October 2018 Community Update

Published in

Skycoin

8 min readNov 1, 2018

The Skycoin juggernaut continues to gather momentum after another highly successful month of development and community engagement. In October we heard about progress on many of the Skycoin components by Synth himself in his most recent video update. Strap in for the ride, Skyfleet!

Software

Skywire

Skywire is the new decentralized internet built to accept Skycoin natively. Skywire has been in testnet for the past several months, but mainnet launch is imminent. The Skywire mainnet differs from the testnet in several key aspects.

Rather than the fixed amount used during testnet, coins will be paid for the amount of bandwidth each node forwards on Skywire.
Mainnet will allow traffic to be relayed between multiple hops. Using the VPN setting will allow users to select the countries and cities they want traffic to route through.
Each Skywire node will relay traffic, but only a few will be gateway nodes to the internet. As these are the bandwidth bottlenecks, they will be located at co-locations with high speed wired connections.
Bandwidth metering will measure bandwidth in and out of every node, and this volume will be reconciled and paid in Coin Hours.

Key points for the Skyfleet to know:

Node registration will be streamlined through an online process. After registering on the Skywire website, you will receive a unique identifier file that you load onto each node.
Nodes will be able auto-update in the future. Updating Skywire software for nodes will be as simple as pressing a button in the Skywire Manager.
All current nodes will soon need to be re-flashed to allow this upgrade.

For those interested in the nuts and bolts, Skywire will soon enter a state of continuous integration. Skywire builds will be tested on an enclosed simulated network on which the Skywire developers will push code. If the updates pass testing, a build will be automatically created, which is then pushed to the public mainnet. Skywire will be updated in this manner regularly, and nodes will auto-update to the new versions. This is the first step in making Skywire nodes zero-configuration so that users will only have to SSH into a node and run a single script. For more information, listen to the whole Synth update.

Pictures of a testing computer cluster for Skywire

Coin Hours

Coin Hours are Skycoin’s inflationary derivative currency that powers transactions on the Skywire network. The Coin Hour bank is launching soon, and is an essential component of bandwidth metering for micro-transactions that occur off of the Skycoin blockchain. Coin Hours will soon be able to be deposited and transferred within the Coin Hour bank for bandwidth payments.

As part of the Coin Hour bank launch, the current Coin Hour burn that occurs when transferring Skycoin will be reduced and eventually eliminated. Once the Coin Hour burn is eliminated, Coin Hours become a fungible currency with their own market price (in some ways similar to NEO’s GAS).

Skycoin Core

Increased transactions on the Skycoin blockchain are necessitating scaling solutions. Thin wallet clients and headers-first downloads will soon be enabled.

CX

CX is Skycoin’s new programming language, a variant of Golang. It has been designed specifically for blockchain applications. Synth describes CX:

“CX is more powerful than Turing complete…its not constrained by a particular model of computation…in CX you can implement new types of semantics and syntax and computation that cannot be represented in a normal ‘Turing complete’ language.”

In addition to blockchain, CX is ideal for high-stakes programming applications such as avionics, IoT and automated manufacturing, with low-threshold for error. CX is currently in alpha, with REPL loop, compiler, interpreter and garbage collector ready to go.

The first version of the CX programming guide has now been released and is ready for download. Developers can begin coding CX games — check the CX games dev group on Telegram.

Hardware

Synth previewed several exciting hardware prototypes and provided updates on the progress of some others:

Motorized directional Wi-Fi antenna. This device will transmit bandwidth at approximately 100 Mbps and will automatically detect and connect to other Skywire antennas to form the Skywire MESH net. These will go into production shortly.
Hardware wallet. Injection molding is currently being optimized, and the software is under development.
Long range radio nodes. Under prototype, these devices are low-cost, long range, low-bandwidth receiver modules for Skywire, similar to Gotenna. Each radio node will be able to receive a signal of approximately 10–50kbps over a distance of 10km.
Skycoin-dedicated ARM processor. This ARM board will power the next generation of official Skyminers, explicitly designed for cryptographic signature verification. A dedicated processor is necessary due to a bottleneck in transaction processing that is inherent with current board CPU limitations.

New hardware prototype of a long range Skywire node.

Early prototypes of Skywire antennas being tested.

Synth Speaks

Synth spoke of Skycoin’s strong position as one of the few coins with established development and its own programming language.

“A very small number of projects have been in development for years and get to the position where they can deploy longer-term infrastructure projects…it is very difficult for someone to come and launch an ecosystem in a short space of time. We’re seeing the competition thinning out, and there is not going to be the emergence of new platforms aside from the ones currently here.”

