a ThreeFold Farmer (TF Farmer). The more decentralized the Internet gets, the more secure and effective it will become. The already is the largest grid of compute and storage in the world.

🔗How To Participate

The process of becoming a ThreeFold Farmer is very straightforward. Anyone can join the ThreeFold Grid by downloading the ThreeFold Zero-OS onto their nodes and connecting them to the ThreeFold Grid.

By doing this you will become an operator of a “micro data center” and with that earn ThreeFold Tokens. With or without experience in the field, anyone can become a ThreeFold Farmer. By becoming a ThreeFold Farmer, you empower a new neutral Internet that belongs to humanity - not corporations.

You can build your server (3node) and configure it, but also options for people with less technical knowledge are available. Please see pre-register.threefold.io to see how easy it is for anyone to become a ThreeFold Farmer.

Blog written in 2019, updated January 2021.

Sam Taggart

August 21, 2019

Bringing Trust is a Human Task

Everyone thinks that Satoshi Nakamoto invented blockchain technology when he published his whitepaper in January 2009

🔗A little history on blockchain technology

Everyone thinks that Satoshi Nakamoto invented blockchain technology when he published his whitepaper in January 2009 to make a digital currency the first use case. But it was not!.

In 1991, Dr. W. Scott Stornetta published a white paper in which he introduced a ‘blockchain’ as a decentralized database where digital transactions are secured. The research focused on creating a digital hierarchy system that time-stamped and chronologically secured deals in a chain of blocks. The first considered use case for blockchain technology was to sign and store land deeds digitally. The technology’s main characteristics were decentralization and immutability across the process of storing transaction data.

Satoshi was the person (or part of a group of people) that used these blockchain principles to create the first digital currency - Bitcoin. The rest is history, from one to many digital currencies based on different creation principles (also referred to as cryptocurrencies, digital coins, etc.) that have been launched and existed for over a decade and have begun to come more into the mainstream purview.

🔗Decentralization and immutability

The two characteristics that have spawned interest in Blockchain technology are decentralization and immutability. In the current world, centralization is everywhere, in most industries, governments, education systems, the world wide web (Internet), and more. All roads these days seem to lead to centralized setups.

Examples of centralized setups today:

Monetary: Fiat currencies are governed and controlled by central banks. According to Wikipedia: “A central bank, reserve bank, or monetary authority is an institution that manages a state’s currency, money supply, and interest rates. Central banks also oversee the commercial banking system of their respective countries. In contrast to a commercial bank, a central bank has a monopoly on increasing the monetary base in the state and prints the national currency, which serves as the state’s legal tender. Central banks also act as a “lender of last resort” to the banking sector during a financial crisis. Most central banks also have supervisory and regulatory powers to ensure the solvency of member institutions, prevent bank runs, and prevent reckless or fraudulent behavior by member banks.“ So central banks control fiat currencies, and other institutions control central banks.
World Wide Web (WWW): The World Wide Web is an information space where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), interlinked by hypertext links, and accessible via the Internet. English scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. Although distributed by design, this technology shares and exposes globally developed information and centralized functions crucial to make this World Wide Web work: large (commercial) monopolies have developed centralized search facilities, e.g., yellow pages of the world wide web. These search facilities now control what you find when you are looking for a specific search term.

There seems to be a natural “desire” to organize and create different things with central control. Probably the result of our (humankind) social models based on hierarchies and competition. These social models have influenced a lot of what we have built in the industrial and information revolution - creating centralization as the defacto standard of building anything.

Now that we have invented a technology that potentially can build different things without a lot of centralization, we need to be careful to use it for the right things.

🔗Blockchain myths

To investigate what potential right use cases exist for blockchain technologies, let spend some time on some of the blockchain myths created in recent years. Similar to other new technologies, blockchains market themselves as a miracle technology that overcomes many (if not any) of the challenges and difficulties that exist in modern-day digital technology. Let’s name and investigate a few.

