🔗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.

🔗Do you believe that the world needs change?

Do you believe in decentralization? Equality? Sustainability?

Do you believe in circular economies, where everyone is invited to partake and succeed?

The ThreeFold Token is the currency of the new Internet and brings true solutions to all the above questions.

It supports the ThreeFold Foundation - an open ecosystem that is shaping a better world by empowering game-changing technology. ThreeFold is growing a green and conscious peer-to-peer Internet that is available everywhere and owned by everyone – across geographical and cultural borders, empowering people to be autonomous, and providing equal chances to learn, partake and succeed.

🔗Ready to support a new Internet?

By buying and holding TFT, anyone can support the ThreeFold Foundation’s ability to achieve its next technological and growth milestones (see Token Distribution Event for use-cases). From funding the next technological innovations to supporting the growth of ThreeFold use-cases built on top of the ThreeFold Grid, TFT powers the expansion of the new Internet.

The time has come for us to step up and shape the world we believe is possible. Join us and lets co-create our futures together.

Get TFT on Liquid now.

Get TFT on BTC-Alpha now.

On behalf of our planet, humanity and the ThreeFold Community, we thank you for considering empowering a better world.

If you need more guidance on buying TFT, please head here.

🔗Hyperscale realities are very different from what most people think

🔗Myth 1: Bigger data centers are more efficient

There are advantages in building larger-scale data centers, like economies of scale and sheer bulk buying power, but these are not as significant as what people think. The average cost per rack in a hyper-scale data center is $20-35K USD including all energy requirements and safety systems. The cost of hardware per rack is around the $200-300K USD mark.

What is often forgotten is that anything that is of enormous scale and highly concentrated comes with complexity and specific problems to deal with. For example. resource requirements such as investment, operational costs, knowledge, and people increase significantly with size.

In reality, keeping things simple, small, and distributed is much more cost-effective than large complex environments.

🔗Myth 2: Big data centers can be sustainable

The carbon footprint of a big data center is enormous. To improve the power usage effectiveness (PUE) of most data center farmers have adopted wind, hydro, and/or solar power technologies, which indeed helps drop their PUE by an estimated 20%. But is this leading to more sustainability?

This 20% looks great on paper and in the farmers’ corporate social responsibility reports. However, it just represents an improvement in the cooling technology and sourcing of energy. It doesn’t actually impact the energy consumed by the equipment that runs in their data centers (servers, storage chassis, physical disks, etc.) which is the equipment responsible for the carbon footprint. PUE only refers to overhead power consumption, i.e. cooling the facility, opening, and closing doors, maintaining power security systems, etc.

Real improvement lies in deploying technologies that actually consume less power to deliver the actual Internet capacity to run workloads, real CPU chassis, physical disks, and storage cabinets. Improving on how hardware is being more effectively used can have an impact of up to a thousand percent and lead to ten times more power-efficiency.

🔗Myth 3: Redundant systems have better uptime

A lot of us believe that systems need redundancy mechanisms to improve their operational uptime and reliability. While it may make sense to IT experts, let’s translate this for the non-IT world?

To make a car more reliable we add redundancy (as we do in IT). So for the risk of having a puncture, we add one extra tire for all the tires we use continuously. This adds 4 extra tires to the car. Then a decision needs to be made: Do we put those tires in a structure where they are always running along with the primary tires or do we choose not to have them “online” all the time, wearing and tearing in the same way as the primary tires?

Building such a system would take a large number of engineers to come up with a solution, and would change cars as we know them. Wouldn’t it make more sense to think outside the box and solve the root of the problem by making tires un-deflatable?

The IT industry has gone overboard with the concept of redundancy, having forgotten to look at the root cause issues. This has spawned a whole new industry of itself, which has a financial interest in creating complicated and expensive redundant systems.

🔗Myth 4: Big companies optimize better

Big companies with a certain track record will know better how to optimize as they have more people and resources.

At first glance, this sounds logical, but in reality, ninety percent of the innovation within the IT space comes from startups. The giant IT companies have a heritage they hardly can overcome. They are locked in old infrastructure designs, and building outside of that infrastructure would be costly, timely, and probably put the breaks on their businesses.

Real innovation gives way to fix the core symptoms rather than taking the problem pain-killer approach.

🔗Respect Human Rights

• Sustainability: It is important for a very simple reason: we cannot maintain our quality of life as human beings, the diversity of life on our planet, or Earth’s ecosystems unless we embrace and protect its balance.
• Equality: Everyone should have a right to learn, dream, partake and succeed. Equal access also means affordability, not ownership by big greedy companies.
• Decentralization: To better distribute power, value and opportunities, we need more decentralization. Technologies and solutions should be available everywhere to improve equality and sustainability.
• Openness & Interoperability: Allows technologies to work together in an open way, without limitation, and therefore expands the possibilities for innovation and sharing.
• Accessibility: Whatever the location or situation, people should benefit from easy and fast access to information and solutions.
• Security & Privacy: Protect people from being put in situations of danger or exploitation. People should be empowered to be independent and they should be the sole owners of their experiences.

🔗Respect Human Effort

• Reliability: Make sure technologies are reliable and last longer.
• Simplicity: We need to keep things simple: no unnecessary complexity - less is more.
• Transparency: Let people and companies work together in a 100% transparent way.
• Collaboration: It’s all about the greater picture. We are stronger together and have to help each other in reaching our common visions.

🔗Respect Human Experience

• Ergonomy: Products and solutions should empower productivity, safety and comfort, while reducing human error.
• Inclusiveness: Design should always be global and inclusive. We are all equal.
• Design: Products should be visually appealing and should achieve it’s purpose.
• Transparency: Organisational records and strategies should be accessible to everyone.
  
  Photo by Renee Fisher on Unsplash.