12 ms·

Skynet – Build a Free Internet

259 points by thesausageking 6y ago

HDMI_Cable 6y ago
This sort of seems like a competitor to IPFS, no?
- thesausageking 6y ago
  Yes. One of founders talks about the two problems with IPFS they saw that led them to build it in this comment from a past thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24626748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24626748
  - EGreg 6y ago
    What did they mean: * Skynet uses a point-to-point protocol rather than a DHT, which not only makes it faster, it's also more robust to abuse. DHTs are pretty famously fragile to things like DDoS and active subversion, and Skynet has been designed to be robust and high performance even when malicious actors are trying to interrupt the network.* How is P2P used rather than DHT
    - feanaro 6y ago
      Think about it this way. To be able to find who is hosting the file, we need a mutable shared data structure which can be updated with this information as it changes over time. In IPFS, this is fulfilled by the DHT, whereas in Skynet/Sia the blockchain takes over the role.
      - EGreg 6y ago
        So basically the reverse of Kazaa flooding vs BitTorrent DHT: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~srini/15-441/F11/lectures/21-p2p.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~srini/15-441/F11/lectures/21-p2p.pdf I have had to deal with routing when building the Intercoin project. And spoke to several of the teams including at MaidSAFE. One way of selecting nodes from the global network is to have everyone’s IP addresses. But them you make the entire network susceptible to DDOS attacks. One of the advantages of an additional search layer (DNS, DHT etc.) on top of IP is that it can mitigate DDOS. The other is if the IP actually changes. Just one of many discussions about the economics of fetching files: https://safenetforum.org/t/how-does-maidsafe-prevent-ddos-attacks/23628 https://safenetforum.org/t/how-does-maidsafe-prevent-ddos-at...
    - Taek 6y ago
      To be a host on Skynet, you have to declare yourself on the Sia blockchain, which means users running a blockchain node (full node or lite node) are able to have a complete and limited list of all the possible hosts on the network. The Skylinks aren't just hashes, they contain a couple bytes extra of information as well. Between the explicit list of potential hosts and a small amount of hinting in the Skylink, you can narrow down the number of potential places a file is stored to be small enough that you can just ping all of them in parallel with a request for the data. You don't have to do any multi-hop routing to find the data. This saves latency.
      - EGreg 6y ago
        If the complete list is available, can’t anyone simply download it and DDOS the entire network indefinitely? One of the roles of a good DHT is to localize any DDOS and refuse to propagate it further.
jondwillis 6y ago
How will they reduce the latency? 300-500ms seems about an order of magnitude slower than centralized CDNs.
- Taek 6y ago
  Most of the latency right now is software slowdowns, our production testing suggests that with some more optimization at the software level we should be able to get below 80ms with today's protocol and host network. That's still not quite where the centralized CDNs are, but the numbers should only get better as the network grows and matures.
leshokunin 6y ago
Didn't realize this was built on Sia. Interesting! I used to follow their development closely back in ~2017. I like how this product seems to be pretty straightforward to use. Hope it leads to more.
- nathanganser 6y ago
  To me, Sia and Skynet are the best usecases to make decentralized tech mainstream. https://skyfeed-beta.hns.siasky.net/#/ https://skyfeed-beta.hns.siasky.net/#/ is a social media built upon Sia and Skynet :)
- jwmoz 6y ago
  Go look at SCBTC daily.
  - Taek 6y ago
    The Sia and Skynet projects are focused on achieving a vision of a decentralized future for the Internet. Pumping the token value has never been a priority. SC is a utility token, and you should buy it if you want to use the Sia network.
turblety 6y ago
If you are using Skynet for your project, I believe you need to run a node, which will require downloading the 23GB [1] blockchain from sia. I really hope these blockchain based projects can solve the sharding problem. These blockchains are getting so big. [1] https://siastats.info/blockchain_size https://siastats.info/blockchain_size
- UShouldBWorking 6y ago
  I agree! Ethereum is already to big and too expensive to use. I hold a lot but worry about both BTC and Ethereum. Normal people can no longer use either chain for everyday transactions and at this rate Ethereum will never work as a global computer. To me only Bitcoin Cash and Monero really have their use cases and code sussed out. Sia (and filecoin) work great but both have issues with their insentives, in Sia's case they issue too many coins and it's not profitable to host content.
  - chrisco255 6y ago
    ETH has already solved scalability with Zero Knowledge Proofs and Optimistic Rollups. Some dapps are clocking 2000 transactions per second. Also, ETH 2's initial beacon chain has launched and when ETH2 fully rolls out, there will be 64x that available on the network.
    - EGreg 6y ago
      Please elaborate. Also when will ETH2 roll out?
      - zelly 6y ago
        It's already out, but most people are still on the eth1 chain
        Taek 6y ago
        I think you misunderstand the state that Eth2 is in. It's technically "released", but Eth2 cannot be used to transact. If you move money to Eth2, it must stay in the same wallet/address until more features are rolled out. Everyone who uses Eth today is still on Eth1 because Eth2 is only good for having your coins sit there and accumulate interest.
mortenjorck 6y ago
It's only a matter of time before this project gets a cease & desist from Disney. (Disney owns 20th Century Studios, formerly 20th Century Fox, owner of the Terminator franchise.)
- aszantu 6y ago
