People, not Numbers
We are all eager to talk about technology. Technologies are the bedrock of our civilization and nowadays, due to the technological advance, an average middle-class man has more comfort that a Medieval king.
But technologies are not the heroes of the story; people are. Technologies are just tools. So let’s talk about our history with the tools. Most likely the story starts with the first stone carved by man, sculpted into a spear or a hammer. Nature did not endow our primitive ancestors with sharp teeth or claws, however, it blessed them with the gift of language, the gift of abstract thinking as well as social behavior.
So the first tools were forged with the sole purpose of compensating for our biological shortcomings and aid us in our struggle for survival. When man was cold, he discovered fire. He needed to hunt, so he invented the spear. He had to protect himself from nature’s disasters, so he constructed the first huts. All the tools that man has created, were specifically designed to increase mankind’s survival chances and make life easier in general. However, the cognitive revolution had yet another effect. In order to pass on the accumulated knowledge, oral language and later written language became vital for the preservation of our civilization. In this manner, humans became more and more dependent on social structures and the technological domain.
The agrarian revolution has bound people to their land; and seeing how agriculture essentially means forfeiting the nomad lifestyle, the first villages were born. Some people were better fighters than others, so they started to steal other’s hard worked crops. In return, they started building walls to defend them and put together armies to protect them. And this is how feudalism was born, where 90% of the population was attending to the required agricultural subsistence, and the rest were either in the army, priests or rulers.
Mankind has been trapped in this stage for roughly 1,000 years, until Gutenberg first introduced printing, which led to mass education being brought slowly, but surely to reality. The Industrial Revolution brought forth the internal combustion engine, electricity and the wonders of the very first automatizations. The man seemed to be free of the constant need of slaving over his land. But not from his tools nor from the structures he created.
Although mass industrialization and capitalism have managed to break the shackles of poverty for many billions of people, it did not fundamentally change the human social structure. Social hierarchies have become harder to define and they are being emphasized more and more. We've started to create more fine-tuned systems and processes that are sadly more inhuman at the same time. Hierarchy complexity has risen once again, but unfortunately, it has done so at the cost of losing our human connection. We build educational systems that are very specialized, but they discourage creativity. We promote jobs that provide a steady income but take away your passions. And somewhere in all this mess, and we are not sure exactly where, humans became an impersonal number in a dusty log book.
Fast forward to 2018. You leave home in the morning, pick up a coffee from some guy whose name you don’t even know, that hates his job which consists of working for a multinational coffee company led by a faceless board of directors, who promote policies designed to satisfy your average anonymous client. Then you call for an Uber, which is essentially a taxi service where you and the driver are subjected to rules written by a company that doesn't know either of you. On the way to work, you spend time on a social network where you don’t even know half of your so-called friends and seek their approval in various manners that have nothing to do with your true nature. Then you go to work for a corporation where you probably don’t even know the `Big Boss’s` name and have no clue what dream led him to build his company, the company you work for.
Is this the world we truly want? A world so cold, so…impersonal? A world dominated by structures and systems, screens, UI/UX optimizations, cost reductions etc? Certainly, this is not our vision at SWAZM. Because technology should serve man, not dictate his behavior. Support creativity, not stifle it. And maybe for the first time in human history, we have the necessary tools for such a change. A change which is not only technological, but social as well.
I am talking about blockchain. In 2008 just a handful of experts in cryptography were familiar with the concept. And yet, this did not stop Satoshi Nakamoto to build the first ever cryptographic digital coin through it. Even now, after 10 years, Bitcoin is probably a more well-known term than blockchain, even though this technology means so much more than just crypto coins.
Blockchain, at its core, is more than just a simple technology. It’s a philosophy. It’s a vision of a society in which trust among its citizens is no longer mediated by institutions and impersonal structures, and in which bonds are established directly between people like us. This is what SWAZM is all about. A project that comes to aid this needed social change. 2017 was a turning point. Initial coin offerings (ICO’s) have raised 5.6 billions of dollars. A year later, more than half of the upstarts who promised to change the world have failed. Why? The infrastructure required to sustain these distributed apps does not exist. We are used to a business logic in which a group of relatively isolated and well defined persons commingle resources and launch a product or a service. This is how the economy has functioned in the last thousands of years. However, the game rules must change.
