🔗A better understanding of wealth

Wealth is more than the accumulation of money and resources. It can be generated in ways other than through conventional financial means. The financial justice warrior, Bernard Liataer, highlighted that to capture the wealth of our societies, our culture and our environments, we have to pay heed to the notion of wealth as well-being.

But how do we obtain that well-being? We all know the answer to this question – we have a sense of well-being when all of our needs are met. It is not just the basic needs of food, clothing and shelter but also the need to be a creative participant in our community, have a voice in our own destiny, and pursue our own spiritual development unhindered by social sanction. Developing real wealth implies making choices that enable all members of the community to attain well-being. Achieving sustainable wealth implies meeting the present’s needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

Digital Twin has been created while taking into consideration the different types of community capital that need to be achieved to create real wealth: 

1. Natural Capital - It includes the community environment that produces more assets. Our today’s economies failed to measure, understand and account for the true value of nature’s riches - clean air and water, soil and pollination for food, the social, intrinsic and spiritual values of natural beauty. Digital Twin will be the tool for us to place a proper value on Natural capital finally. 

2. Technological Capital – It includes how we harness our intellectual resources to create tools, systems, machines, arts, skills, and materials designed to improve our lives. This is what Digital Twin is all about - providing the required technology to enhance our lives and those of our communities’ members through collective efforts and intelligence. Digital Twin is only the foundation for this future global well-being. People will support education and creativity throughout the world and give access to material information required to create additional innovative technologies.

3. Social Capital – It recognizes the economic importance of all the ways we are connected: the relationships, our networks and values we share and the cooperative systems, and all its different components we use for interacting. Nowadays, our social capital is threatened through the repetitive act of violence, betrayal of trust, exclusion or less sharing and caring towards our fellow humans. Digital Twin has been created to encourage the easy sharing and exchange of resources and cooperate with each other on a platform.

4. Historical and Cultural Capital – Through history, we have learned, and now we are transmitting our cultural understanding and recommendation about the economic and financial system to others through an open-source, public and transparent peer-to-peer exchange protocol.

5. Human Capital – It includes all capabilities that people have to learn, invent, create, work, care for each other, and contribute to the community. This is the reason why Digital Twin has been created - A project to benefit us all.
   

6. Financial Capital – It is the creation of real wealth through the availability of liquidity resources through a multi-currency system and Savings & Investments made by individuals and institutions. By strengthening and increasing this type of capital, our peer-to-peer platform believes that it is the obvious path to a successful economic development.

All of these forms of capital produce the critical flows of assets through the economic system. Capital is the foundation, the reproductive system, the greenhouse that grows a healthy economy. This has been one of the fundamental beliefs of Digital Twin - For the well-being of worldwide communities. 

🔗Actually, you are the product

Now more than ever with this global pandemic happening since late 2019, our lives are being shaped by our interaction with the digital world - work meetings on Zoom followed by Skype or Messenger Video Call with your family before a quick run with your favourite running app and a google search for your next meal. Technologies and services offer us a lot and greatly improve our daily lives. But what’s the real cost of these tools we rely on so much? 

A lot of companies, especially those offering free services, collect data about you. It might be data you knowingly and willingly share to enjoy the benefits of the service (name, age, email address,..) or data that you might not realize you are sharing, like your approximate location through your IP address or your social network identifier or apps accessing your contacts. 

While some of this data, and its collection, may appear harmless to some, what happens behind the scenes is a real source of concern as the data collection is only the first step in a long and opaque process. Adtech companies combine this information and create an assumed picture of you that we may call a digital doppelganger - Your “digital secret identity”. Actually, you may have hundreds or thousands of different doppelgangers held by companies you’ve never heard of. 

Our data are so valuable that big tech giants spend so much time and effort building the platform that is useful for us and giving those platforms to us for free. Well, this data is collected for a single purpose: to better predict your behaviour and target you with ads. 

Real example: 

Imagine a person who has never talked about their political views online, never shared anything related to politics, never donated any money and never mentioned anything even in their private emails. Now the algorithms models that had been developed can analyse his/her Facebook likes or the music he/she listen to and with high accuracy can predict their political affiliation, and then being the target of unnecessary ads. 