  they could call it skynettery afterwards xD
- Taek 6y ago
  We get somewhere between dozens and hundreds of DMCA's per week, and we comply with all of them. We can't actually take content off of Skynet itself (similar to how you can't actually take content off of IPFS), but we can have our portal (https://siasky.net https://siasky.net) refuse to serve content with known-infringing or known-abusive hashes.
  - KMag 6y ago
    GP was joking about the name of the project itself infringing on Disney trademarks, but (as a peer notes) Fox/Disney hasn't registered a trademark on Skynet.
- lgats 6y ago
  Several trademarks exist for skynet, none are registered to/owned by Disney https://uspto.report/Search/Skynet https://uspto.report/Search/Skynet
newbie789 6y ago
I might be entirely wrong but I feel like I've seen multiple projects called Skynet in the past few years. I can't recall any others running currently because some of them might've become defunct and/or I've forgotten about them. I wonder what the appeal of the name is nowadays. (I have seen Terminator and am familiar with the origins of the name) I should clarify: It is another company's trademark or whatever as far as I know (again, could be wrong. Don't know how Disney litigates things in this domain). Again, I could also be wrong about this not being the only thing called Skynet in the past few years. I welcome responses!
twostorytower 6y ago
Disclosure: I mined Siacoin for years and have hundreds of thousands of tokens. Sia is an amazing project with a team who is extremely talented and passionate, but Skynet is the future. They've built a fully decentralized CDN and it's incredible. Ten years from now, I can see it being the norm for startups and maybe even larger companies to use decentralized CDN's like this. I hope Coinbase adds Siacoin for trading soon, since they participated in integrating Rosetta.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- andrew_ 6y ago
  Is it still profitable to mine Siacoin locally?
  - tgtweak 6y ago
    No, they've made purpose-built silicon for sia mining and it is no longer viable to mine on general purpose compute. As far as storage mining - it may be. last check (november) filecoin was the most profitable to host your disk space for but required a rediculous amount of compute as well as disk space (latest gen GPUs, 128G ram, near-100% uptime).
    - viraptor 6y ago
      It's relatively early days for filecoin though. I suspect that after "we've got space and availability, see?" period, the restrictions for hosting will be relaxed.
      - tgtweak 6y ago
        Hopefully they loosen the coin collateral requirement for nodes also.
RMPR 6y ago
After skimming a bit, I don't see how they plan to deal with abuse. Especially if there's no size limitation on files.
- tmikaeld 6y ago
  There seems to be a lot of issues other than that. https://siasetup.info/concerns-about-sia-and-skynet https://siasetup.info/concerns-about-sia-and-skynet "Sia hosts have always had questionable liability over what they store as hosts. These concerns are likely to amplify with Skynet, where a host may hold a whole unencrypted file and serve it to a portal or public users, exposing the host as being the one that holds a file that may infringe copyright or be illegal in some other way."
  - Taek 6y ago
    I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but most jurisdictions have strong protections for providers hosting third party content so long as the providers are not aware that the content is problematic. If a provider is notified that there is problematic content on their machine, they have an obligation to take it down in a reasonable timeframe. Sia hosts already have tooling for complying with DCMAs and abuse notices. To the best of my knowledge, no Sia host has yet received one, but we are prepared for when that moment happens. Most of the rest of the issues in that letter are overstated and ungenerous. Sia/Skynet is an early project, with a small team and a limited budget. Of course it is not as polished as its centralized alternatives, but if you compare to better funded projects like Storj and Filecoin, I believe it's very difficult to say in good faith that our team is not up for the task.
    - bitwize 6y ago
      > I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but most jurisdictions have strong protections for providers hosting third party content so long as the providers are not aware that the content is problematic. We cannot rely on that continuing to be the case. Neither Trump nor Biden want Section 230 to keep going as it is.
- 6y ago
74d-fe6-2c6 6y ago
How does Skynet relate to Tim Berners-Lee's Solid project (https://solid.mit.edu/ https://solid.mit.edu/)?
ghoomketu 6y ago
I'm asking in earnest but since I'm not very savvy when it comes to blockchain and decentralised internet, can this be used for piracy (movies mp3 etc)? What about really nefarious stuff like CP? Do we know who is responsible and is it possible to report and take down links? Also does running a node involve you in anything unknowingly? Or does it have nothing to do with anonymity/bullet-proof links and is merely just a very cheap storage? P.S. Sorry if this sounds like noob questions but i wasn't able to answer it by looking at their homepage.
- Proven 6y ago
  > can this be used for piracy (movies mp3 etc)? What about really nefarious stuff like CP? How can it be private if it's possible to check what the content contains? If it's private you can't tell which network packet contains CP and which cat videos. > Do we know who is responsible and is it possible to report and take down links? How can you report it if you haven't viewed it? If you've view it and then report it, how do you think would that work out for you? > Also does running a node involve you in anything unknowingly? If it's censorship-free then you serve all content unknowingly.
- cyphermoon 6y ago
