Update:

We are at 90% launch readiness
- network is operating
- 3 of the 7 white papers are on the websites
- deposits, withdrawals and done
- Skycoin order book is done
- CLI and WebRPC are done
- skycoin.net website is 70% done (backlog of tickets)
- over half the wallet builds are on website (but have backlog of UI bugs)
- wallet explorer API is done. We are waiting on web dev to fix UI bugs and to do the stand alone blockchain explorer
- infographics are done
- introduction video is in progress
- several of our applications are close to launch (but backlog)

Infographics



















CXO

We did benchmark two days ago and were able to sync 20,000 hash objects in 10 seconds.

The meshnet is being refactored, so that it can be run and debugged in a single threaded context, to avoid the use of mutex and multiple redundant goroutines as much as possible.
 
After we get the coin backlog done, then we will switch to marketing and launching applications.

Marketing

We are starting with dedicated marketing and intend to do one content push per channel per week.

We will move the development and technical discussion to our own distributed social media platform on top of CXO as soon as possible.

>do you plan to update your website in order for us potential users to get some info on developments, basic features and opportunities regarding this coin?

We have ~30 people working. There are ~4 people doing the white papers.
- we only have one frontend dev part time on the website, so will take a while to get all the content
-- he is only doing the download page and wallet page right now
- we have one vector graphics guy, to do illustration
- have ~5 different people working on various white papers for the website
- we just got a community manager, who will handle updates and pushing notification to community on the social media channels
- we only have one angular 2.0 person part time for the wallet GUI and we have backlog of 40 to 60 bugs (wallet, blockchain explorer) and he is working through that
- Our ICO and exchange platform integration has been handed over to a third party and there are ~15 people getting exchange and ICO ready.
- we have one person working full time on the coin
- three people working on meshnet actively right now
- two people working on skyhash/aether
- one person working on CXO
- one person working on CX
- two people working on consensus implementation
- one person doing logo, infographics part time
- We had meetings with the exchange people and have liaison person and he needs to follow up.
- We have one person working on build scripts, docker and ansible 20 hours a week
- etc

So we are spread pretty thin right now. I am nagging the website person everyday and recruiting other people to nag him. After the download page is satisfactory and we have the white paper page, then we will start adding more information to the website.

The website has a backlog of twenty or thirty things and we are only getting one or two things done per day. Its four to six iterations to get a good download page and we are only doing one iteration per week.

We need to hire a person to just do documentation and improve our documentation for installation (for OSX and to verify build scripts work and to clean up documentation).

>In the OP I read that less than 1% of the coins will be distributed and more than 99% held by someone

2.4% of the coins have already be distributed. Each of the core developers is only getting 1% each and they are locked for several years.

The next ICO will be about 0.3% . Then we may have a 0.6% to 1% ICO at higher price.

We need a 8x to 25x appreciation, for the investors who have been holding coins for the last three years.

The market cap is the free float, times the price per coin. The speculators, marketing and exchange partners want the coin ranked in the first ten by valuation, for viability. Then they want a stable price that varies within a range and which gradually appreciates over time.

Our distribution schedule is very similar to Bitcoin.
- We are not doing a large sale of 30% of the coins at once like Ethereum. We think this distribution schedule sells to many coins and limits the upside for investors and will destroy the long term price when the speculators/miners dump.
- We are not hoarding 98% of the coins like Ripple (the Ripple free float is a lie)
- We think a gradual distribution with the number of new coins decreasing over time is the best distribution schedule.
- If the distribution negatively impacts the price, we will cut the distribution back and if it continues to fall we will begin buybacks.
- We have a professional market maker partner who is invested for the long term and will provide liquidity on both sides of the order book.

We think the Bitcoin distribution schedule is the most natural and has been the most successful. We do not have miners and no new coins are created, so it has to be done by hand, but we think that is best way to allow gradual long term appreciation.

Update:

We are getting through bug backlog and feature improvement. We made ~180 changes to CLI and WebRPC in last two weeks.



DevOps

We have ansible scripts and docker containers for automating deployment.
- https://github.com/skycoin/devops
- we need a lot of help with this

Install docker and docker-compose
- git clone github.com/skycoin/devops
- cd devops
- docker-compose up

Then it will
- start up a debian VM and a Alpine Linux VM
- use the alpine linux VM as ansible agent to do installation on the debian hosts
- install golang
- pull skycoin
- pull dependences
- have skycoin image ready for running and deployment

Switch from Void linux to Alpine:

We are switching defaults for our server deployment from Void Linux to Alpine linux, because of better support
- no SystemD
- MUSL instead of glibc
- minimum image size of 6 Mb for docker container
- runs on ARM
- alpine linux can run docker and docker-compose

Network Unreliability Affecting Unattended/Automated installs:

In China, Japan, Hong Kong and South East asia, DNS is not working reliably and we are internalizing external dependencies and golang repos into IPFS for peer-to-peer replication.