An infrastructure that can sustain tens, if not hundreds of millions of users across the globe, with an unheard of data traffic in both quality and quantity is required. And a working system which can transcend the geographical limitations is needed. All of these have to be executed at an Internet speed the current infrastructure cannot sustain. We need a new Internet. And that is SWAZM.
In a nutshell, SWAZM is an innovative blockchain architecture tailor-made to enable the horizontal scaling of decentralized applications into mainstream usage.
To scale up and into the mainstream, each DApp must perform flawlessly, serving -as previously stated- tens, if not hundreds of millions of users at the same time, while also keeping the highest standards of security, network speed, and version control. This puts an immense pressure on the infrastructure needs, which can lead to unsustainable costs hikes, drops in performance, and eventually failure in scaling.
At SWAZM, we understand DApps. So we designed a turnkey architecture that helps DApp developers deploy, manage and scale up their decentralized applications.
The SWAZM solution offers:
- An infrastructure capable of supporting millions of users at a very high network speed. — Competing with the existing business in the tech space today, the DApps’ infrastructure must be able to handle tens of millions of active users, while also offering a very short feedback loop. SWAZM can help your DApp deliver the perfect user experience, regardless of the user’s geographical location.
- Cheaper, higher performance decentralized storage solution for your DApp. — The current cloud model for hosting and file storage services is not optimized for the particular demands of decentralized apps. SWAZM offers a solution to go beyond the cloud, bypassing the technological bottlenecks by putting to good use the vast amount of unused computing, storage, and bandwidth resources, creating a unique marketplace for computing resources in the process.
- Decentralized compute architecture. — SWAZM addresses the needs of big scale applications by offering microservice support to divide the workload across multiple CPUs or clusters of CPUs.
- Robust and flexible development ecosystem. — Businesses or developers need the flexibility to enhance their applications with new features or to deploy fixes on the fly, while also managing the access to specific areas of the development ecosystem. SWAZM addresses that need by offering a robust versioning system with the possibility to add or revoke access certificates, enabling more versatility in connection to ephemeral contractors working on the DApp.
All the above-mentioned features are possible due to our unique blockchain architecture that combines reliable transfer network, storage capabilities, and compute containers. The software provides certificate authorities, authentication, storage and the scheduling of applications across many CPU cores or clusters.
This allows for a plethora of use cases for devs to build on top of the SWAZM infrastructure, such as:
1. Content delivery networks. The properties of SWAZM infrastructure granted by SDTS (SWAZM Data Transfer Socket) and by SDSL (SWAZM Data Storage Layer) make it a unique solution for CDNs. The ability to deploy the content from the nearest SWAZM nodes will ensure the lowest latency and the highest possible data transfer speed. This can be used for:
- Video on demand services
- Online radios
- Private CDNS, for example for video surveillance
- Large data streaming solutions, for business or scientific purposes
2. General hosting and storage services (websites, backend infrastructure for apps, etc). The ability to host language-agnostic compute containers on the data layer, together with the above-mentioned advantages of SDSL and SDTS allow for devs and general public alike to be able to deploy any content on SWAZM:
- DApp infrastructure solution. The first and (for now at least) the main usage of SWAZM blockchain is to offer a decentralized infrastructure on which DApps developers can deploy their world-changing solutions.
- Website/portal hosting solution — The SWAZM network can offer hosting services, or domain + hosting services for any website, no matter the complexity, from a simple Wordpress site to the most complex e-commerce portal.
- Decentralized personal storage space. Just like the traditional cloud system (iCloud, Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox), the SWAZM network can provide the storage space for all the needs of the user in terms of space. Given the cryptographic nature of the storage, this can also work as a safebox for private documents. The contents could be shared as either public or private documents and the public documents could be indexed by hash and could be browsable, offering, in fact, a peer to peer data streaming service, like BitTorrent.
