Distributed, peer-to-peer Internet company.

I've been talking about mesh-networks for some time. Lately almost everybody has a smartphone with as much compute-power and storage as a desktop PC from 2008, that's a lot of horsepower sitting around idle. Also, lately the Big Tech companies are getting kinda fascist in their rules and regulations. Twitter and Farcebook have gone so far as to censor the President of the United States. Who knows what they're already doing to you and me, right?

So here's a notion. I'm not recommending this company, because I don't know anything about it. Nobody does. But the idea is excellent. A de-centralized Internet that skips all the big companies and does the transactions on a block-chain, peer-to-peer level.

It requires a lot of different technology for backups and storage, for which ThreeFold is building a variety of related technologies: peer-to-peer technology to create the grid in the first place; storage, compute, and network technologies to enable distributed applications; and a self-healing layer bridging people and applications.

Oh, and yes. There is a blockchain component: smart contracts for utilizing the grid and keeping a record of activities.

"Farmers" (read: all of us) provide capacity and get micropayments for usage.

I'd say it will require a lot of work, because the first thing that will happen is some asshole will try to turn the whole thing into his personal bot-net. But this mesh-network structure is the answer to Google, Apple and Microsoft. Peer-to-peer, created at the individual level instead of the corporate Big Iron approach. Personal computers instead of mainframes with dumb terminals, which is the model that we currently operate under. You -think- that because they call it a Personal Computer or a Smart Phone that the thing is doing the work and that you own it. But that is not true. All the work is done by a server farm with cloud storage. It is situated somewhere probably far away and under somebody else's control. Your smart phone is basically a dumb terminal. It barely does anything except play games.

That's the thing. Games are mostly local processing with a bit of network connection to a server, mostly for authentication. So the phone is certainly a capable machine. It can do things. But applications like Siri are mostly server-side processing with a bit of local hardware for the microphone management etc. It doesn't have to be that way of course, the phone is fast enough to do most of what Siri does, and it has more than enough storage to hold the Siri ap and its database. But Apple runs it server side because that gives them DATA on you, which they then sell to advertisers.

Which is why I never use Siri or the Android equivalent. Because that level of intrusion into my private life is not something I feel like cooperating with. They get enough free data from me already, I should actively help them? No way.

So the local-storage, local-processing model is how you beat Big Brother. If the data never touches their server, they can't copy it and sell it. A mesh-network doesn't use Big Iron cloud storage and huge servers to route the packets.

And really, there's no reason not to have both models going. Big Iron has its place, its just a bad idea to have a small number of companies (or governments) control everything. There needs to be an alternative, to keep them honest. This could be an alternative.