March, 2018 Skycoin Community Update
Onward and Upward Skyfleet!
Greetings Skyfleet members new and old. Let us begin by saying we have the best user community in the crypto world. We have everyone from Ethereum core developers, crypto media publishers, to an MIT Media Lab scientist on the Skycoin project. Everyone working on the Skycoin is highly committed, intelligent, hard working and focused. Every last member of the Skyfleet community is important and valued.
We have been working for over seven years on this ecosystem, we are very proud of what it has become. Meanwhile, we are working with the community to improve transparency and make sure that anything written about Skycoin is factual and accurate. We are also constantly striving to improve our response to all legitimate complaints, and remove any and all bad actors. Dishonesty, destructive conversation, and divisiveness have no place here and are swiftly purged.
Skycoin is based upon mathematics. The ultimate goal is to eliminate the need for subjective human trust and replace it with immutable mathematical truth and algorithms.
At Skycoin we are open source and community driven. Think you can lend a hand? Hit us up in Telegram. We thank our thriving community for its continual support through these rough waters, some of you have been working away years for this to come to fruition, and we ask you to stay positive and consider every new face an opportunity to make a Skyfleet member for life. The storms have passed Skyfleet, and it is blue SKYs ahead.
Skycoin’s plans to soar…
Since as early as 2010, Skycoin has been in development under some of the most brilliant minds in the blockchain industry. The scope of this project is often daunting to new community members (something we’re addressing, keep reading below), and at times things can get lost in translation. With a project of this scope, managing every aspect of it is a complicated and arduous process. The technology that has been built here is powerful, groundbreaking stuff — but unveiling new technology to the world has become a complicated process in today’s age of tabloids and twitter feeds.
As a fundamental principle, Skycoin has never marketed anything that is not already fully in development with prototypes and proof of concepts. Combine that with an iterative development process, and all of a sudden you’ve got a major project with tens and hundreds of people working on it across the world. Actually, we boast one of the largest telegram communities and extremely active DIY hardware and software groups constantly hacking away — so far we’ve let it grow rather quietly — that is now changing.
Late last year, Skycoin’s founders started bringing on community-building specialists and marketing “gurus” to try to spread the word to the general public about the revolution we’re all here to build together. Some of them have stuck around and become integral members of the Skyfleet community and leadership, others unfortunately showed some stripes that were not so flattering and have been asked to step away.
We’re in the middle of bringing some of the most sophisticated technological developments in the blockchain space to the masses with digestible, regular, and exciting content — the Skycoin project continues to soar onward and upward!
Ready for take-off!
Over the coming weeks and months we’ve got a lot of projects we want to dig into with you all, so you’re going to need to stick around for the ride as we fly over our many project-bases in due time. We’re here to tell you about all things SKY, so we hope you keep coming to us with questions as our exciting release process moves forward.
In the past quarter, the Skycoin team has been expanding and reshaping itself to fit the needs of its growing community. We’ve brought on a substantial number of excited new team members who will to help Skycoin realize and execute on the revolution Synth and his elite team have laid the groundwork for.
If you’re new, we hope you’re ready for what you’re about to uncover — but if you’ve been a Skyfan for a while this should be a breath of fresh air.
Moving forward we plan to evolve alongside the community and work with you toward satisfactory solutions. We believe we can execute on a community and media strategy that will get you more excited than ever before to be a member of the Skyfleet community.
What can the community look forward to?
We are actively making iterative improvements across the organization to improve on clarity and focus within the litany of disciplines and teams working on Skycoin and its numerous projects. From here on out, we’d like you to hold us all to a higher standard — and in return expect to be held to the same standards, because we are here to build a platform capable of uniting us in unprecedented and profound ways — we will need the highest caliber hands on deck. Don’t misunderstand us, we’ve known you’re ready for the next step for a while, we are here and ready to deliver. We want to empower our community to get involved and start making a difference. Take a look outside, observe what you wish was different, then walk back inside and help us build that better future. (We’re only half-kidding.)
Take action, Boldly and Transparently
Throughout this exciting year ahead, the Skycoin team will be engaging its community on a regular basis across respective social media channels and looking forward to getting the community involved in some exciting new ways. “Bounties?” Not quite, because we don’t intend to be hands-off in the process — we want to be engaged with you along the way. There will be transparency and clarity — and if we fail to deliver we expect you to help point us in the right direction — because we can’t expect you to believe in us if we don’t believe in you.
Without further delay, let’s dig into what exciting developments are happening at Skycoin and what you can expect from us next!
Let’s talk: Skywire
Skywire is one of the most exciting aspects of Skycoin’s platform for the majority of us working on Skycoin, because it is so powerful that it has already caused a ruffle in some big birds’ feathers, as you’ve seen them come clucking, and it’s coming so soon. Okay, fine, full transparency, the whitepaper is coming soon. You’re going to love what’s inside, and as we’ve already disclosed before there is an internal testnet of Skywire running today and the hardware required to run a public testnet is currently shipping around the globe!
