ORCHID x SATOSHI CLUB RECAP for AMA from April 27, 2020 (Satoshi club english Telegram community)
April was a great month for Satoshi Club, the group is growing and also the number of AMAs and rewards presented on it. Our friends from Orchid were invited to conduct a session with Satoshi Club Community (English, Russian and spanish), today we are going to focus on the 27th April AMA on the english group. Our guest was Derek Silva — Community & Developer Relations from Orchid Labs Inc.
The total reward pool was $320 ($200 for English group, $80 for Russian and $40 for Spanish). The AMA´s structure was split in three parts. It was a good time with Derek, the members of the group learned a lot about Orchid related topics.
PART 1, INTRODUCTION AND TWITTER QUESTIONS
Serg | Satoshi Club: Hello, dear friends! Today we will have another episode from our AMA series in Satoshi Club.
We are proud to present to you Orchid Protocol! Our guest is @dereksilva (Derek Silva) — Community & Developer Relations. Welcome to Satoshi Club! Let’s have a great time together. Please tell us a little bit about yourself and how did you start your work with Orchid Protocol.
Derek Silva: I fell into the Ethereum space in the summer of 2017. I attended Fireside Conference where I met Ethan Buchman, Anthony DiIorio and others that were building wallets, blockchains and dApps. I got hooked! I had already heard about Bitcoin previously, but I found Ethereum and smart contracts far more interesting. When I got home from the conference I started researching ICOs, I found ETHLend, and then Bloom, and then district0x, and others. I have been working in the space full-time since February 2018.
Serg | Satoshi Club: we are not working full time in crypto but we have similar stories. :)
Derek Silva: I have actually been very lucky to focus on learning about and helping projects and teams with real world use cases, and Orchid is one example of that. I met a former business development manager for Orchid, Tegan Kline, last fall. She said they were looking for community help. After speaking with her, Travis and then Seven (the CEO), they brought me on!
Serg | Satoshi Club: We made the warm-up. Are you ready to start with the questions from the community?
Derek Silva: Yes, let’s do it!
Q1 from Twitter user, @nandhase
Why is a decentralized VPN platform better than centralized? What are the benefits of having decentralized over centralized?
Derek Silva: Good question! There are a few key reasons why dVPNs are better.
1. Orchid doesn’t collect any personally identifiable information. You don’t need to tell Orchid your name, your address, it doesn’t collect credit card information, and there’s no central database for Orchid accounts. It’s anonymous and there is no chance of a data breach where your information could be stolen.
2. Many VPN providers’ servers IP get identified and banned by various services. With a dVPN, where thousands of people can sell their bandwidth in the marketplace, there is a very, very small likelihood of that happening.
3. Many VPN providers’ servers IP get identified and banned by various services. With a dVPN, where thousands of people can sell their bandwidth in the marketplace, there is a very, very small likelihood of that happening.
You can learn more about why dVPNs are better in Orchid’s whitepaper.
Irina Kravchuk | Satoshi Club: What about before crypto life? Were you involved in other tech projects?
Derek Silva: Yes, I had a traditional project manager and sales job at an app development agency, and I used to own a web hosting company that I sold in 2018.
Irina Kravchuk | Satoshi Club: (in relation to numeral two of Derek´s previous answer) It’s something similar to how tor browser behaves?
Derek Silva: Yes, kind of. You can set up multiple hops to further protect your data and obscure the source and destination traffic. But Orchid’s VPN routes all your traffic through the network, not just web traffic. I have done Zoom video calls and watched YouTube on my iPhone while connected to the Orchid privacy network.
Irina Kravchuk | Satoshi Club: Sounds very cool. And can you geotarget it like in a regular VPN?
Derek Silva: Not yet, but that’s something we anticipate the community building. Others will be able to build their own curated list of nodes, so we anticipate others will create a list of servers in Canada, a list of servers in the UK, a list of servers in Brazil, etc.
Serg | Satoshi Club: How many people are selling bandwith at the moment?