P.S: This is not only for political affiliation. It stands out for every products and service using these marketing tools. 

Technology isn’t just hardware and software; it’s a fundamental component of every aspect of our lives and society. Inventions need to be created with social impact in mind. The invention should not be driven solely by profit, and the long-term effects should not be ignored and unknowable. 

If you are not paying for it, you are not the customer. You are the product being sold. It’s a powerful phrase, a modern dialogue to get people rethinking their relationship to social media. 

With Digital Twin, regain your freedom where you will live your digital life securely and privately. Now, you will have one and unique digital identity to interact in human-to-human way with your peers, edit, manage and store your documents, publish your web and make automatic payments. 

With Digital Twin, only you own your data and no one else.

🔗Why should I care?

Do you remember when you could create your own safe space and decide what others see and know? Now, whether you are at home, in the middle of a city, or hiking a mountain, you’re never really alone. More and more, the technology we used is connected to the internet. Cars, fridges, energy meters, even baby monitors send out data about you and your family 24/7 beyond your control.

🔗Behind the scene

This data is collected for spurious purposes: to better predict your behaviour and target you with ads. The targeted advertising ecosystem, using trackers included in the sites you visit and Software Development Kits (SDKs) in the apps you use, aims to get a better picture of you to present you with more relevant ads.

But it doesn’t stop there. The ad tech ecosystem has one main feature: connecting companies to you through an opaque and technically complex infrastructure, allowing almost anyone to enter the data collection and exchange market. Moreover, this means any companies can participate in processes such as Real-Time Bidding (an automated process that enables advertisers to target particular groups of people on different websites, videos, apps without having to negotiate prices directly), only to collect data and never display ads. 

This means that companies, such as two AdTech companies that track your activities on a different set of sites, can grab data from each other to consolidate the data and profiles they have on people. Consequently, companies participating in this ecosystem (or sometimes on their own) can sell your data to clients that may not be using it to try and sell you stuff. This is the unhealthy and unsustainable digital cycle that we live in.

Given these examples, it is not hard to imagine that your personal data can be used to influence the price of products and services proposed to you, particularly from companies and institutions. 

So, let’s join forces together and, as a community, reclaim our freedom and get back ownership of your data. With Digital Twin, you are at the centre of your digital world. No one else. 

🔗The Data Center Problem: Cost & Proximity

The centralized data centers that power today’s Internet are located “strategically” mainly in North America, Europe, and select parts of Asia. For populations living in these regions, Internet is accessible and generally relatively affordable. But the further you travel from these data centers, the less available and more expensive the internet becomes. Internet access is mostly an issue Sub-saharan Africa, throughout Asia, and some parts of South America.

Of course some data centers can be and are being built in and near developing and remote regions, but for reasons including cost and audience, this hasn’t been a huge priority to date. Beyond that, the data center model as a whole simply cannot scale to meet the future demands of the internet nor is it sustainable for our planet, so this is not the right option.

🔗The Internet Shutdown Problem: Control & Manipulation

Lack of internet access isn’t always just an availability or affordability problem. Today’s internet can be limited or even shut down at any point, by the right people. Take a quick look at NetBlocks.org, an organization that reports on global internet disruptions or outages. Typically governments are enacting these measures during times of unrest or protest or  important political moments. Even in the United States, the Executive Branch of the government has the power to shut down the internet in a case of a national emergency.

Cutting the internet or restricting certain services based on region (a common practice as well) is not only not right, it’s dangerous. People rely on the internet for information and communication and no government or entity should have the ability to shut the internet down at their discretion.

🔗The ThreeFold Solution: Fair & Neutral Internet for All

In 2016, the United Nations declared internet access to be a human right, yet today if you are reading this post, you are privileged. All humans deserve access to the internet and ThreeFold has the solution.

With the ThreeFold model, nodes can be set up anywhere in the world where an existing internet connection and electricity are present. By putting physical infrastructure at the edge (close to users), greater levels of access can be reached.