  Skynet can be used for any sort of data. Public facing portals and hosts serving unencrypted data are of course responsible for the content they serve. People can upload content in two ways: either by using a public facing portal such as siasky.net or by spinning up their own portal client (Sia node) and communicating with hosts directly via the distributed network. It is possible for individual portals and hosts to take down links and stop serving that content, for example after accepting copyright infringement requests. It it also possible for anyone to spin up their own portal and keep content pinned as long as any host on the network will accept it. For example, skyportal.xyz is another public portal. Same goes for hosts. The Skynet (Sia) model aims for thousands and thousands of hosts spread geographically. It becomes extremely difficult to delete any piece of data from the network entirely as long as someone wants to make sure it stays up. Erasure coding redundancy ensures very high resilience from any single host going offline.
  - 6y ago
zaptheimpaler 6y ago
Why is this free? Who is paying the Sia nodes to store the data?
- cyphermoon 6y ago
  Portal and renter nodes pay hosts for the data in Siacoin. These payments are managed by file contracts that renters and hosts agree on and sign cryptographically. These contracts involve periodic verification that the data is being hosted. Failure to verify involves an automatic financial loss for hosts.
- forgot_old_user 6y ago
  How much does it cost?
pentae 6y ago
So what's stopping an abuser from generating tons of accounts and spamming their network with junk causing everyone to have to host lots of junk data?
- Taek 6y ago
  It's a paid network. https://siasky.net/ https://siasky.net/ is free for the moment, but will be switching to a freemium model in the near future. As a portal, siasky will have the ability to ratelimit and block abusers. If you "abuse" the network using your own node, you will have to pay for everything you upload and download, which means the people storing it won't really think of it as abuse, you're just another paying customer.
  - pentae 6y ago
    Thanks for the clarification
- qwantim1 6y ago
  I hope it’s not the T-800[1]. [1]- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminator_(character) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminator_(character)
- cyphermoon 6y ago
  Cost. If this abuser was running his own Portal node to do so, he would simply be paying hosts to host his junk data. Hosts would be very happy to do so, as they set their own prices. If this abuser was trying to use a public Skynet portal, the same abuse prevention measures apply as for any other data storage service out there. IP banning, filtering, etc
snorrah 6y ago
hey don’t call yourself Skynet. names tainted.
- bitwize 6y ago
  Well, it does provide a neat explanation for the Terminator franchise: the in-movie Skynet is an advanced version of this Skynet, which decided to conquer humanity because it was trained on data from all the fascists that are bound to flood Skynet with their rhetoric.
qwantim1 6y ago
Another thing named Skynet?[1] [1]- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skynet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skynet
- KMag 6y ago
  Maybe they should rename it to YATNS/Yet Another Thing Named Skynet?
ranguna 6y ago
Am I the only one that can't download the examples, it just gets stuck. Also the dapp example throws me a json saying that skynet is blocked.
- Taek 6y ago
  Are you in Europe by any chance? We haven't finished setting up load balancing yet and the Europe server is getting hit really hard right now. The dapp sample was blocked because it was mistaken for a phishing attempt (it's the Uniswap frontend) and Namecheap required us to block the link. Sloppy of us not to change the link to an unblocked example, we'll do that on Monday. In the meantime, here's a dapp sample: https://marstorage.hns.siasky.net/ https://marstorage.hns.siasky.net/
  - ranguna 6y ago
    Yep, I'm from Europe. After changing my vpn to the US, it started working m Thanks for the HEADS-UP, really hope this project future is less sloppy than it's lunch on HN.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dt3ft 6y ago
> Skynet's speeds rival centralized providers and surpass all decentralized offerings. A typical Skynet download starts in under 500 ms and can stream at rates as high as 1 Gbps! I tried to download the PDF sample on the frontpage and the download never actually started. It kept waiting for the server to begin transmitting the file...
- shaicoleman 6y ago
  Didn't download for me either
- jbotz 6y ago
  It worked and was essentially instantaneous for me.
  - Taek 6y ago
    Europe servers are struggling, US servers are doing fine. We're still building out our load balancing strategy.
- spzb 6y ago
  Tried the mp4. After a wait of 30 seconds or so, it started downloading at about 15 MBit/sec on a 200 MBit/sec broadband connection.
  - Taek 6y ago
    1 gbps us if you are running your own node, when you are on a public node you are sharing the speeds with hundreds of other users
Hnsuz 6y ago
Skynet is down.. Could this be alternative for Google sensure anyway??
LockAndLol 6y ago
Can somebody explain what the difference between this and IPFS is? I see block chain mentioned so I assume you pay for storage but that page just allows you to upload anything right away without payment. Is this actually an alternative to FileCoin? https://ipfs.io https://ipfs.io https://filecoin.io https://filecoin.io
knorker 6y ago
Is there a tl;dr how this differs from e.g. Freenet? I mean aside from the "we use blockchain herp derp".
- cyphermoon 6y ago
  Among other things, the blockchain/crypto part ensures hosts and portals have a monetary incentive to host data, making their service scalable and sustainable.
troquerre 6y ago
We’ve been using Skynet for all our decentralized web projects at Namebase.io ever since they added Handshake naming support[1] — it’s been fantastic. It now takes us days to build things that previously took our intern a month to do. With censorship entering the zeitgeist nowadays I wouldn’t be surprised if the next big decentralized social network is build on Skynet. [1] https://siasky.net/docs/#handshake https://siasky.net/docs/#handshake