🔗Blockchains are “Super Scalable”

Are they? Pure blockchain deployments are not super scalable compared to conventional (server-based) transaction methods. Current financial blockchain transaction times are very slow compared to any other (currency) transaction technologies out there, being it card transactions like Mastercard, VISA, or money transfers from one bank account to another.

🔗Blockchain technology brings “Impeccable security.”

Very questionable! While blockchains use cryptographic standards, the methods to ensure privacy is entirely outside of any blockchain standards and implementations. It’s every implementer’s responsibility to ensure security, therefore mostly handled as it is in the old (conventional?) world.

🔗When using Blockchains, “Trustworthiness is guaranteed.”

By what? Blockchain ensures the integrity of transactions and information storage, but otherwise, nothing is inherently trustworthy about any fact stored on the Blockchain. You need to corroborate trustworthiness by ensuring that the parties who store information in the Blockchain are incorruptible and that these facts are correct —just as you would in the rest of the world without using blockchain technology.

🔗Blockchains can manage “Anything.”

Blockchain is a protocol expressed in code, and this does not define in terms of any standard. There are no standards bodies to provide sanctioned implementation rules or guidance.

Many contracts or types of data are better dealt with not on a blockchain: as it is a database that has only write and read functionality, but no update nor deletion is possible, it’s even dangerous to post sensitive and personal data on a blockchain, and if not used well, there might raise conflicts with regulations such as GDPR. However, a blockchain can provide consensus where required.

🔗Smart contracts on the Blockchain can do “Everything.”

Potentially but maybe not in the way how people see it today. While this is technically true, Blockchain is limited to well-understood and straightforward use cases, without ambiguities. Smart contracts are essentially rocket science. By design, once published (launched), you cannot revise or bug fix them.

🔗Blockchain deployments “If not public - go private!”

Not the same thing! Private blockchains are not the answer to privacy or restricted access to information. Purely private/enterprise blockchains might fail to realize any of the benefits of Blockchain.

🔗A new feature, “justifies deploying a new Blockchain.”

Community-driven blockchain products are being forked left and right by private players who enhance them in various ways. But only the open-source blockchains with the largest communities and install-plus-adoption bases will persist. The rest are mainly lab experiments, and 99.9 percent of these probably fail.

🔗Blockchain myths undone

So Blockchain is a hyped new technology, but they are not the answer to everything. Just like with any other technology or tool, you need to consider if the use case considered carefully is appropriate. In the end, it is only neutral characteristics that might be a reason for applying a blockchain or not:

is there a need for decentralization?
is there a need for immutability?

When considering Blockchain technology for a specific purpose, proper due diligence should happen. This to determine the fit and implementing it if it enhances value for the organization. Humans play a vital role in the decision process and are required to find solutions for the flaws that blockchains bring along.

Scalability, security, trustworthiness, functionality are to be added by humans to blockchain deployments.

This delicate mix of characteristics to be implemented explains why many Blockchain projects don’t succeed, despite the rightful claims around the disruptive nature of the technology.

Two frequent mistakes within the Industry:
The technology is used as the ultimate technology to solve all the problems described above, and this often leads to failure in the end as Blockchain can’t fulfill these promises.
The technology is used under the false pretext that decentralization is wanted, whereas the real intention is to be in control. Blockchain thinking also requires an entirely different way of thinking than the classical models embedded in the heart of our economies: concentration of power & control and competition need to make room for decentralization and collaboration.

🔗Blockchains are here to stay!

With all the hype around blockchain technology and also all the failed initiatives, blockchain technology does allow for digital worlds to exist without centralization. The information revolution has brought forward a lot of progress and innovation to the people; however, the outcome has also been only a few large organizations controlling all of it.

Examples are:

Online search: Google
Online social: Facebook, Twitter
Online banking: any large international bank
Online insurance: few insurance alliances
Customer Relationship Management: SalesForce
Enterprise Resource Management: Oracle, SAP

All these organizations are leading in their specific digital innovation sector, and some of them even provide services for free. Nothing is for free in this world and reality -in return for these services, you accept the terms and conditions which allow the companies to use your personal information and user statistics for their benefits and make money from this behavior derived data.