Further, the ThreeFold Grid cannot be shut down or manipulated. It is a neutral internet owned by the people, where autonomous technology heals and runs itself and requires minimal human intervention.

Today we are working with partners in the clean energy and network / connectivity to build the solutions that are needed to provide fair and uninterrupted internet access with all corners of the world.

Of course we will need new safe, secure, and private solutions for people to collaborate online. Many of these are already live and deployable via ThreeFold Now Community Solutions. We are working with partners in the education space as well to build toolsets for students to enrich their lives.

We need a more inclusive internet, and that is what we are building.

🔗What is Peer-to-Peer?

Peer-to-peer (P2P) is a term that originated from the distributed computer application architecture where tasks and workloads are shared between peers, popularized by Napster, a revolutionary file storing system from the late 1990s.

The concept inspired new structures and philosophies in many areas of human interaction. P2P systems and groups are typically critical of authoritarian and centralized social structures and believe in equality, meritocracy, flat systems, participatory & circular economies, as the concept represents a concrete pathway to these outcomes or visions.

P2P systems are network, not linear or ‘pyramidal’ hierarchies (though they may share some elements). They are ‘distributed’, though they may have elements of ‘centralization’ and ‘decentralization.’ And intelligence is not located at any center, but everywhere within the system.

🔗How does ThreeFold relate to peer-to-peer?

ThreeFold’s Peer-to-Peer (P2P) computing network is a distributed architecture that splits tasks and workloads between its peers, ThreeFold Farmers. Farmers are equal participants in the network and together they form a peer-to-peer network of nodes, the ThreeFold Grid.

Farmers make their resources, such as processing power, disk storage or network bandwidth, directly available to other network participants, without the need for central coordination by servers or stable hosts. Farmers are both suppliers and consumers of resources, in contrast to the traditional client-server model in which the consumption and supply of resources is divided.

In the near future, ThreeFold will create Digital Twin, which will go beyond the era of peers doing similar things while sharing resources. It will actually enable much more than that. Digital Twin will create a complete new digital world with diverse peers that can bring in unique resources and capabilities to a virtual community on the ThreeFold Grid. This will empower the network of peers to engage in greater tasks beyond those that can be accomplished by individual peers, and are beneficial to all the peers.

🔗Why did ThreeFold choose peer-to-peer? 

Everything starts (or should start) from the why, and the ThreeFold story started a long time ago. Before the inception of ThreeFold, many of the co-founders of the project used to work with the largest IT & Cloud actors. Throughout their experience working in the Industry, they realized that the complexity of the technology and the centralization of knowledge & power led to an inefficient, unsustainable, not scalable and unequally distributed infrastructure. So they decided to redesign the whole Internet and cloud infrastructure bottom-up with the vision of shaping a global internet economy that can scale anywhere efficiently, cost efficiently and sustainably. 

🔗Why does the world needs peer-to-peer? 

By developing the technology, the conviction that peer-to-peer was the best solution for humanity and the planet strengthened itself. Why? Well, put simply, a peer-to-peer system removes all forms of intermediaries, unnecessary steps and complexity from the picture. Therefore, it simplifies the architecture in an incredible way. The benefits are many but here are the most popular benefits:

• Privacy: Our peer-to-peer environment means no middlemen or intermediaries, meaning data travels directly between peers and stored on the nodes of their choice rather than being sent through and stored by a third party.
• Security: Data stored in data centers is susceptible to security breaches. In bypassing data centers and exchanging data directly between peers, we can achieve much greater security as it reduces code and back doors significantly. 
• Scalability: In a many-to-many system, scale is essentially unlimited. There is simply no bottleneck. And hardware (nodes) can be added at ease compared to current data center model.
• Cost-efficiency & Sustainability: End-to-end (direct) connection between peers means a more efficient path for data and less energy is needed. Less energy means less cost, and less harm to our planet.

🔗In 2021 the world is going peer-to-peer! 

We’re now in 4 years into the project, and it is clear that ThreeFold holds the most advanced technology and is probably the only tech company in the world that can achieve a peer-to-peer network & digital world as envisioned by the concept authors. The ThreeFold Grid is running and already at it’s 2.4 version and 2021 will bring various commercial opportunities for the public to partake in the peer-to-peer network, from hosting IT workloads to experiencing P2P end-user solutions. In other words, in 2021, the world will be able to go peer-to-peer.