We have experience network unreliability for
- github (dns fail, https timeout, https works then is throttled down to 4 Kb/s, then drops later, sporadic unavailability in south-east asian region)
- debian/apt-get (DNS resolution failure for debian, speed throttled to 4 Kb/s, sporadic unavailability in south-east asian region)
- golang installation (google servers blocked in china)

To rebuild client gui requires
- golang binaries (static file IPFS, or wget/remote server dependency)
- golang dependencies in the gopath (dependency on github, or later can be moved into IPFS)
- apt-get install npm (debian dependency)
- NPM install (NPM server dependency)

To only run the client/server/meshnet requires
- golang binaries (static file IPFS, or wget/remote server dependency)
- golang dependencies in the gopath (dependency on github, or later can be moved into IPFS)

So we should be able to have skycoin node and meshnet nodes running completely from IPFS without depending on DNS and using only local resources. This should significantly improve deployment speed and reliability for unattended and automated installation.

The end goal is that
- all our files required for installation should be in one volume (zip file or IPFS)
- everything required for install should be in that volume
- install will complete and server will run reliably, even if network cable is unplugged from server (offline installation, with no network resources or foreign dependencies)
- installation should be fully automated (unattendend installation and automated deployment)

This solves the following problems
- our build process has been very poor and needs to be completely automated (for build bot)
- the internet is falling apart internationally and has been getting progressively worse over last year, especially for Russia, China, Brazil and South East Asia. Scripts that would work perfectly are failing because of inability to access cross border network resources, because of filtering, throttling at border or cyber attacks on the DNS system.
- Even within China, traffic between different ISPs will often completely drop for seconds at a time, screwing up installation scripts, while overseas traffic is also dropping sporadically or being filtered. Within China, all installations requiring access to github.com, apt-get repos often fails. Access to all google servers is blocked (including golang binaries and git repositories hosted on google servers).
- Several people have offered us single VPS servers to run nodes on. Someone offered us 3 nodes. Another person offered 5 servers. Another sent us a list of IP, username/password for 30 VPS servers. Another person offered  two hundred servers. We do not have time to maintain and update the nodes by hand. We need completely automated deployments with ansible.
- a medium sized meshnet node deployment for VPS might be ~30,000 nodes. So we need perfectly reliable, automated installation, deployment and self-testing. The human time, should not increase as the number of servers/nodes increase. It has to be zero marginal cost.

For instance for servers in Singapore, japan and Tokyo we are getting errors like this.



So for reliability we need to internalize all our dependencies to eliminate the possibility of disruption of access to network resources, preventing deployment and installation.

These are problems we are having right now. There is not even a war yet and the submarine cables have not even been cut yet. I cannot figure out why there are are so many problems with HTTPS, SSL and DNS lately.

We have even seen our installation scripts broken by errors indicating a SSL packet injection attack, which were only observed on servers at a large corporation that may be an interesting target for attack and only if we are accessing overseas resources. We have also observed DNS problems, when a VPN is used to particular countries and where traffic passes through particular countries.

DNS Is completely insecure and broken. DNS is completely unencrypted and 3rd parties can easily modify DNS packets in transit. It is not reliable anymore, because of the increasing weaponization of DNS by ISPs. I am getting these DNS problems in Singapore, Hong Kong an Taiwan now.

We also had failed DNS resolution cause an inability to access STUN servers, so the node was unable to determine its public facing IP address.

China's cyber security policy appears to include blocking every overseas resource (such as docker), controlled or owned by an entity subject to US/NATO national security orders. Unreliable networking causes a slew of meaningless Docker errors that the program is not designed to handle.

Very annoying.

Update:

Blockchain explorer almost working. All of the API functions are in.

We are very bad at this part. This is a new coin from scratch, so if we need something, then we have to code it.

 To get listed we need
- working CLI
- working WebRPC interface
- blockchain explorer
- website
- white paper
- wallet download

We could have done these two or three years ago and should have made this a priority.