Most industry leaders have become so powerful that there is almost no way around them anymore. You are practically obliged to comply with their terms and conditions to do something useful with the Internet today.

The world is awakening and seeking alternatives in which such monopolistic structures do not control data and information. Blockchain technologies allow new solutions to be built without central governing bodies, creating person-to-person sharing and trading opportunities.

🔗The combination of people and blockchains is really powerful

People remain the best to create decentralized business models that combine Blockchain’s strengths with complementary measures to compensate for the weaknesses of the technology. Blockchains are not replacing people. Blockchain technology is just a tool that enhances people’s ability to organize themselves around decentralized initiatives that require no central body to govern and control. Therefore, Blockchain is a powerful tool indeed but remains just a tool.

🔗A platform for people to start blockchains

What if there would be a platform where the strong points of blockchains (decentralization) could enable people to organize themselves around a random initiative and launch it based on blockchain technology? Blockchain As a Service (BAAS).

A platform like that could be powerful to enable people around the world to use and benefit from blockchain technology to organize themselves around digital initiatives, currencies, finance, trade, company, anything. Let’s consider a small example:

e.g., Sixty people want to start an organization in which they all have an equal stake. They can organize this by going to the notary and establishing a company with equity and dividing the equity amongst them. They can run quarterly /annual meetings to govern and control the company. They would also need an administration to record decisions and communicate across the organization.

What if a platform could launch several blockchain nodes (60, one for each of them) and record all decisions, having all information trackable and traceable for anyone? Blockchain As A Service (BAAS) will enable people to organize themselves independently and create new movements, companies, groups, tribes. This would be a powerful platform allowing many people (and hopefully all people) to organize themselves in new ways, free of the need to have notaries, lawyers, and contracts.

However, to build such a platform, compliance is needed with some pretty specific requirements. Requirements that enable such a platform not to be governed and controlled by a single organization.

The requirements for such a platform would sum up as follows:

A single organization cannot own the platform, it needs to be owned by many
Such a platform cannot have administrator access. Administrators access takes away the neutrality and privacy that such a platform requires.
The platform needs to be very efficient. To be available to all people globally, it needs to be affordable for anyone.
The platform needs to be everywhere. Part of the efficiency is that it should require expensive international access lines - it needs to be able to live everywhere - in well connected (and affordable) areas as well as in less well-connected places.

Such a platform is a very different platform than most of what we know today. It needs to be a platform build by many people, for anyone. It needs not be governed by a single organization; it needs to be governed by many.

People with the right intentions need to collectively build a platform based on hardware owned by many and software that is open and can be inspected and improved by anyone. It is a platform created by people for people using blockchain technology to achieve a genuinely decentralized nature of the platform running Blockchain as a service.

People should always remain as the element that brings trust in IT. Blockchains help to register that trust forever.

August 17, 2019

Co-create the new Internet. Participate with TFT!

Do you believe that the world needs change? Do you believe in decentralization? Equality? Sustainability?..

Sacha Obeegadoo

June 1, 2019

The need for a sustainable digital currency

Cryptocurrencies commonly face some major problems, which can be solved.

🔗The world needs a new stable & green digital currency, which is usable globally

Digital currencies are on the way to global adoption. Today, there are approximately 130+ billion dollars worth of digital currencies in circulation and approximately 1 billion dollars traded on a daily basis on open market exchanges. Benefits of digital currencies include direct peer-to-peer transactions (requiring no intermediaries such as banks), greater trust (secured by cryptography and mathematics), lower friction charges, faster transaction times, and no single point of failure.

