THE CREATIVE GENIUS OF THE SKYCOIN COMMUNITY — DIY MINERS
While the cryptocurrency market is currently going through a topsy-turvy
moment, I would like to present some of the very inventive and genius creation of the skycoin community otherwise referred to as sky fleet.
Skycoin is the foundation for a new decentralized Internet and the most advanced blockchain application platform in the world.
The flagship project of skycoin is skywire. Skywire will be decentralizing the Internet with an incentivized mesh net of nodes. In the future, by installing a mesh net of antennas, you can stop piggybacking off of the existing infrastructure.
The test net is already running with the main net scheduled to launch at the end of 2018 or the beginning of 2019.
Decentralized skywire is powered by a hardware skyminer.
Skyminer is the device that runs this new decentralized Internet. The name ‘Skyminer’ is somewhat of a misnomer from the perspective of Bitcoin mining and those familiar with the PoW consensus mechanism. Similar to PoW, it earns coins for those who spend the electricity and hardware to run the device, but unlike PoW it doesn’t achieve this through a process of hashing.
There are no block rewards for minting a block. “Mining” in the context of Skycoin refers to the contribution of bandwidth, computation, and storage to the network in return for Skycoin and Coin Hours.
Those running Skyminers are rewarded in Skycoin hours proportional to the resources they bring to the network — currently bandwidth but in the near future storage and computation.
If you provide bandwidth to the Skywire network, you will earn Skycoin hours. If you consume network bandwidth, you will pay Skycoin hours.
The Skyminer is essentially a Linux server with an integrated router and networking capabilities. The unit is pre-built but the specs are also available to anyone who would like to build their own Skyminer unit.
Skyminer is a customized VPN and the fastest ever developed. The Skyminer hardware powers the Skywire network. It has an integrated router technology with a server that has a quad-core processor, 16GB ram, a storage space of 128GB and a graphics card of 8 core Mali 450. This server helps users to connect to the Internet thereby ensuring that connection to the Internet is fast, secure, and cheap.
Using this hardware, Internet Service Providers do not have control over the content users access on the web.
Skycoin is an open-source, community-owned, hardware-based peer-to-peer Internet designed from first principles and leveraging the incentive system of the blockchain.
In the spirit of the open source movement and to facilitate distribution of coins, the project is encouraging construction of DIY miners made to similar specifications as the official Skyminers.
This has brought to the fore numerous and some mind-blowing designs of the skyminer by these very active and extremely intelligent community members of skycoin.
The community is very aware of the fact that skycoin is asset-based and with numerous projects been launched, they always see a buying opportunity when the market bleeds.
I am going to show you some of the amazing and extremely creative design of this community.
This is one project anybody in the crypto-space should be looking into right now as the project is handsomely rewarding community members with rewards for helping to build the skywire community and helping in the testnet.
The testnet was launched in May of this year and hands out rewards on a monthly basis to participant in the testnet.
The Skywire “miner” is meticulously designed and configured to provide a backbone for the new Internet. Its custom-built hardware exceeds technical specifications to deliver maximum power and performance. Skywire functions as a “miner” for Skycoins. It acts as a specialized VPN, using the following hardware configuration:
• 8 CPU boards
• 2 GB of RAM per board
• 4 CPU cores per board
• 64 GB of storage per board
• 64-bit Linux (Alpine Linux)
• Gigabit Ethernet, 8+1 port switch
Each board features an ARM processor, 2 GB of RAM, and anywhere from 32 to 256 GB flash storage. The hardware is segmented in such a way that even if one service is compromised, the other services on the same machine can’t be. An OpenWRT router with strict packet forwarding rules and access control increases security. The setup can be further customized to consist of 4, 8, 16, or 32 boards.
Official Skyminers are currently being manufactured in the Skycoin factory in Shenzhen, China and over 750 devices have been shipped to date and the wait list for the official miner is over 5000.
The long waitlist has encouraged the construction of DIY miners made to similar specifications as the official Skyminers as stated above.
Below is a breakdown of the approximate price of the components of the skyminer if you are building a 4-node design.