- Esiason 6y ago
  Be warned of the large post mine coming to SiaCoin soon (the crypto-currency that powers Skynet). Massive inflation is coming to SiaCoin because of this to pay off Skynet Labs as they exit development on the Sia core protocol. David (aka Taek), the original creator, is leaving the Sia project to become a third party dev (working for the new Skynet Labs VC funded company) and will no longer be working on making the Sia core protocol actually work better. Lots of outstanding issues in the Sia core protocol still and with Sia losing their founding dev it raises concerns if the Sia protocol will ever be able to mature. Read more at https://SiaSetup.info https://SiaSetup.info (and more specifically https://siasetup.info/concerns-about-sia-and-skynet https://siasetup.info/concerns-about-sia-and-skynet)
  - Taek 6y ago
    The "post mine" is something that has been discussed in the community for many months, and is not something we are hiding - in fact it's stickied at the top of /r/siacoin and has appeared in all of our announcment channels and official newsletters. https://www.reddit.com/r/siacoin/comments/iox6ly/proposal_the_sia_foundation/ https://www.reddit.com/r/siacoin/comments/iox6ly/proposal_th... It is also not correct to say I am "leaving" the Sia project, I will continue to work on Sia and Skynet as I always have, but administrative control over the codebase is being handed over to a non-profit foundation with a mandate of placing the community health and vision as its primary priority. My own primary responsibility is to the bottom line of my company, and to the extent that Skynet Labs' bottom line is no longer perfectly aligned with the community's interests, we have created a foundation to ensure the community has a voice in how development progresses for the base layer. I know that the 18,000 word letter you linked raises a lot of concerns about the project - from the history, to the speed of developemnt, to the core codebase, to the new Skynet initiative, to the economic model, to the team behind the project and the leadership behind the project, to the documentation, to the new initiative to hand over the project to the community, to the communtiy itself - but I don't believe the letter was written from a place of good faith, and I don't believe that most of the arguments hold up to scrutiny, especially if you compare the progress and decision making of the Sia project to competitors like Filecoin, Maidsafe, and Storj
als0 6y ago
In layman's terms, how much does this cost?
miki123211 6y ago
What's the difference between Sia and Skynet? This is the point that confuses me most. I thought Sia is the low-level layer and Skynet is the high-level layer, but one of the comments says that Sia encrypts data and Skynet doesn't, so that makes no sense. Too many names that aren't clearly explained in a very obvious place is a plague that many otherwise cool projects suffer from.
- dghelm 6y ago
  Yeah, there's actually organizational changes happening to help remedy this. At risk of over-simplifying: - Sia is the blockchain project that lets renters and hosts create a market for storage space. (using SiaCoin as the cryptocurrency) - Skynet uses this market to provide a data backend for a web ecosystem for developers and users. They access the ecosystem through "portals," which are actually just specialized hosts on the sia network. Data on the Sia network is encrypted at a storage layer (as part of splitting it up to send it to hosts), but Skynet files are accessible to anyone who has its hash (portals, ISP, etc could see this info when you access the URL). The file contents are not encrypted by default because they're meant to be widely-accessible, but you can encrypt files on the client-side before sending the, to Skynet, which is what https://skysend.hns.siasky.net/ https://skysend.hns.siasky.net/ and some other projects do.
- Esiason 6y ago
  Documentation about Sia and Skynet can be found at https://SiaSetup.info https://SiaSetup.info in the "Learn" subsection.
api 6y ago
Look it’s Sia, the only non-vaporware ICO that quietly shipped a mostly working and usable version of what Filecoin raised 100X more to so far fail to ship (in a usable form).
- Esiason 6y ago
  Sia is also about to initiate a large post-mine which will go directly to cashing out the dev's work on the protocol for the last 6 years. To me a post-mine cashout is worse than a pre-mine ICO because it more closely resembles shady bait-and-switch tactics than being up front about where the money to fund development will come from.
phreack 6y ago
I had zero knowledge of what any of this was (Sia, Skynet, etc), tried looking it up on the page but the technical terms were too many and there was no glossary I could find. So I started searching, read the Readme on Sia's project on Gitlab, and then came upon this website [1] which harshly demonizes both Sia and Skynet due to maintainers banning a critic, and allegedly being generally toxic. This is very much not a good look at all for the whole thing, and I suggest the developers should both solve this problem amicably ASAP, and also add very clear 'WHAT THIS IS AND HOW IT WORKS' links on every page related to the project, with many real world examples of how/why use this and with nearly no use of specific jargon that's not introduced clearly during explanations. [1] https://siasetup.info/guides/using-skynet https://siasetup.info/guides/using-skynet
- dghelm 6y ago
  For a more accessible description of what sia & skynet do, https://siastats.info/sia101 https://siastats.info/sia101 is a good starting place.
  - Esiason 6y ago
    https://siastats.info/sia101 https://siastats.info/sia101 is a nice newbie guide to Sia and Skynet but the more technical guides and troubleshooting knowledge exists at https://siasetup.info https://siasetup.info
bgdkbtv 6y ago
Have we not learned anything from the famous documentary "Terminator"?