However, cryptocurrencies commonly face some major problems, such as:

Lack of scalability: The main blockchains today are based on “proof of work” - generating very large and complex prime numbers called “hashes” to record ledger transactions. These proof of work blockchains cannot scale to meet the increasing blockchain transaction volumes. In fact, Ethereum, one of the most popular and well known blockchains has announced it will change from “proof of work” to “proof of stake.”
Crazy energy requirements: Computing complex proof of work hashes requires enormous amounts of processing power. Actually, a large portion of today’s hashrate is produced by very large dedicated billion dollar data centers called miners. It is estimated that the energy consumed by digital currency mining is approximately equivalent to the power consumption of the entire country of Denmark.
Certain perceived reputational issues: Numerous commentators - particularly in the early years of bitcoin - speculated that unregulated digital currencies could be used to fund illicit activities.
A general absence of intrinsic value: The major digital currencies today are not backed by real assets - therefore their value is more surrounded by hype.
Limited utility: Today digital currencies are predominantly held by miners and investors. There is very limited use of digital currencies to buy goods and services.

These are some of the problems we see with cryptocurrencies. The world needs a new stable and green digital currency, which is usable globally. Enter ThreeFold Token.

To learn more about the token, please dive into our wiki.

Adnan Fatayerji

March 6, 2019

Use cases for the ThreeFold Peer-to-Peer Cloud

Containers, IAAS, Archives, Security, and more..

🔗Use cases for the ThreeFold Peer-to-Peer Cloud

🔗Any Docker Service

ThreeFold nodes natively run containers - therefore they can run any Docker service. But it does so in a more efficient way than the current Docker engine - the most used and known container technology platform in the world.

🔗IAAS

The ThreeFold node technology enables hardware capabilities to be used for IAAS services in a very efficient way. Overhead is reduced to a minimum by stripping out unnecessary layers of software that have been implemented over the last decade to patch scaling and performance problems. Our engineers have always looked at the root cause of issues and by innovating at the core algorithm level, solved many issues. Examples are:

Less is more: Scale down the operating system for a virtualization architecture to a minimum and boot it over the network - no local operating system files installed on local storage.
Look at root causes, no painkiller approach: Step away from existing storage solutions that require proprietary acceleration hardware and use standard off the shelf, affordable and efficient components with a 100% software-based storage solution that can withstand hardware failures without requiring human intervention - creating a very efficient, reliable and performing storage solution that can operate standalone.

The platform is secured by using a network boot mechanism that makes it virtually hack resistant as there are no operating system files installed locally. Infrastructure as a service traditionally runs in hyper-scale data centers, remote from the businesses using it. ThreeFold node technology allows you to install, operate and run IAAS services close to your business locations operated by your local IT team. It operates on a peer-to-peer network - only transferring bits of data that need to be transported to avoid network congestion and traffic bottlenecks.

🔗Archive

Data generation is growing exponentially. More data has been generated in the last 2 years than ever before. This creates a big need to archive data. The ThreeFold node technology creates storage and archiving capabilities by using standard hardware and known interfaces (S3, FTP, WebDav, CIFS, and NFS) will be built by developers worldwide and made available. The low-level storage functionality supports version controlling of the archived data, which keeps all relevant changes without any limitation by using a small amount of actual storage capacity.

🔗Security

Data security and reliability are key aspects of any storage system. The ThreeFold node allows all data to be compressed and encrypted if and when needed. The distributed character of the storage system enables site redundant storage algorithms to be deployed while keeping large data volumes from being stored in a single location. This removes the risk of data being stolen (physically) and prevents a site outage to result in data outage. The distributed character of the system is in line with the increasing spread of actual data generation. ThreeFold has sensory equipment everywhere these days, and the overhead of storing all that information in a few central places is enormous. Data collection and storage happens once - reading data to use it for a particular workload happens many times.

