A recap of the Skycoin AMA (Ask Me Anything) session on ExMarkets

As part of its educational endeavours, exmarkets have recently held an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session on its Telegram channel to cooperate with Skycoin upon listing their token on the exchange.

The Skycoin Project is one of the oldest crypto projects in development. Built as an infrastructure project rooted in the founding concept of decentralization, Skycoin runs on a completely different consensus algorithm, “Obelisk” or a “web-of-trust.”

With Obelisk, Skycoin is not susceptible to the weaknesses of PoW and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) algorithms and also endorses net neutrality — a key public good essential for the successful implementation of a decentralized society.

The session allowed direct contact between Skycoin and the exmarkets crypto trader community. People could ask the Skycoin executive team direct questions about its products and its role in expediting the decentralization process.

In this recap of the session, we come up with the most important questions with their answers that took place in the session. Below you can find a slightly edited session summary.

The session was run by the Lead Project Manager of Skycoin, Mr. Synth, who founded Skycoin 8 years ago with a vision of creating a new, decentralized Internet. Synth, who has a background in mathematics, distributed systems, and symbolic logic, sits on several cryptocurrency projects’ advisory boards.

Q&A

Q: What are the leading utilities of $SKY token in your ecosystem? Is there any reward mechanism/benefits that convince someone to hold $SKY over the long term？

A: Yes. Users receive coinhours for holding Skycoin. One coinhour per Skycoin per hour.

And then companies or users will be using coinhours to buy services such as network, VPN, file storage, relay for corporate VLAN and more.

Moreover, we are implementing a milestone with “bandwidth meter” where there will be daily or hourly node rewards based upon usage by other users in the network.

—

Q: I know this platform can attract a lot of users away from the crypto industry as well, What are the plans to attract the Non-Crypto users to Skycoin?

A: Yes. The idea is that we build the core infrastructure.

Then most of the users come from consumer applications, applications that are related to Skycoin but not forcing the people to be crypto users. And most of the revenue comes from corporate adaptation, hardware sales, vendor stuff, corporate VLAN services, etc.

And so users are on the application side (which we do not make any money on) and revenue is on the corporate side.

—

Q: How does Skycoin deal with any kind of regulation related to governments? Does anyone have access to User’s Data or Search History?

A: No. We designed Fiber so that each individual user creates their own blockchain. They have their own blockchain and control all the data on it and they run the blockchain on their own hardware. So we are not involved. We just provide the software. And the user chooses what applications to run and what data to store.

—

Q: Are there any plans to integrate a coin shuffling feature into the Skycoin wallet in the “near” future to allow for anonymous transactions?

A: We have a native “coinjoin” implementation, inside of Skycoin (from the start; for almost a decade now).

Privacy is at level zero.

BUT we cannot enable the coinjoin feature, because many exchanges are banning or harassing “privacy coins” or putting pressure on them; especially in US exchanges. They have a lot of government pressure to remove Monero and Zcash, etc., So we have not yet enabled the coinjoin transaction type in the interface, lol.

—

Q: Really, what is the mission and vision of this Skycoin project? Is it simply to achieve a project that manages the full decentralization of wireless internet networks?

A: Yes. Generally, the objective of the project is:

1. Make sure the token holders do well in the long term (develop things that promote the platform or drive core adaptation);

2. Develop technology for decentralizing the current internet infrastructure (VPN, networking tech for wireless ISPS, blockchain technology for decentralized social media, the programming language for blockchain development, development of blockchain as decentralized database technology, etc.)

Very few people in the Skycoin community are focused on money. It is mostly technology people and engineers heavily focused on internet censorship and internet decentralization for ideological reasons.

—

Q: What innovations have Skycoin brought to the DEFI space? How is Skycoin changing the new DeFi ecosystem and what are the plans for the next few years?

A: For DEFI, we are looking at projects where people can do some kind of yield farming, by funding local infrastructure or hardware network deployment in specific cities or with specific people and things like that, but it’s something we have to wait for bandwidth monetization to start.

I think that if someone wants to build a local city network that is going to generate yield or returns, then if someone else wants to fund the hardware and split it, that would be interesting. But we have to figure out how to do it.

—

Q: “All traffic on Skywire is end-to-end encrypted,” could you please briefly describe what “end-to-end” technology is. Then besides the benefits, are there any disadvantages caused by it?