Derek Silva: So, the server side software is not quite ready for general availability. You can download it today and start poking around, but the version that’s ready for full production is not out yet. For the moment, Orchid has partnered with trusted providers like PIA, LiquidVPN, Boleh and others to act as a whitelist of providers. They are running nodes now and actively providing feedback so that we can keep improving the node software. We have had many, many people inquire about being bandwidth providers though, so I suspect there will be thousands of small node operators later this year.
Q2 from Twitter user, @Sarp09385732
Which companies are your major competitors in your field and what is/are your main competitive advantage(s) against them?
Derek Silva: Well, we see Orchid as a way for traditional VPN providers to gain access to more customers since they can earn revenue through Orchid, so I would say that other decentralized VPN networks like Mysterium and Sentinel are the primary competitors.
Without diving into each one specifically, I have noticed a few key differences:
- Orchid’s default curator guarantees you at least one list of nodes you can trust (PIA, LiquidVPN, Boleh, etc.).
- Orchid is running on mainnet and has been since December.
- Orchid has an iOS app and macOS client available, along with Android.
- Orchid users are actually paying providers now, Orchid is not subsidizing it or paying the providers on the user’s behalf.
Serg | Satoshi Club: If traditional providers will provide IPs, wouldn’t they get flagged?
Derek Silva: They have actually started up new nodes just for Orchid, so we don’t anticipate that happening at this time. It could, of course, but with the possibility of thousands of people selling their own bandwidth at home, the traditional VPN provider’s servers shouldn’t be such easy targets.
Irina Kravchuk | Satoshi Club: So at the moment people that are using the app are paying for their traffic? Like they pay for what they use only?
Derek Silva: Yes, and yes! No monthly subscriptions. You pay for the traffic you use. A 1 OXT payment is triggered after about 10GB of traffic.
Q3 from Twitter user, @MaxiVV05
Why did you decide to call it ‘Orchid’? And most interesting and curious, why are there a lot of pics of rabbits and even ants on your website? What is the meaning of this? Do you wanna send some messages?
Derek Silva: Unfortunately, I don’t have the answer to why the company is called Orchid. I have asked, but Seven won’t reveal the secret yet.
The rabbit goes along with the theme of calling each node you connect to a “hop.” Orchid is not the only team that uses that term, but it was a nice way to bring a friendly theme to the brand. Bunnies, hops, etc.
The ants represent the traffic going across the network and the work involved to route the traffic through each hop.
Above: Images of rabbits and ants that can be found on Orchid´s Website.
Q4 from Twitter user, @TicoEdgardo
VPN is considered illegal in our Country, and in my research many other Countries considered VPN as illegal. How will Orchid Protocol address this rising Problem over VPNs?
Derek Silva: That is very unfortunate. VPNs should be legal, but this is all the more reason they should exist. Orchid’s goal is to get people like you access to the free, open and full internet. Our team does a lot of outreach and speaking against censorship and government intervention. That won’t stop anytime soon.
Seven just published an op-ed piece in Nasdaq last week, and we are also engaging with other organizations around issues of internet freedom, speaking against censorship, speaking against intrusive legislation, and so on.
And of course, Orchid’s privacy network is putting tools in your hand so that you can choose to bypass some of these problems. One thing that is unique about Orchid’s protocol is that the web traffic is disguised as WebRTC, so it all looks like audio/video calls to your ISP. So while it looks like you’re having a Google Meet video call, you could actually be sending BTC to your family.
Irina Kravchuk | Satoshi Club: But would it be possible to block orchid in some countries? I mean if it would be possible for governments to do it.
Derek Silva: Possible, yes. Anything is possible. The technology has been designed to be very hard to detect, though, and therefore very hard to differentiate from other traffic. You would need to inspect WebRTC traffic that’s encrypted inside the VPN, and the data you’re sending is probably already encrypted, and that’s almost impossible.
Q5 from Twitter user, @Nishantmeti
How has Orchid designed to share Incentives to its internet users? Are there other benefits as well that they will get?
Derek Silva: The benefit to VPN users is encrypted traffic, nodes that have not been blacklisted/banned, open source software, and the pay as you go model. If you want to earn revenue through Orchid, you will soon be able to easily set up an Orchid node and sell your own bandwidth. People who want to check out the node software can do so at https://github.com/OrchidTechnologies/orchid/tree/master/srv-shared.