🔗Data Mining

On traditional server architectures, every application has to set up its servers that run their code in isolated silos, making sharing of data hard. The distributed character of the ThreeFold node technology presents compute and storage capacity everywhere. This enables large data mining workloads to happen close to the source of the data. By storing data in a distributed manner, mining can be distributed as well. Distributed compute capacity next to storage capabilities creates the possibility to create data mining operations on local storage (which makes it very fast and efficient) by coding data mining algorithms in programming languages (such as Python, Lua, Javascript, and Golang). Data mining follows distributed data storage.

Never run into scalability problems again with the ThreeFold node. Data storage can expand horizontally using thousands of distributed nodes to create large storage volumes.

🔗Smart Contracts

Smart contracts are applications that run on a decentralized platform, exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud, or third-party interference. These applications run on a blockchain, a powerful shared global infrastructure that can move value around and represent the ownership of that value. Smart contracts enable developers to create markets, store registries of debts (or promises), move funds following past instructions (like a will or a futures contract), and many other things without a middleman or counterparty risk. ThreeFold nodes run based on smart-contracts.

🔗Self-Learning and AI

Blockchains can be seen as databases. By current database standards, traditional blockchains like Bitcoin are terrible: low throughout, low capacity, high latency, poor query support, and so on. But even with these terrible characteristics, blockchains introduced three new and important characteristics:

Decentralized data and shared data control leads to more data and better qualitative data which results in better models. Shortening the machine learning time also enables AI to progress at a faster pace.
Immutable audit trails improve the trustworthiness of the data, and improves the models’ provenance on training and testing results.
Native assets and assets exchanges make training and testing models intellectual property (IP) assets easier - enhancing decentralized data and model exchanges.

Blockchain technology allows more and better quality data to be presented to machine learning algorithms. It has been proven (Microsoft researchers - Banko and Brill) that more data — not just a bit more data but way more data — while using the same algorithms results in a lot better machine learning. Meaning that the future of machine learning is not in trying to create more sophisticated algorithms (which will happen). So by moving AI learning into a blockchain environment we speed up machine learning and in the end create AI.

Sam Taggart

September 12, 2018

FEATURED POST

The Building Blocks of the Internet

March 4, 2024 - Emilie Ouwerx

ThreeFold stories and project info

An Intro to the ThreeFold Token

🔗How are ThreeFold Tokens created?

🔗5 good reasons to buy ThreeFold Tokens

Internet is growing wild

🔗Internet capacity needs to become localized

🔗The Internet needs to perform better

🔗The Internet needs to become more sustainable

🔗The Internet needs to become more affordable

🔗The Internet needs to become self-healing

🔗The world needs a responsible internet

🔗The Internet is growing fast, with the wrong solutions

You Are Unique

🔗You are unique

An escape from the Great Hack

🔗The neutrality of the current Internet is in danger.

🔗So what is the solution to these problems?

Decentralizing the Internet

🔗Decentralization

🔗The current Internet is centralized

🔗How To Participate

Bringing Trust is a Human Task

🔗A little history on blockchain technology

🔗Decentralization and immutability

🔗Blockchain myths

🔗Blockchains are “Super Scalable”

🔗Blockchain technology brings “Impeccable security.”

🔗When using Blockchains, “Trustworthiness is guaranteed.”

🔗Blockchains can manage “Anything.”

🔗Smart contracts on the Blockchain can do “Everything.”

🔗Blockchain deployments “If not public - go private!”

🔗A new feature, “justifies deploying a new Blockchain.”

🔗Blockchain myths undone

🔗Blockchains are here to stay!

🔗The combination of people and blockchains is really powerful

🔗A platform for people to start blockchains

Co-create the new Internet. Participate with TFT!

🔗Do you believe that the world needs change?

🔗Ready to support a new Internet?

The need for a sustainable digital currency

🔗The world needs a new stable & green digital currency, which is usable globally

Use cases for the ThreeFold Peer-to-Peer Cloud

🔗Use cases for the ThreeFold Peer-to-Peer Cloud

🔗Any Docker Service

🔗IAAS

🔗Archive

🔗Security

🔗Data Mining

🔗Smart Contracts

🔗Self-Learning and AI

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