- Hosting infrastructure for mobile app backends, providing best latency connection for local users.
3. The SDaS (SWAZM Drive as a Service). Building on the previous use case, but also coupled with the decentralized compute abilities allowed by the SCL (SWAZM Compute Layer), this can act as a B2C solution for renting interactive (write/read) space on the SWAZM network and use it as an internal drive. The OS can see it as a physical drive and can allow apps to be installed on the said drive and ran from that place.
4. SWAZM Compute Marketplace. The ability to distribute and collect distributed compute power allows the creation of a marketplace for computing power, where different projects can bid for computing power using SWAZM tokens. The users can see the profitability of each offer and pick the highest one in terms of using one’s own compute power. The bidders for compute power could set the price in SWAZM tokens as “gas” to make sure their need of compute power gets saturated first. This could be used for:
- Machine learning sandboxes (similar to Neurotoken)
- Mining other cryptocurrencies
- Video rendering (similar to Golem)
- Running a SWAZM node.
5. Pay2Idle — a software product that would identify the moments when your machine is idling and use the excess compute power (up to a percentage of resources that you can control) to run SWAZM nodes, creating value. Eventually, it could automatically identify the highest value it can create via the marketplace for compute systems and saturate the offer with the highest return, then move to the next one. Such an application would mean that people can earn high revenues while putting their computational power to good use into actually doing something useful, other than just maintaining the consensus on a network, like POW currencies do nowadays, where they consume a considerable share of the world’s energy.
6. Decentralized Exchanges — Due to the fact that SWAZM has support for cross-chain interoperability, an exchange would have several advantages by being built on it:
- security (the high risk of losing funds due to centralized exchanges having security breaches is eliminated)
- decentralized nature and transparency (it would eliminate the market hurdles for potential game-changing projects and alleviate the market distortions caused by traditional crypto exchanges taxing large listing sums)
- It would make a community-based project easier to manage.
The vision of a decentralized future is shared by our colleagues from Restart Energy Democracy, the first big app for SWAZM. A civilization will remain sustainable only by preserving the progress made by the current generation and ensure it will not be undone by ecological disturbances in the following decades. To build that future, we need to replace the economy based on fossil fuel consumption and integrate renewable sources distributed in a green energy marketplace, directly from producers to consumers.
But maybe the greatest changes that blockchain technology will bring are not related to the evolution of the financial system or to the economic decentralized models represented by DApps. Perhaps the greatest changes will be much more profound, established in the very fiber of human society, at the very core of social construct. The entire representative democracy system is built on two concepts:
- The physical impossibility of a citizen to involve himself personally in political life.
- The reluctance to delegate rights as a consequence of technological vulnerabilities.
All these problems are eliminated by blockchain tech apps. The technology already exists. From Agora vote to Blockvotes, solutions for completely anonymous and incorruptible digital voting already exist. Functionalities of personal identity management and applications for stimulating political and civic involvement are also in a state of effervescent pioneering. Maybe in 5 years’ time, we will have blockchain elections, which will be 100 times cheaper and impossible to fraud up until the last vote. Or maybe we will have gamified Apps for direct political and civic involvement of the citizen, through which we will be able to participate on a daily basis to communal decisions.
From the way we rethink our economic models to the radical modifications in the very fiber of social human civilization, blockchain technology aka the new Internet is shaping to be more than enough to sustain this revolution which will change our lives in ways we cannot even properly imagine. We live in a historical era in which we have the opportunity to write these pages that will leave their mark on mankind hundreds of years from now. And we should be grateful for all those who fought to rupture the shackles of structures, to radically innovate, to create technologies which will free man in order to fulfill his dreams and aspirations, well beyond grey cars, impersonal hierarchies, and anonymous structures; for a better world, a more humane world, a warmer world.
A world of people, not numbers.