🔗Simplicity is the key to unlock a better future

Over time, integration suites, middleware solutions, and enterprise service busses have been invented and implemented to cover integration challenges within the current internet. This has further complicated IT architectures, resulting in a loss of actual end user workload performance.

ThreeFold reworked the whole approach to IT architectures and eliminated the layers of complexity. The result is a cloud stack that presents minimal overhead and that requires less hardware – reducing heat generation and eventually cooling requirements. By reducing the need for power, the net result is an energy-efficient Internet grid.

🔗Improving resilience and efficiency through Self-Healing IT

Keeping systems up and running is a major requirement in modern day IT. Leading vendors earn most of their margin by selling maintenance contracts, performance guarantees, and professional services. Their business models bring no incentive to make things simple and efficient for consumers.

Creating a self-healing environment requires only minimal manual intervention to replace broken hardware components. Broken hardware components are inevitable, and the Zero-OS distributed node architecture deals with such failures by turning off broken components and provisioning unused capacity. By removing the need to ship broken parts back and forth, and linking to the corresponding installation knowledge (engineers), a lower carbon footprint can be achieved.

🔗“No painkiller” approach. We tackle the root issue

If a specific piece of software or hardware is not delivering the required performance or reliability, we should analyze the core design/algorithm and its usage of soft/hard components to determine the root causes of persistent issues to be solved.

Currently, most storage vendors follow the path of least resistance when trying to improve on performance. Their solution for meeting performance targets is to use faster components (CPU, memory, network card, proprietary acceleration) rather than looking at the core algorithms that drive the utilization of those components. Swapping components for faster ones perpetuates a cycle of cutting corners and focuses reliance on innovation from hardware component providers rather than solving the more fundamental and underlying issues. That’s a “painkiller” approach.

Zero-OS was designed to solve root problem issues by design. While still using high-performance hardware components on the ThreeFold Grid, the algorithm of Zero-OS maximizes utilization possibilities. This enables greater performance and sustainability. Some key examples how this is achieved:

🔗Eliminating unnecessary elements from standard architectures

Virtualization adds a layer of software between the actual end-user workload and physical hardware. It also allows for multiple workloads to run on the same hardware by using excess capacity. There is definitely merit in building a virtualization solution. Building an effective virtualization solution that does not require abundant context switching is key and this is why Zero-OS has been developed. Zero-OS uses a minimal Linux kernel that allows for a number of user spaces to co-exist. In these user spaces, containerized versions of software can be run, eliminating the need for hypervisors, virtual OS to fuel the virtual machines, and guest operating systems. This also minimizes the required overhead for the host OS.

🔗Minimizing network connections usage

Supercomputing delivered many new technologies. But, not all of them are usable solutions for everyday workloads. One technology invented to make supercomputers performant is the use of Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA). RDMA allowed physical CPU boards (containing both CPUs and memory) to access other CPU boards in memory stored data over a dedicated channel. This eliminated the need to transport data between CPU nodes over network connections (or other mainstream means to exchange data). The result was a considerable reduction in overhead created when allowing distributed end user workloads to operate over multiple physical cores. The leading server and storage solutions brands have never considered nor implemented such mechanisms. This resulted in an increased need for faster networks - increasing complexity, costs, efforts and resources needed to operate solutions.

RDMA is only used in certified farms and requires involvement of TFTech.

🔗Minimizing disk usage

The storage solution uses slow and big (the bigger the better) HDD disks which drive in rack density. As they spin slower they consume less power and need less cooling. But then, how can you deal with read/write intensive workloads? The storage algorithm uses a SSD cache to acknowledge Inputs/Outputs coming from the applications, fills the erasure coded data blocks in large (up to 64MB) storage containers and writes the big chunks of data on the big and slow HHDs. If you are familiar with HDD disks, you know they like to be streamed on instead of having a lot of small bits written in a scratchy way.

Continuous innovation in all of these areas are leading to an efficient technology stack.