In the last few months we did
- the CLI is done
- the webRPC API is done
- the blockchain explorer or sort of done (APIs are there but still fixing bugs)
- the website is sort of done, but undergoing multiple rounds of improvements ( https://github.com/skycoin/skycoin/commits/master )
- the whitepapers, we need three white papers plus infographics, because this is a large project and its not clear to people what we are trying to do
- the wallet download works and now we have automated installation/build scripts for ansible and docker ( http://github.com/skycoin/devops )

All of those are in progress, then we are 100% done with everything for listing. Then the coin will be a "finished product".

I think it is tradable now. We are just finishing the blockchain explorer (which turns out to have been massive task, with 60 sub-tasks and new bugs and full of API calls that were missing when the frontend developer went to implement the interface).

---

Getting to this point however is extremely daunting. If you broke it down into sub tasks, its hundreds of small things that need to be done.

We have an exchange partner now too. To handle ICO and listing, liquidity and stabilizing price across all the exchanges.

This is getting complicated too, because we just write code. We did not have people in place for product stuff (like finishing working software and launching it). Now we are at point of launching five separate "products" or end-user applications, at the same time.

We have several applications (like the VPN and meshnet) that are ready or working, but which do not have user facing interfaces and can only be used from linux/osx on the command line. The Skycoin consensus network, block, transaction prorogation and network stats will eventually need their own web GUI dashboards (like this ethstats.net )

So now we are building up product launch (finishing wallet and getting it to the users), marketing and user community experience/capacities. Where as we had no one doing this before.

We had too few people working on this. Right now, I think for just the white papers there are about five people involved on it and it will still take weeks (but is finally in progress). For blockchain explorer and API, took backend and frontend developer weeks and we had backlog of ~60 bugs or things to do (API requests moving, blockchain storage changes, changes to transaction history API, bugs with timestamp parsing etc).

The website, also needs dozens of small changes to be good. And we can only get a few changes in per week. We did a lot of work on the home page and are now working on the download page. Most of the work is deleting useless things one at a time. Then will go back and do the info-graphics and content pages. The evolution and revisions of the skycoin webpage design, could be a twenty page blog post, even through it is a simple two page sit with just a home page and then a download page.

You can track progress here:
- https://github.com/skycoin/skycoin/commits/master

The two highest importance things right now are
- complete the coin (100% status, for coin product). So that we can do listing and begin market/float
- get the user community on the same platform (so that we can coordinate the developers)

No. The market cap is the free float (the distributed, traded coins) times the price per coin.

At 2000 SKY/BTC, with 3% of the coins sold, the market cap is
- 3 million coins / 2000 SKY/BTC = 1500 BTC
- 1500 BTC * 720 USD/BTC is $1,080,000

The construction cost of 1 mile of 4 way highway is 4 to 10 million USD.

The current Skycoin market cap is
- 2.4% of coins, 2.4 million
- 2500 SKY/BTC
- 2,400,000 SKY / 2500 SKY/Bitcoin = 960 BTC
- 960 BTC / 720 USD/BTC = 595,2000

Also, we raised most of the money when Bitcoin was at half its current price.
- We previously pegged to USD, because did not want the investors disadvantaged by declining BTC price
- So we pegged the SKY price to BTC, so that earlier investors would not be disadvantaged by the BTC price increase.

We priced the ICO price so that
- the price was high enough that we could fund 1 year of development
- the price was low enough and number of coins sold was low enough, that investors could reasonably get 20x to 50x return later (turning 50 BTC into 1000 BTC or 2500 BTC)

We do not think the days of Bitcoin going from $0.01 to $1000 and seeing 10000x returns are going to happen against, because market is much more mature now.

The biggest jump is always when coins go from developers and early adapters compiling from source and small community, to public listing on Poloniex and large speculators and people without wallet flooding in. Most of these people will never install the wallet, will never user the coin or any of its applications, will not contribute to development at all (many Ethereum investors do not have wallet and their coins only exist on the exchange). However, these are the people driving the market.

Instead of an Ethereum style IPO, were a large number of coins was sold (30%) at a higher valuation in an ICO, we decided to sell a smaller number of coins (few percent at a time), then distribute the rest over time. This would allow for a larger price multiple increase.

However, the large ICO is optimal for hype and marketing and easiest way to raise money.

---

Another thing we learned, is that people just like to complain and no matter what you do, someone is going to going to be unhappy.
- We had severe mistakes that were really bad and no one complained about that, but which only had minor effect because was small amount of coins (like improper pricing of coins in 3rd party crowd sale). However no one complained or even noticed
- We have received loud complaints about things that seemed to us minor, hypothetical or irreverent. People seem to scream the loudest and fight the most about irreverent wedge issues than about things that matter (example: the blockchain size in Bitcoin).