HDMI_Cable 6y ago

This sort of seems like a competitor to IPFS, no?

thesausageking 6y ago
Yes. One of founders talks about the two problems with IPFS they saw that led them to build it in this comment from a past thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24626748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24626748
- EGreg 6y ago
  What did they mean: * Skynet uses a point-to-point protocol rather than a DHT, which not only makes it faster, it's also more robust to abuse. DHTs are pretty famously fragile to things like DDoS and active subversion, and Skynet has been designed to be robust and high performance even when malicious actors are trying to interrupt the network.* How is P2P used rather than DHT
  - feanaro 6y ago
    Think about it this way. To be able to find who is hosting the file, we need a mutable shared data structure which can be updated with this information as it changes over time. In IPFS, this is fulfilled by the DHT, whereas in Skynet/Sia the blockchain takes over the role.
    - EGreg 6y ago
      So basically the reverse of Kazaa flooding vs BitTorrent DHT: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~srini/15-441/F11/lectures/21-p2p.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~srini/15-441/F11/lectures/21-p2p.pdf I have had to deal with routing when building the Intercoin project. And spoke to several of the teams including at MaidSAFE. One way of selecting nodes from the global network is to have everyone’s IP addresses. But them you make the entire network susceptible to DDOS attacks. One of the advantages of an additional search layer (DNS, DHT etc.) on top of IP is that it can mitigate DDOS. The other is if the IP actually changes. Just one of many discussions about the economics of fetching files: https://safenetforum.org/t/how-does-maidsafe-prevent-ddos-attacks/23628 https://safenetforum.org/t/how-does-maidsafe-prevent-ddos-at...
  - Taek 6y ago
    To be a host on Skynet, you have to declare yourself on the Sia blockchain, which means users running a blockchain node (full node or lite node) are able to have a complete and limited list of all the possible hosts on the network. The Skylinks aren't just hashes, they contain a couple bytes extra of information as well. Between the explicit list of potential hosts and a small amount of hinting in the Skylink, you can narrow down the number of potential places a file is stored to be small enough that you can just ping all of them in parallel with a request for the data. You don't have to do any multi-hop routing to find the data. This saves latency.
    - EGreg 6y ago
      If the complete list is available, can’t anyone simply download it and DDOS the entire network indefinitely? One of the roles of a good DHT is to localize any DDOS and refuse to propagate it further.

jondwillis 6y ago

How will they reduce the latency? 300-500ms seems about an order of magnitude slower than centralized CDNs.

Taek 6y ago
Most of the latency right now is software slowdowns, our production testing suggests that with some more optimization at the software level we should be able to get below 80ms with today's protocol and host network. That's still not quite where the centralized CDNs are, but the numbers should only get better as the network grows and matures.

leshokunin 6y ago

Didn't realize this was built on Sia. Interesting! I used to follow their development closely back in ~2017. I like how this product seems to be pretty straightforward to use. Hope it leads to more.

nathanganser 6y ago
To me, Sia and Skynet are the best usecases to make decentralized tech mainstream. https://skyfeed-beta.hns.siasky.net/#/ https://skyfeed-beta.hns.siasky.net/#/ is a social media built upon Sia and Skynet :)
jwmoz 6y ago
Go look at SCBTC daily.
- Taek 6y ago
  The Sia and Skynet projects are focused on achieving a vision of a decentralized future for the Internet. Pumping the token value has never been a priority. SC is a utility token, and you should buy it if you want to use the Sia network.

turblety 6y ago

If you are using Skynet for your project, I believe you need to run a node, which will require downloading the 23GB [1] blockchain from sia. I really hope these blockchain based projects can solve the sharding problem. These blockchains are getting so big. [1] https://siastats.info/blockchain_size https://siastats.info/blockchain_size

UShouldBWorking 6y ago
I agree! Ethereum is already to big and too expensive to use. I hold a lot but worry about both BTC and Ethereum. Normal people can no longer use either chain for everyday transactions and at this rate Ethereum will never work as a global computer. To me only Bitcoin Cash and Monero really have their use cases and code sussed out. Sia (and filecoin) work great but both have issues with their insentives, in Sia's case they issue too many coins and it's not profitable to host content.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  ETH has already solved scalability with Zero Knowledge Proofs and Optimistic Rollups. Some dapps are clocking 2000 transactions per second. Also, ETH 2's initial beacon chain has launched and when ETH2 fully rolls out, there will be 64x that available on the network.
  - EGreg 6y ago
    Please elaborate. Also when will ETH2 roll out?
    - zelly 6y ago
      It's already out, but most people are still on the eth1 chain
      - Taek 6y ago
        I think you misunderstand the state that Eth2 is in. It's technically "released", but Eth2 cannot be used to transact. If you move money to Eth2, it must stay in the same wallet/address until more features are rolled out. Everyone who uses Eth today is still on Eth1 because Eth2 is only good for having your coins sit there and accumulate interest.

mortenjorck 6y ago

It's only a matter of time before this project gets a cease & desist from Disney. (Disney owns 20th Century Studios, formerly 20th Century Fox, owner of the Terminator franchise.)