A: All traffic from start to end for Skywire is encrypted. That means no nodes in the middle can see the contents of the traffic. This is called “end to end encryption” which is encryption between source and destination.

All traffic between individual nodes is also encrypted. This is called link-layer encryption.

The performance overhead is not too bad, because we can just add more computers or CPUs to handle the overhead. So we can use 8 computers instead of just using 1 computer if we need to do 500 Mb/s etc.

—

Q: 1. There are rumors about a new quantum computing system that the world is going to use. Will Skycoin as a cryptocurrency survive that change and would it be difficult to adapt to such a new system?

2. Skycoin transactions have NO Fees (10% coinhours burn) and now at Exmarkets it is possible to deposit, withdraw and trade $SKY into $USDT with also NO Fees. I see this as a significant advantage to use Skycoin for transactions and payments for companies and businesses. Do you agree?

A: Skycoin was designed with a level of quantum resistance.

We have an option to enforce address re-use at the wallet level, and that means that there are less than 10 seconds between the publication of an address public key and when an attacker would have to crack the key.

Even if they have a quantum computer, it will still take days or hours and is useless if we enforce non-reuse at the protocol level.

—

Q: Explain more about the Skycoin SKYWIRE bandwidth routing algorithm, how it solves the problem of bad internet, and how does 5G network support it.

A: We use source routing.

And that means the routes are software-defined. The user starting a connection can choose a custom route through the network, based upon their traffic requirements.

So connections for gaming can emphasize latency, and other applications can choose higher throughput latency insensitive paths and so on.

—

Q: Every project requires funds to function and to innovate. Where do you get the funds to function and for how long you still have enough to function properly?

A: Skycoin was started when Bitcoin was very low.

And we are almost financially independent, from the crypto market now, in terms of revenue and funding.

Also, before the COVID-19, we were doing meetings for government contracts for using Skywire networking hardware for border surveillance systems and some misc contract projects with governments that would basically make us independent from raising money in the crypto market. But the covid stuff shut down all the flights and meetings and the government has just been dealing with that all year and everything else is basically shut down.

And we were also doing some work with universities to do blockchain education centers and to teach CX in universities to students, for blockchain programming courses, and doing hackathons. But then the colleges have been completely closed down for almost a year now!

—

Q: Have you experienced any threats by governments to stop the skycoin project?

A: Governments are complicated.

Actually, we have been approached by governments, and they mostly want to use the technology. Or they want to make money from it and things like that.

Drone companies, surveillance companies, cybersecurity projects where governments were building their internal networks that were independent of the current internet.

And I was told that a company I can’t name put some of the software we developed on a missile as a demo to bid for some government contract.

We did a lot of work with peer-to-peer replication of immutable data structures and transmitted the same data from N different sources or receivers, etc. and for peer-to-peer data replication for redundancy has something apparently to do with missile telemetry data, lol.

One government wanted their network, with their own hardware, with the chips and PCBs built by their own people in a factory in their own country, after Snowden. And we talked to them. But we did not get that contract because they wanted their friends to do it. But they contact us for technical advice or “How would you do this?” Etc and how much it would cost and what resources it would require.

In China, one of our investors had to have a meeting with the local public security bureau and they said what we were doing did not affect them. They mostly leave you alone unless you are causing a problem or organizing riots or something.

Intelligence agencies and IT providers for the government are mostly looking at this in terms of getting contracts or using the technology. And we haven’t had any direct harassment yet.

But I think once we start getting into the social media area, that is going to be a bigger problem than what we were doing before. That is really a touchy point in the US and look at the attacks on bit chute and gab and it’s just getting a filthy and dangerous area to operate in. I think 8chan even had their domain seized.

—

Q: How is the Jianxi University partnership going?

A: COVID-19! I don’t even know if the students are allowed to return to campus yet.

—

Q: What are the plans for SKY Fiber projects integration into the skywire ecosystem? Adding support in SKY wallets for the coins such as SLB, MDL?

A: All addresses/pubkeys generated by any Fiber blockchain can innately support any other Fiber coin. The regex for Fiber addresses also naturally supports Bitcoin. We are currently developing a super wallet for displaying all Fiber coins contained within a Skycoin wallet’s addresses. Additionally, we are nearly finished with adding Bitcoin support to our hardware Skywallet and ETH/ERC20 support will follow, etc.