We also learned that perfectionist is very bad and engineers will never launch anything because it can always be improved or there is always another problem. Perfectionism is paralyzing. So we should just launch whatever we can, as quickly as possible and just get it done.

---

Now that its almost done and everything is nearly 100% completion (website, wallet downloads, CLI, WebRPC interface, first applications ready for packaging etc...). We are in a state of shock.

The rest of it, is marketing, documentation and community development. Those will be the most important things in the stage after technical development.

The development team will not be good at this and has no interest in it, so we have to build up a whole new team around this. We also need to develop our own platforms when possible.

When I look at Bitcoin, Litecoin, etc... They should have failed. They only do two things
- check balance
- send

There is not a clean, rational reason why people use them. The community, the hundreds of millions in mining rigs, the electricity use, speculation and trading. It is not intuitive what the factors driving the human activity and behavior are. What the purpose is and why people do it.

Examining the FED, the purpose is clearly slavery and keeping nations as colonies. That is what it was designed for and central banking for a top down, hierarchical society of elites ruling over a class of human cattle and harvesting them for labor and resources. It is very clear from how the system is structured mathematically, how it functions and how it evolved over time.

However, Litecoin? What drives litecoin adaption? Who uses it? Why does it have such a high price? Where does the money to pay for the mining equipment and electricity come from? What holds the user community together? How does the user community grow? What is its purpose?

It seems to be a completely speculator driven market, or "altcoin real money fantasy football" or "altcoin horse racing".

Which is great. It actually means all the work we did, does not actually matter. As long as there is a dream and something for people to buy and sell, they will go and do that. So the emphasis should be on creating a narrative for a speculator driven market and then giving people something to buy and sell.

If it works and is useful and people actually find it useful or real economic activity occurs, then that is just icing on the underlying psychology.

The altcoin market is still in a transition period between pure speculation, the dream of what is possible and a transition into real economic activity.

So the price is one thing, but the most important thing is what the coins intend to accomplish or change in the world. These new technologies are creating the conditions for a new era. The are creating the possibility for alternative visions for the future.

In that respect, Litecoin, etc... and even Ethereum are very boring. As long as you are focused on the coin price, instead of what you are trying to accomplish in the real world, it is difficult to get anywhere.

I think Assange may have a blockchain Christmas present for everyone. I think we are on the border of change and that these technologies are going to lead us there.

Zhang Hong is doing forks/derivatives of Skycoin for corporations for China market. Mzcoin and Tmcoin. For Airlines Reward points programs and blockchain traded gift cards. So closed network, internal blockchain applications for corporate use. We have four Skycoin forks running and this is part of method for funding development.

The core developers are still the same.

We are also doing partnerships with other companies for technology development and IoT. The core Skycoin development for the coin, is not being managed by a large exchange partner (which is why the command line interface and wallet bugs and website are getting done now).

Then we have moved to work on applications and the ecosystem.

Update:

Very busy.

We have marketing manager to turn up the pump and manage community now. He is going through the bitcoin talks backlog,

---

We have an invite only ICO on third party platform, that you need QR code to access. 25 people have code right now, and it is open to anyone who posted on the Bitcoin talks thread in the past 4 years. More information later.

We will probably do 1%. Then double price and do another 1%. Or increase price to 2000 SKY/BTC, then double price, then after that, will float on exchange with order book. We have not discussed this.

---

We are launching our own post blockchain social platform. Starting with an immutable object replication system, inspired by Urbit and IPFS. Which is designed for decentralized social networking and source independent networking.

We started this on friday and we almost have a decentralized text only version of 4chan working, five days later.

- https://godoc.org/github.com/skycoin/cxo/schema
- https://godoc.org/github.com/skycoin/cxo/bbs

- Each object has a schema and is a struct (with basic set of atomic types)
- Each object has a canonical serialization as a byte string
- Each object instance IDed as the SHA256 hash of its []byte serialization
- Each object can Href (hash ref) over objects (like a pointer to an immutable object)
- The objects are stored in a map from SHA256 hashes to []byte
- we track which objects we have references to, but which we do not have local copies to
- garbage collection is easy because we have a directed acyclic dependency graph in this form (like Rust, there are no pointer cycles allowed)

This type of immutable object system is designed for peer-to-peer replication over Skyhash/Aether
- https://github.com/gagliardetto/skyhash-pub-sub

In Aether, there is a swarm of people subscribed to public key A
- A serializes a root object as a []byte, hashes it, signs it with their private key and then publishes it
- the root object is published peer-to-peer
- the objects referenced by the root object are pulled in recursively

This will replace Bitorrent, IPFS, zeronet, maidsafe, Tox, bittorrent sync, http, bitmessage and more with a single protocol that can cover a wider range of use cases more easily.