aszantu 6y ago
they could call it skynettery afterwards xD
Taek 6y ago
We get somewhere between dozens and hundreds of DMCA's per week, and we comply with all of them. We can't actually take content off of Skynet itself (similar to how you can't actually take content off of IPFS), but we can have our portal (https://siasky.net https://siasky.net) refuse to serve content with known-infringing or known-abusive hashes.
- KMag 6y ago
  GP was joking about the name of the project itself infringing on Disney trademarks, but (as a peer notes) Fox/Disney hasn't registered a trademark on Skynet.
lgats 6y ago
Several trademarks exist for skynet, none are registered to/owned by Disney https://uspto.report/Search/Skynet https://uspto.report/Search/Skynet

newbie789 6y ago

I might be entirely wrong but I feel like I've seen multiple projects called Skynet in the past few years. I can't recall any others running currently because some of them might've become defunct and/or I've forgotten about them. I wonder what the appeal of the name is nowadays. (I have seen Terminator and am familiar with the origins of the name) I should clarify: It is another company's trademark or whatever as far as I know (again, could be wrong. Don't know how Disney litigates things in this domain). Again, I could also be wrong about this not being the only thing called Skynet in the past few years. I welcome responses!

twostorytower 6y ago

Disclosure: I mined Siacoin for years and have hundreds of thousands of tokens. Sia is an amazing project with a team who is extremely talented and passionate, but Skynet is the future. They've built a fully decentralized CDN and it's incredible. Ten years from now, I can see it being the norm for startups and maybe even larger companies to use decentralized CDN's like this. I hope Coinbase adds Siacoin for trading soon, since they participated in integrating Rosetta.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
andrew_ 6y ago
Is it still profitable to mine Siacoin locally?
- tgtweak 6y ago
  No, they've made purpose-built silicon for sia mining and it is no longer viable to mine on general purpose compute. As far as storage mining - it may be. last check (november) filecoin was the most profitable to host your disk space for but required a rediculous amount of compute as well as disk space (latest gen GPUs, 128G ram, near-100% uptime).
  - viraptor 6y ago
    It's relatively early days for filecoin though. I suspect that after "we've got space and availability, see?" period, the restrictions for hosting will be relaxed.
    - tgtweak 6y ago
      Hopefully they loosen the coin collateral requirement for nodes also.

RMPR 6y ago

After skimming a bit, I don't see how they plan to deal with abuse. Especially if there's no size limitation on files.

tmikaeld 6y ago
There seems to be a lot of issues other than that. https://siasetup.info/concerns-about-sia-and-skynet https://siasetup.info/concerns-about-sia-and-skynet "Sia hosts have always had questionable liability over what they store as hosts. These concerns are likely to amplify with Skynet, where a host may hold a whole unencrypted file and serve it to a portal or public users, exposing the host as being the one that holds a file that may infringe copyright or be illegal in some other way."
- Taek 6y ago
  I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but most jurisdictions have strong protections for providers hosting third party content so long as the providers are not aware that the content is problematic. If a provider is notified that there is problematic content on their machine, they have an obligation to take it down in a reasonable timeframe. Sia hosts already have tooling for complying with DCMAs and abuse notices. To the best of my knowledge, no Sia host has yet received one, but we are prepared for when that moment happens. Most of the rest of the issues in that letter are overstated and ungenerous. Sia/Skynet is an early project, with a small team and a limited budget. Of course it is not as polished as its centralized alternatives, but if you compare to better funded projects like Storj and Filecoin, I believe it's very difficult to say in good faith that our team is not up for the task.
  - bitwize 6y ago
    > I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but most jurisdictions have strong protections for providers hosting third party content so long as the providers are not aware that the content is problematic. We cannot rely on that continuing to be the case. Neither Trump nor Biden want Section 230 to keep going as it is.
6y ago

74d-fe6-2c6 6y ago

How does Skynet relate to Tim Berners-Lee's Solid project (https://solid.mit.edu/ https://solid.mit.edu/)?

ghoomketu 6y ago

I'm asking in earnest but since I'm not very savvy when it comes to blockchain and decentralised internet, can this be used for piracy (movies mp3 etc)? What about really nefarious stuff like CP? Do we know who is responsible and is it possible to report and take down links? Also does running a node involve you in anything unknowingly? Or does it have nothing to do with anonymity/bullet-proof links and is merely just a very cheap storage? P.S. Sorry if this sounds like noob questions but i wasn't able to answer it by looking at their homepage.