Aside from that, Fiber project coins may well be accepted for various apps or services of our own which are released as Skywire exclusive systems. Many Fiber coins will want to run all of their traffic over Skywire for their own security so this creates added demand for $SKY to be held by them to generate a steady stream of $SCH which will ensure that they can always facilitate secure comms over Skywire and even sell off the extra to fund their own R&D.

When it comes to collaboration, Fiber projects dealing with infrastructure, microgrid, etc., are uniquely positioned to be physically deployed alongside Skywire infrastructure in the field.

—

Q: The launch of Skywire Mainnet in April was a significant milestone and crucial step towards realizing Skycoin’s vision of a secure and Decentralized internet. What other future milestones are you aiming to achieve to further realize this vision?

A: The next milestone for Skywire is VPN service to complement the SOCKS5 proxy services over Skywire. VPN will be released for desktop and mobile on iOS, Android, Windows, and Linux.

Following this, bandwidth metering will be implemented with payments made in $SCH Coin Hours which will turn Skywire into the first open p2p bandwidth market in history and create the first true service economy in the cryptosphere.

Other milestones for Skywire include the release of the Skyminer 2.0 with its homebrew PCBs, our OpenWRT router, proprietary SoC, etc., plus other Skyminer units (LoRa, etc.) as well as the various antennae we’ve developed.

—

Q: Does Skywire Mainnet include a marketplace for bandwidth-sharing based on Coin Hours already?

A: Not yet, but such bandwidth metering services are the core of tying our coin to our mesh net so this is incoming after we release the VPN services over Skywire.

While the two technologies of Skycoin and Skywire are orthogonal, completely independent of one another, they can be combined into a service economy to simultaneously supercharge Skywire adoption and Skycoin value. Bandwidth metering is the milestone for Skywire after VPN deployment in the near future.

—

Q: Can you talk a little more about the Coin Hour Bank? If I understand correctly, it is going to be its own blockchain, so why is the bank needed?

A: $SCH is going to be given its own burn-free Fiber blockchain which will run in the background in order to facilitate the Coin Hour Bank and bandwidth metering payments over Skywire.

The bank is needed as a system for Skyminers to financially interact with but also serves as a way for users to send $SCH to one another without spamming the main $SKY chain.

It may well be that the augmented $SCH chain can act as the Coin Hour Bank originally did in testing so the CHB then becomes superfluous because of the new chain.

Q: “Can you compare the main benefits between ISP’s & Skycoin's platform? As ISPs already have a vast number of users, how will you attract them to Skycoin platform”

A: ISPs spy on your data while Skywire cannot. ISPs sell your data to the highest bidder and share your data with governments for free while Skywire cannot. ISPs store your data indefinitely while Skywire cannot.

ISPs rate-limit your bandwidth despite laws and your set payment rates while with Skywire you only pay for the bandwidth you use. ISPs censor users or outright deny them service for political reasons while Skywire cannot. Hackers can see what you do when using a traditional ISP while Skywire makes this impossible.

ISPs regularly refuse to build infrastructure into rural areas because it’s not profitable to them while Skywire can be readily deployed on any system and connected to another by using inexpensive hardware which can also be made on-site such as various antennas.

— — — — — — —

That was a recap of the Skycoin AMA (Ask ME Anything) session that was held on the Telegram channel of exmarkets exchange.

Follow us on our websites and social media channels to keep updated about our future events, profitable quizzes, and educational programs.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ExMarkets is a digital asset exchange platform powered by the state-of-the-art trading engine developed in-house. On the exchange, ExMarkets users can trade the most popular cryptocurrencies as well as gain the chance to participate in the token sales of the most promising blockchain and crypto projects through ExMarkets Initial Exchange Offering (IEO) LaunchPad.

ExMarkets has been operating in the crypto market since the autumn of 2018 and has gathered a 160,000 member community that is actively trading on the platform on a daily basis. ExMarkets is included in the top 100 CoinMarketCap Exchange list, has hosted more than 60+ Initial Exchange Offerings, and generates around $30,000 daily trading volume.

It takes only a few minutes to set up your account and users are allowed to make deposits in Bitcoin, Ethereum, other supported cryptocurrencies without paying any deposit or withdrawal fees.

To top it all off, ExMarkets is a part of the CoinStruction liquidity framework which is aggregating order-books from the most well-known cryptocurrency exchanges guaranteeing 24/7 crypto liquidity — a feature which can seldom be seen in the current market.