All Skyfleet members are encouraged to listen and re-listen to Synth’s latest update for an in-depth summary of the latest happenings in the Skycoin ecosystem.

A previous video explained the concept of cyberbalkanization, an excellent accompaniment to the recent Part I in-depth article which explains the justification for Skywire’s creation and the need for a new stateless internet protocol.

Synth explaining the forces causing the internet to break apart.

Exchanges

Binance publicly acknowledged the integration of SKY within the Binance Coin ecosystem in a tweet including an infographic. As previously announced, BNB will be integrated into the KittyCash gaming platform and all future Skycoin games and apps. BNB will be a circulating currency on Skywire network, and Skycoin ecosystem hardware and software wallets will support BNB.

Official articles

CXO — The Next Generation File Sharing Network explains one of the core ‘primitives’ of the Skycoin ecosystem, a peer-to-peer immutable object system for data storage and replication. CXO is a form of content-addressable storage on which new decentralized data sharing platforms will be built.

The official Skycoin Wikipedia page has finally been approved, providing a concise explanation of the Skycoin platform.

Media

Skycoin is gaining traction in online media. We were featured as the top coin for 2019 by Forbes contributor Andrew Rossow in his article ’13 Blockchain Companies By Industry That Will Have Your Cauldrons Bubbling For 2019’. There was a several-page spread on Skycoin in the Uni-Extra magazine published in Hamburg Germany, covering the Blockchance conference of last month. Skycoin was also featured in another German-language story on Hamburg’s pitch to become a future blockchain hub. Blockpublisher produced a well-done overview of Skycoin in October.

Exhibitions/Meet-ups

The Skycoin roadshow stopped in at Hack the Community event in Beijing hosted by StartupGrind, where Synth and the team participated in a hackathon and spread the good word.

Synth presenting Skycoin’s ecosystem to entrepreneurs and developers at the StartupGrind event in Beijing

Synth acting as a judge for the hackathon hosted by StartupGrind

Skycoin’s Western team were present on the Blockchain Beach Crypto Cruise. Everyone was impressed with our extensive development history, functioning blockchain and established hardware platform.

Skyfleet articles

The prominent writers of the Skyfleet produced really great content in October. Prolific as ever, Charles Bivins wrote an excellent teaser piece on the upcoming Synth vs. John McAfee debate at the Malta Blockchain summit on November 2nd. He also wrote a fantastic two-part series (Part 1 & Part 2) explaining the advantages of Skywire compared to the existing internet and perhaps his best article yet, “50 facts you need to know about Skycoin before it soars.”

Christian Ott wrote an in-depth summary of Skycoin distribution, providing insight into the unique Skycoin distribution model that developers saw as necessary to remove proof-of-work miners from consensus and coin generation.

Lawrence Qholloi is showing his quality as a top community writer with three informative articles. He published features on KittyCash, Fiber and an incisively direct summary of Skycoin’s programming language, CX. In perhaps his most evocative and inspirational piece yet, he evokes images of Skycoin’s potential to bring about a new internet utopia.

CryptoDiscipulus unleashed a potent double of fundamental Skycoin analysis. ‘Bitcoin, Skycoin and the importance of quality developers’ details of the characteristics of the coins that will dominate the next crypto bull run, and why Skycoin possesses quality in all the important domains. ‘Bitcoin Bug CVE-2018–17144 and a Skycoin Solution’ is a brilliant explanation of the recent critical inflation bug affecting Bitcoin, and how these vulnerabilities have been addressed in Skycoin’s codebase. Skycoin is the only altcoin with written analysis on how it might avoid such a bug.

Skyfleet lead MacSkyver released a fantastic piece on how community members can contribute to Skycoin social media promotion and a transcript of a recent TEDx speech by new Skycoin adviser Prof. Dr. Stefan Brunnhuber.

Skyfleet videos

Macskyver also did an excellent video summary of the September update (getting very meta). CryptoRich released a great short video previewing the Synth vs. McAfee debate at the Malta Blockchain Summit. Mountain Crypto Shane Ripley did a brief video overview of some project updates. There were also hilarious short clips of Synth in nature, Skycoin hip-hop tune ‘Skycoin Matters’ and a pensive piece of Synth’s thoughts on the blockchain moving forward.

Community Content

In community news, Skycoin collectibles have been restocked and are available for purchase.

/u/CryptoLifeCrisis posted this excellent infographic on Reddit depicting the lack of ISP choice in the United States.

That’s everything from a very productive October. As we look forward to mainnet launch and Synth’s debate with John McAfee, we encourage the Skyfleet to double down and spread the Skycoin word!