Proven 6y ago
> can this be used for piracy (movies mp3 etc)? What about really nefarious stuff like CP? How can it be private if it's possible to check what the content contains? If it's private you can't tell which network packet contains CP and which cat videos. > Do we know who is responsible and is it possible to report and take down links? How can you report it if you haven't viewed it? If you've view it and then report it, how do you think would that work out for you? > Also does running a node involve you in anything unknowingly? If it's censorship-free then you serve all content unknowingly.
cyphermoon 6y ago
Skynet can be used for any sort of data. Public facing portals and hosts serving unencrypted data are of course responsible for the content they serve. People can upload content in two ways: either by using a public facing portal such as siasky.net or by spinning up their own portal client (Sia node) and communicating with hosts directly via the distributed network. It is possible for individual portals and hosts to take down links and stop serving that content, for example after accepting copyright infringement requests. It it also possible for anyone to spin up their own portal and keep content pinned as long as any host on the network will accept it. For example, skyportal.xyz is another public portal. Same goes for hosts. The Skynet (Sia) model aims for thousands and thousands of hosts spread geographically. It becomes extremely difficult to delete any piece of data from the network entirely as long as someone wants to make sure it stays up. Erasure coding redundancy ensures very high resilience from any single host going offline.
- 6y ago

zaptheimpaler 6y ago

Why is this free? Who is paying the Sia nodes to store the data?

cyphermoon 6y ago
Portal and renter nodes pay hosts for the data in Siacoin. These payments are managed by file contracts that renters and hosts agree on and sign cryptographically. These contracts involve periodic verification that the data is being hosted. Failure to verify involves an automatic financial loss for hosts.
forgot_old_user 6y ago
How much does it cost?

pentae 6y ago

So what's stopping an abuser from generating tons of accounts and spamming their network with junk causing everyone to have to host lots of junk data?

Taek 6y ago
It's a paid network. https://siasky.net/ https://siasky.net/ is free for the moment, but will be switching to a freemium model in the near future. As a portal, siasky will have the ability to ratelimit and block abusers. If you "abuse" the network using your own node, you will have to pay for everything you upload and download, which means the people storing it won't really think of it as abuse, you're just another paying customer.
- pentae 6y ago
  Thanks for the clarification
qwantim1 6y ago
I hope it’s not the T-800[1]. [1]- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminator_(character) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminator_(character)
cyphermoon 6y ago
Cost. If this abuser was running his own Portal node to do so, he would simply be paying hosts to host his junk data. Hosts would be very happy to do so, as they set their own prices. If this abuser was trying to use a public Skynet portal, the same abuse prevention measures apply as for any other data storage service out there. IP banning, filtering, etc

snorrah 6y ago

hey don’t call yourself Skynet. names tainted.

bitwize 6y ago
Well, it does provide a neat explanation for the Terminator franchise: the in-movie Skynet is an advanced version of this Skynet, which decided to conquer humanity because it was trained on data from all the fascists that are bound to flood Skynet with their rhetoric.

qwantim1 6y ago

Another thing named Skynet?[1] [1]- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skynet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skynet

KMag 6y ago
Maybe they should rename it to YATNS/Yet Another Thing Named Skynet?

ranguna 6y ago

Am I the only one that can't download the examples, it just gets stuck. Also the dapp example throws me a json saying that skynet is blocked.

Taek 6y ago
Are you in Europe by any chance? We haven't finished setting up load balancing yet and the Europe server is getting hit really hard right now. The dapp sample was blocked because it was mistaken for a phishing attempt (it's the Uniswap frontend) and Namecheap required us to block the link. Sloppy of us not to change the link to an unblocked example, we'll do that on Monday. In the meantime, here's a dapp sample: https://marstorage.hns.siasky.net/ https://marstorage.hns.siasky.net/
- ranguna 6y ago
  Yep, I'm from Europe. After changing my vpn to the US, it started working m Thanks for the HEADS-UP, really hope this project future is less sloppy than it's lunch on HN.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dt3ft 6y ago

> Skynet's speeds rival centralized providers and surpass all decentralized offerings. A typical Skynet download starts in under 500 ms and can stream at rates as high as 1 Gbps! I tried to download the PDF sample on the frontpage and the download never actually started. It kept waiting for the server to begin transmitting the file...

shaicoleman 6y ago
Didn't download for me either
jbotz 6y ago
It worked and was essentially instantaneous for me.
- Taek 6y ago
  Europe servers are struggling, US servers are doing fine. We're still building out our load balancing strategy.
spzb 6y ago
Tried the mp4. After a wait of 30 seconds or so, it started downloading at about 15 MBit/sec on a 200 MBit/sec broadband connection.
- Taek 6y ago
  1 gbps us if you are running your own node, when you are on a public node you are sharing the speeds with hundreds of other users

Hnsuz 6y ago

Skynet is down.. Could this be alternative for Google sensure anyway??

LockAndLol 6y ago

Can somebody explain what the difference between this and IPFS is? I see block chain mentioned so I assume you pay for storage but that page just allows you to upload anything right away without payment. Is this actually an alternative to FileCoin? https://ipfs.io https://ipfs.io https://filecoin.io https://filecoin.io

knorker 6y ago

Is there a tl;dr how this differs from e.g. Freenet? I mean aside from the "we use blockchain herp derp".

cyphermoon 6y ago
Among other things, the blockchain/crypto part ensures hosts and portals have a monetary incentive to host data, making their service scalable and sustainable.

troquerre 6y ago

We’ve been using Skynet for all our decentralized web projects at Namebase.io ever since they added Handshake naming support[1] — it’s been fantastic. It now takes us days to build things that previously took our intern a month to do. With censorship entering the zeitgeist nowadays I wouldn’t be surprised if the next big decentralized social network is build on Skynet. [1] https://siasky.net/docs/#handshake https://siasky.net/docs/#handshake