That means by the time you’ve grokked the whitepaper, the testnet will be knocking on your door if you’re one of our whitelisted Skyminerss. Rest assured, there will be full clarity on what that means coming from our technical team before the testnet goes live, so don’t be afraid you’re going to miss out if you don’t have your Skyminer already built. We are dedicated to fostering the community, so if you are the type to DIY — do it yourself — and you’re building your own Skyminer we want to help you and get you involved as much as possible. We’re not going to screw the nuts and bolts onto your rig, but expect full technical clarification on what the requirements to participate are and the various ways you can set up your own Skyminer.
This is all, of course, just a stepping stone toward the eventual, already-being-developed hardware solutions like plug-and-play Skyminers of all shapes and sizes. As with all things, expect clarity as we approach relevant timeframes.
“Hey, I’m new here — what the heck is Skywire?”
Sorry, we got ahead of ourselves — Skywire is Skycoin’s anonymous distributed mesh network that will be the backbone of free interconnectivity around the globe. Skywire will be run by the aforementioned Skyminers; and pay Skyminers for traffic over the network. The Skyminers run a distributed web-of-trust consensus algorithm invented here at Skycoin, known as Obelisk, that enables secure, fast, trustless consensus and communication across a network of nodes of all imaginable characteristics from lightning-fast, with little memory to slow, with storage arrays for days! There is a lot to be excited about when it comes to Skywire, but we can’t take the time to explain every aspect of Skywire here in this article. Stay hungry for information because it’s right around the corner and it is tasty. (What do pixels taste like again?)
New Website On The Way
One of our many efforts on Skycoin includes a newly designed website for skycoin.com. This will go live before the end of March. We hope it fosters exploration of the project in healthy, digestible sections. Many new information pieces will be available on Skywire, and a lot of other exciting features, so keep on the look-out for those as they become available.
Skycoin Wallets
Skycoin hardware wallet incoming…
We’ve got some exciting new developments in the pipeline for storing Skycoin. We’ve been working hard with third party wallet manufacturers (such as Ledger) to get Skycoin supported on several different hardware wallet solutions. Here at Skycoin, we believe security is one of the most important aspects of cryptocurrency and we want to back that up by being able to make your coins as safe as possible.
In addition to getting support from third party wallets, we really wanted to go the extra mile for our Skyfleet so we are currently designing and gearing up to produce our own proprietary hardware wallets. These will be cheap (goal is to get them under $25), and very robust (able to store Skycoin, all Skyledger tokens, and other popular coins). We don’t have an exact date for the release of these wallets yet, but stay tuned as there is always more information to come.
What about the software wallet?
The Skycoin software wallet has plenty of exciting new developments underway, and we are able to share two exciting new features with you today!
The first new feature that we want to share is the development of Skycoin OTC functionality in our Skycoin software wallets. Simply put, Skycoin OTC will allow our community to buy Skycoin directly from the Skycoin wallet! That means no dealing with exchanges and their purchasing fees. The woes of dealing with exchanges with extended withdrawal times are no more. Wondering “Where is my Skycoin?” will be a thought left in the past. You can sleep easy, knowing that hackers won’t be able to claim your coins if an exchange gets attacked.
The rates on the Skycoin OTC will be the same as the lowest market rate across any exchange, you never have to shop around for the exchange with the best price as that best price will be available to you right from your wallet.
Secondly, the new version of the Skycoin software wallet will have the ability to shapeshift your coins, free of charge. Wallets like Exodus are great, beautiful wallets. One of the best features of a wallet like Exodus is the ability to directly trade any coin you own for any coin they support, all without an exchange.
We are taking that page out of the Exodus book and expanding on it. Not only will you be able to directly convert any coin you hold in the Skycoin wallet for any other coin that the wallet supports, we are going to let you do this free of charge. Exodus charges 1% per shape shift, and we feel that is just too much. The idea of losing some coins every time you decide to grab something new is not an idea we want to support. We want you to keep all of your coins, regardless of which ones you hold. We believe in freedom, and not having to pay fees for things that should be free — so we decided to build that functionality ourselves.
More is on the way!
We are hard at work building out a soon-to-be-unveiled repository of information on all things related to Skycoin, but we encourage you to take a look at the efforts already on-going in the /r/Skycoin subreddit and telegram. Synth, our noble Lead Developer and Founder, has been hard at work trying to answer the most pressing questions from the community and we have no intentions to shirk from those duties as time goes on. Check out his various interviews and AMAs, but keep a pulse on us because here’s a teaser of topics coming down the pipeline:
- Skywire white paper
- Sky Fiber, the architecture behind Skyledger
- All the ICO’s and projects already underway on Skyledger
- Coin Hours, the means of affording network data exchange
- Community meme and video contests
- Exchange listings…?
- More… ?!?!
Onward and upward Skyfleet!