Irina Kravchuk | Satoshi Club: When do you expect the possibility for regular users to create nodes will be available?
Derek Silva: I can’t promise a date, but I know that the engineers are re-architecting the node software so that it’s way easier to set up right now. Once that’s done, it should be made available. You won’t need to do any manual compiling after this work is complete.
PART 2, TELEGRAM COMMUNITY QUESTIONS
The chat was open for 2 minutes and some hundreds of questions were posted by the Satoshi Club community. Derek Silva have chosen 5 of them.
Q1 from Telegram user, MIN
Mass adoption is a problem for blockchain projects. So how will ORCHID solve this problem in order to achieve Adoption in reality?
Derek Silva: Mass adoption happens in a few ways:
1. Ease of use. While Orchid requires some knowledge of Ethereum and the ability to purchase OXT directly from an exchange right now, along with having a Web3 browser and all that, we know this is not ideal for mass appeal and adoption. The product and engineering team is always looking for ways to reduce friction, make the app easier to use, and of course improve stability on the back end.
2. Knowledge. This comes through AMAs like this one, speaking engagements and sponsorships like Ethereal Summit, ETHDenver, ETHLondon, ETHCC, and others, along with traditional marketing. Only the Android app is generally available, but when the iOS app is in the App Store (not TestFlight) and the macOS app is available with a GUI, then we’ll be in a place to do more marketing.
3. Product quality. The app has to be great, and the server software has to be fast and reliable. The product team is always working on improving this.
Q2 from Telegram user, Jhonatan
What’s about your VPN service, what countries supports it? Who regulate your privacy policies? Are we safe using this service?
Derek Silva: We are supported in any country where we can make the app available. There are some gaps here like Venezuela and France, but we can do things like make a signed APK available so that people can still access the Android app. We feel the app and service is incredibly safe to use since Orchid does not collect any of your information. Our website doesn’t even have Google Analytics on it! We removed it last year to help protect your privacy.
Q3 from Telegram user, Thea
All mentioned that you would aim to keep your VPN service free for journalist, how do you plan on keeping Orchid accessible worldwide to do this? (other languages, outreach ECT.)
Derek Silva: I think I just addressed this. Making the software available on multiple clients, making it available outside app stores when possible, attracting bandwidth providers (companies and individuals) across the globe, and targeting marketing at different countries and demographics to ensure we reach as many people as possible. The iOS and Android apps are already available in English, Korean, Japanese, Russian, Chinese, and Indonesian now with more languages coming in the future.
Q4 from Telegram user, OYIBO PEPPER
DeFi and Dapps are 2 pillars primed to rule 2020 in crypto space, what’s your approach to DeFi and Dapps? As a developer I Know SOLIDITY, Java C, KSML, can I build dApps on orchid and what programming language does orchid employ?
Derek Silva: The mobile apps are built using Flutter framework, and C++ for the node software. You could use our nanopayments scaling tech in your app today! It’s fully open source.
Q5 from Telegram user, Josefina Korea Love
What is the objective of the Whitelist in your protocol? Under what circumstances could it be within a whitelist and in which cases not? Would an unbalanced distribution of nodes be a problem for network performance?
Derek Silva: The whitelist ensures that everyone has a secure list of well-behaving partners to connect to. If we find out that one of the whitelist partners is behaving badly, we can remove them from Orchid’s default curator.
An unbalanced staking distribution does lead to the largest staker receiving more traffic than others, however when you disconnect from the network and reconnect again, Orchid’s default curator automatically connects you to a new node. And of course any node can only handle as many customers as the server and connection can support, so every bandwidth provider should receive traffic even if they are only staking a few OXT.
PART 3, QUIZ RESULTS AND CONCLUSION
As usual, for the third part we had a quiz with 120$ for first 15 who answer correctly all questions.
Serg | Satoshi Club: Thank you Derek! How are you feeling after seeing so many questions? :)
Derek Silva: My fingers feel very limber now! I haven’t typed this much, so quickly in a while.
Thank you so much for all the questions! We hope you will all check out orchid.com/join and give Orchid a try. You can join t.me/OrchidOfficial to learn more.
For more information and future AMAs, join our Social Media channels:
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