Skywire is the flagship application of the Skycoin ecosystem, and is a new decentralized internet allowing users to provide bandwidth peer-to-peer and receive payment in Skycoin. The hardware backbone of Skywire is the Skyminer which consists of 8 independent, low-cost computing boards that perform the rapid computations needed to process and forward encrypted traffic on the network. When users provide bandwidth to their peers using the Skyminer, they receive coins. When users consume bandwidth, for example by routing encrypted traffic through a Skywire node, they pay coins.
Milestone Achieved: First Skywire Testnet Distribution Sent
Skywire recently reached an important milestone with the first distribution of mining rewards for participation in the testnet. Community members are being paid on a monthly basis for running nodes with at least 75% uptime. In mid-July, whitelisted official Skyminers received 96 SKY and DIY miners received 48 SKY, the equivalent of US $350 and US $700 respectively. Skyfleet members have calculated the electricity costs of running the official Skyminer. It is estimated that an official 8 board miner uses an average of 23 watts. Assuming an average price of 12 US cents per kilowatt-hour, it will cost US $24.19 to run the Skyminer for the entire year. Even if the Skyminer is running at maximum current of its power supply, the cost of running will only be US $105.19 in a year.
In total, the Skycoin project distributed US $250,000 in Skycoins to the Skyfleet community for supporting the network.
Once mainnet launches, users will receive Skycoin Coin Hours directly metered for the amount of bandwidth they contribute. Beyond the initial configuration and setup, there is no ongoing work required to receive payment. Ensuring the nodes are powered, active and online are all that is necessary to earn the network reward.
DIY Miners Galore!
As one of the only blockchain projects currently producing hardware, approximately 600 official Skyminer units have been produced and shipped by the Skycoin team. Current limits in manufacturing capacity for the official Skyminers have led many to build their own DIY Skyminers in order participate in the network. Skyfleet members were aided by the committed and highly knowledgeable admins and community members of the Skywire telegram and Skywug forum who provided equipment lists, setup scripts, and troubleshooting. Many participants built their DIY miner with no previous hardware or software coding experience. Here is a sample of DIY Skyminers that showcase our community’s engineering talent and serve as a guide for those looking to build their own:
Pine64 Miner
Valued community contributor Christian Ott created Pine64 miner using SoPine processor and the Pine64 clusterboard. This unique build features 7 nodes, yet boasts equivalent computing power to the 8 node official Skyminer. A slick case can also be manufactured by those familiar with 3D printing.
Skylight Miner
Telegram user Stijn has earned a small following for his highly aesthetic Skylight Miner, which wouldn’t look out of place at the Museum of Modern Art. This is a compact miner case that can accommodate four computing boards of various models including Orange Pi Prime, ODROID C2 or the Rock64. Skylight Miners can be purchased directly from Stijn.
Raspberry Pi Noob Miner
Shortages of Orange Pi Prime computing boards lead many of the Skyfleet to use the Raspberry Pi 3B+ board as a substitute. Skywug member adhaelon provided easy-to-follow instructions to build the Raspberry Pi Noob Miner, with assistance from user BigOokie. The design of this DIY miner favors function over style, but its ease of construction makes it the preferred build for those with no hardware or software experience.
Millennium Falcon miner
The winner of the most creative build in the recent DIY Skyminer competition, the Millennium Falcon miner uses Orange Pi boards housed in a model of the famous Star Wars ship complete with pilot figurines. Congratulations to Skywug user gfxhero for this creative and original design.
There were too many fantastic builds to include here, but check out the DIY miner Instagram, and the Skywire Telegram group for more inspiration to build your own DIY miner.
The innovative range of DIY Skyminer builds is a testament to the commitment of the Skycoin community and the incentive structure that Skywire permits. Most of the DIY Skyminers were whitelisted and received Skycoin for their efforts. At the time of writing, 6500 nodes are participating in the network, which equates to approximately 800 online Skyminer units. This is a fantastic achievement.
Skywire Updates
As Skywire goes from strength to strength, there are many exciting developments in the pipeline. In the next 6 months, the production of a proprietary antenna will begin and they will be available for pairing with Skyminers. If several such Skyminers with these antenna builds are running within an urban area, they will connect to each other to form a fully autonomous mesh network layer, allowing users to provide internet bandwidth to each other directly, beyond the price gouging or censorship of internet service providers (ISPs).
Additionally hardware wallets continue to be developed and finalized to hold Skycoins, Coin Hours, and all tokens built on the Fiber platform safely and securely.
We are also eagerly awaiting the rollout of a single-node Skywire box, which will allow households to route their entire internet traffic through a private encrypted connection, and commercial Skyminers consisting of up to 256 computing boards that support the Fiber enterprise platform. There are currently 30–40 Skycoin developers working exclusively on hardware projects.
Join the internet revolution by constructing your own DIY Skyminer from one of the links above. Stay in touch with more exciting updates as we build the new decentralized internet together!
For more information, check out:
Skywire, the Internet for the New World on the official Medium
Skyminer vs Bitcoin miner a community article on Medium
Skywire on the Skycoin blog
Skywire on Skywug, the Skycoin Wireless User Group