4 Orange PI Boards: $162
4 Power Adapters: $20
4 Micro SD Cards: $40
5 LAN Cables: $5
4 Cases: $32
Switch: $21
Surge Protector: $19
Mini Router: $20
USB Charger for Router: $5
Total: $324
Essentially 8 Orange Pis, a router, Ethernet cables and a power supply will cost a total cost of 600 USD. Using cheap but efficient and easily accessible hardware prevents problems like ASIC mining centralization. At the same time, it provides the hardware needed to for infinite horizontal scaling.
Interestingly, each Orange Pi will act as a node for only one application on Skywire. Quarantining each application into its own blockchain will remove the systemic risk of an ever-growing massive worldwide blockchain.
Having a separate router for the Skyminer allows you to create a subnetwork that only has the PIs on it, the benefits are that it compartmentalizes the miner from the rest of your network and allows more network control.
Once you have set up your Skywire node with an official Skyminer or a DIY miner and connected the nodes to a discovery address, you are now available as a bandwidth provider to other nodes in the network. Every node in the network has the possibility to connect to your node and use it as a VPN .
The GitHub below provides an easy guide to use skyminer as a VPN .
https://github.com/skycoin/skywire/wiki/Connecting-Skynodes-to-OpenVPN
https://github.com/skycoin/skywire/wiki/Access-Skyminer-from-remote-using-Skywire-SSH-functionality .
The Skywire community is incredibly active, with many different designs of DIY Skyminer being continuously developed and discussed on the Skywug forum and the Skywire Telegram group. Latest data suggest that users in more than 300 cities already have their official and DIY miners online since the commencement of testnet and the numbers keep increasing daily.
When building your skyminer, you have tremendous support from the skywire group especially from some of the unsung heroes of this project.
Special mention must go to Steve, Mr Hodlr, asxtree, K and @paperstream as they are always available to help troubleshoot any problem.
While there is no guarantee that all the DIY miners will be whitelisted for the testnet, be rest assured that all that meet specification will be required for the mainnet as a lot of nodes are needed for mainstream adoption.
In the future, hundreds of thousands of nodes running on the Skywire network will ensure a highly censorship-resistant, distributed platform for transfer of value and the provision of bandwidth, computation and file storage. The Skyminer makes it all possible.
The testnet was launched in May of this year and present node count is way above 8,000.
http://discovery.skycoin.net:8001/#/
Skycoin gives out rewards on a monthly basis to participant in the testnet.
Official Skyminers received approx. $700 USD in SKY while DIY miners received $350 for testnet participation. Technically speaking you should get your return in investment on a miner in less than 3 months depending on the state of the market .
Distributing over $250k to the Skyfleet monthly, the question is
What other coin gives back that much to its community.
Still in doubt? Join the community and find out by yourself .
For all question concerning skyminer and skywire join the telegram @ https://t.me/skywire
Skycoin, like other assets and technologies, goes through cycles that affect its use, which is often correlated with the asset price. What we see here is that the cycle was accelerated by situations, which can be solved by fully decentralized operations. Eventually, when the blockchain ecosystem becomes fully decentralized and not controlled by big stakeholders and “whales,” it will be bringing back trust into the markets and we can see the markets climbing again.
In the meanwhile, I will say keep calm and enjoy “Ameno”
For all question concerning skywire join the telegram @ https://t.me/skywire
https://www.instagram.com/diyskyminers/
Find out more at https://www.skycoin.net
Buy skycoin directly from the website @ https://www.skycoin.net/buy/
Buy from the exchanges @ Binance, Cryptopia BitRabbit, C2CX, ChaoEX
sign for skyminer waiting list @ https://www.skycoin.net/skyminer/
Learn to build your own skyminer @ https://skywug.net/forum/Forum-Skywire
https://steemit.com/blockchain/@tetragravity/skycoin-a-d-i-y-miners-guide
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/skycoinproject
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/skycoinproject
Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/Skycoin
Telegram: https://t.me/Skycoin
follow me on twitter https://twitter.com/bivins1
If you find the article interesting, please send your skycoin donation to
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