Esiason 6y ago
Be warned of the large post mine coming to SiaCoin soon (the crypto-currency that powers Skynet). Massive inflation is coming to SiaCoin because of this to pay off Skynet Labs as they exit development on the Sia core protocol. David (aka Taek), the original creator, is leaving the Sia project to become a third party dev (working for the new Skynet Labs VC funded company) and will no longer be working on making the Sia core protocol actually work better. Lots of outstanding issues in the Sia core protocol still and with Sia losing their founding dev it raises concerns if the Sia protocol will ever be able to mature. Read more at https://SiaSetup.info https://SiaSetup.info (and more specifically https://siasetup.info/concerns-about-sia-and-skynet https://siasetup.info/concerns-about-sia-and-skynet)
- Taek 6y ago
  The "post mine" is something that has been discussed in the community for many months, and is not something we are hiding - in fact it's stickied at the top of /r/siacoin and has appeared in all of our announcment channels and official newsletters. https://www.reddit.com/r/siacoin/comments/iox6ly/proposal_the_sia_foundation/ https://www.reddit.com/r/siacoin/comments/iox6ly/proposal_th... It is also not correct to say I am "leaving" the Sia project, I will continue to work on Sia and Skynet as I always have, but administrative control over the codebase is being handed over to a non-profit foundation with a mandate of placing the community health and vision as its primary priority. My own primary responsibility is to the bottom line of my company, and to the extent that Skynet Labs' bottom line is no longer perfectly aligned with the community's interests, we have created a foundation to ensure the community has a voice in how development progresses for the base layer. I know that the 18,000 word letter you linked raises a lot of concerns about the project - from the history, to the speed of developemnt, to the core codebase, to the new Skynet initiative, to the economic model, to the team behind the project and the leadership behind the project, to the documentation, to the new initiative to hand over the project to the community, to the communtiy itself - but I don't believe the letter was written from a place of good faith, and I don't believe that most of the arguments hold up to scrutiny, especially if you compare the progress and decision making of the Sia project to competitors like Filecoin, Maidsafe, and Storj

als0 6y ago

In layman's terms, how much does this cost?

miki123211 6y ago

What's the difference between Sia and Skynet? This is the point that confuses me most. I thought Sia is the low-level layer and Skynet is the high-level layer, but one of the comments says that Sia encrypts data and Skynet doesn't, so that makes no sense. Too many names that aren't clearly explained in a very obvious place is a plague that many otherwise cool projects suffer from.

dghelm 6y ago
Yeah, there's actually organizational changes happening to help remedy this. At risk of over-simplifying: - Sia is the blockchain project that lets renters and hosts create a market for storage space. (using SiaCoin as the cryptocurrency) - Skynet uses this market to provide a data backend for a web ecosystem for developers and users. They access the ecosystem through "portals," which are actually just specialized hosts on the sia network. Data on the Sia network is encrypted at a storage layer (as part of splitting it up to send it to hosts), but Skynet files are accessible to anyone who has its hash (portals, ISP, etc could see this info when you access the URL). The file contents are not encrypted by default because they're meant to be widely-accessible, but you can encrypt files on the client-side before sending the, to Skynet, which is what https://skysend.hns.siasky.net/ https://skysend.hns.siasky.net/ and some other projects do.
Esiason 6y ago
Documentation about Sia and Skynet can be found at https://SiaSetup.info https://SiaSetup.info in the "Learn" subsection.

api 6y ago

Look it’s Sia, the only non-vaporware ICO that quietly shipped a mostly working and usable version of what Filecoin raised 100X more to so far fail to ship (in a usable form).

Esiason 6y ago
Sia is also about to initiate a large post-mine which will go directly to cashing out the dev's work on the protocol for the last 6 years. To me a post-mine cashout is worse than a pre-mine ICO because it more closely resembles shady bait-and-switch tactics than being up front about where the money to fund development will come from.

phreack 6y ago

I had zero knowledge of what any of this was (Sia, Skynet, etc), tried looking it up on the page but the technical terms were too many and there was no glossary I could find. So I started searching, read the Readme on Sia's project on Gitlab, and then came upon this website [1] which harshly demonizes both Sia and Skynet due to maintainers banning a critic, and allegedly being generally toxic. This is very much not a good look at all for the whole thing, and I suggest the developers should both solve this problem amicably ASAP, and also add very clear 'WHAT THIS IS AND HOW IT WORKS' links on every page related to the project, with many real world examples of how/why use this and with nearly no use of specific jargon that's not introduced clearly during explanations. [1] https://siasetup.info/guides/using-skynet https://siasetup.info/guides/using-skynet

dghelm 6y ago
For a more accessible description of what sia & skynet do, https://siastats.info/sia101 https://siastats.info/sia101 is a good starting place.
- Esiason 6y ago
  https://siastats.info/sia101 https://siastats.info/sia101 is a nice newbie guide to Sia and Skynet but the more technical guides and troubleshooting knowledge exists at https://siasetup.info https://siasetup.info

bgdkbtv 6y ago

Have we not learned anything from the famous documentary "Terminator"?