My Skyminer
This is my Skyminer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
This is my Skyminer.
I ordered it in March of 2019, and it arrived only a few days later. Then, on the night of my birthday, I stayed up all night and built it, from start to finish.
On April 8th, 2019 I plugged it in and turned it on. I even filmed it, because it felt momentous to me; and it was! Both because I had built it with my own hands, and because I knew that it represented another eight nodes coming online for Skywire. It meant helping my hometown of Calgary, Alberta, Canada get that much closer to a city-wide network, just waiting for antennas to connect us local Skyminer operators.
This month, I will receive my first monthly uptime reward for having the Skyminer plugged in. I’ll get these rewards every month for two years, until I’ve earned back the entire amount I paid for it originally.
After that, I’ll still be getting monthly payment in the form of Coin Hours, which is automatically paid in exchange for bandwidth and services on Skywire, by those who want a fast, secure, and private Internet.
June marks the first anniversary of Skywire, which is the new distributed and end-to-end encrypted network that will one day replace the Internet. Launched as a testnet in June 2018, Skywire entered developer mainnet in early 2019, with public mainnet scheduled for release not long after.
There were a few reasons why I ordered a Skyminer. The fact that the purchase price would be reimbursed made it a no-brainer, but I probably would have done it anyway because there were other considerations that entered into my decision.
I do like building things, and frankly, building the Skyminer looked fun. And it was! It was maybe slightly more complex than IKEA furniture, or a big LEGO set, but more fun than either. (Well, maybe not more fun than LEGO.)
But the main reason why I wanted to buy a Skyminer was because I believe in what the Skycoin project is trying to accomplish, and wanted to do my part to move that project forward. I believe that Skywire is an incredible idea with the potential to change the world, and I really do believe that Skycoin is the project that can get it done. We need to bring the power of the Internet back where it belongs, in the hands of the people who use it. The Internet is a network of connected computers, and while the existing Internet may technically be decentralized, it is not distributed, not really. Internet Service Providers are gatekeepers who charge high prices for questionable service. The whole thing runs on the decades old TCP/IP protocol, which was never intended for privacy. The result has been a privacy apocalypse, with governments, hackers, criminals, and corporations spying on us, tracking our Internet activity, blocking or censoring data they disagree with. Even ISPs are in the surveillance game, and our privacy is being bought and sold without our consent.
Every solution I’ve come across including other crypto projects attempting to solve some of these issues, and the infamous TOR browser, are all built on the backbone of the existing Internet. They are at best, kludges that drape a thin sheet of encryption over some of what we use the Internet for.
Skywire is completely new. Users will be able to access the legacy Internet, complete with all its current security flaws and privacy shortcomings, but Skywire itself will be a haven of complete freedom, true to the principles upon which the original Internet was built. There will be no geo-restrictions, no censorship, no surveillance. It will be unstoppable and indestructible.
Once people running Skyminers begin attaching small antennas, they will become literal Internet Service Providers for their communities. Earning money in the form of Coin Hours by providing power, bandwidth and storage on Skywire. Antennas will connect to antennas, and city-by-city a global, wireless mesh network will blanket the globe.
So I didn’t just buy a Skyminer; a collection of CPUs and processors. I bought a vision of the future. I’m excited to be a small part of something that will change the world.
Buy your own Skyminer or build one yourself and join the revolution with me.
If you liked my writing and would like to contribute to me making more feel free to donate some Skycoin: GCB5KK9LmJzxxxh2hMoKm3HRXwaJe9vRfd