If public key A subscribes to pubkey B and pubkey B subscribes to pubkey A, then it gives you a Tox or Bitmessage like asynchronous messaging channel with peer to peer replication.
- Nodes A, B by public key
- A subscribes to B
- B subscribes to A
- A publishes a message that only B can read, into its pubsub channel
- B publishes an ACK to A, confirm message receipt
- A removes the href to message in next round

This protocol is very good for peer-to-peer replication of static content like websites, blogs and youtube videos.

--- meshnet sequence diagrams

We are doing UML protocol sequence diagrams for the meshnet now.



The network is very similar to I2P, except that it is designed to be fast. I want to get this working (again) soon.

--- build automation

We are doing docker, ansible and juju. For node installation, deployment. Will have scripts that automatically SSH into node with ansible and install golang and install from source and run nodes.

This should help with large deployments.

--- CLI

The Skycoin CLI and WebRPC is working and is better than Bitcoin or Ethereum.

We fixed issue with the CLI and web-wallet contending to write for same wallet files. We will add ability to disable the web-wallet APIs for nodes that will be used over the thin client interface.

Update:

We now have bitmessage channel, instead of subscription thing.

Bitmessage Channel
name: skycoin
address: BM-2cW9oxq2cx8PmWgySvaHyJnTpcxpsiFhqD

Anyone can post or discuss here.

Skyhash/Aether:

Version 2
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4ZQCYJeic4

I need the Apollo moon landing music played in the background of this video.

We will have the social media stuff up soon.

Update:

Really annoying. Our Angular 2.0 guy disappeared. I do not know if he was hit by a car or what happened to him.

We were in the middle of finishing the blockchain explorer and the wallet on the dev branch is in an intermediate state...

Coin Status:

Dozens of bug fixes on the CLI and WebRPC interface. The OSX wallet directory bug is fixed now.

I have been using CLI interface a lot.

Meshnet:

Three tasks left then we are onto info graphics and marketing. We do not have a user interface yet but back end will be working.

Marketing:

We are trying to get full time person to manage the social media accounts, marketing and user community.

Coin Checklist:

The remaining items for the coin are
- the three white papers
- blockchain explorer interface
- minor bugs and usability improvements in the wallet

I want to get the coin out of the way and be at 100% launch readiness. All of the APIs are in place to do an internal market.

Then will start pushing out the application software, ecosystem stuff and begin selling the dream.

Yes. The seed and deterministic wallet algorithm is identical.

If you put in the same seed, you will get the same addresses. Try it for the CLI or the new wallet.

Update:


---

go run ./cmd/cli/cli.go send 2X6eRFh6pp6rUHj74NJXLcmTg1TnDaPyYCw 1000000000
txid:127cae7ab2e851738fc4c9894dade853173c658317e5e551c0618f3c14de0c6e

---

go run ./cmd/cli/cli.go transaction 127cae7ab2e851738fc4c9894dade853173c658317e5e551c0618f3c14de0c6e

{
        "transaction": {
            "status": {
               "confirmed": true,
               "height": 1
               "unconfirmed": false,
               "unknown": false,
            },
            "txn": {
                "length": 414,
                "type": 0,
                "txid": "127cae7ab2e851738fc4c9894dade853173c658317e5e551c0618f3c14de0c6e",
                "inner_hash": "ae44ad68c8a6f83d22436a19ff274d5eeeceb7c515348c910cf09abea87b4449",
                "sigs": [
                    "0a332a5c2c501b5fcf6d8ce21ef1aa6c82324dcaf5a4162a0ab8f6cada1ae56b19be195564263ac e98db8a0b0b4c37a5ac080c5a55c76b2c9315980a025307b001",
                    "b2a3d81f2a2bd12ed1fc0d5bb9daa781a2553410902a25cfcf4c179165ef52936b86c4774ad3e9a 4fbc2188f8fe7e5ad1949715c307ab4499b4d2bc2536bb2b600",
                    "e660d1823b2d2637c2da6080443410dadf90c8559e17b37b17fe51d553e2f26c0b71ee1b3a652b5 22b0f1cc17baef65f63457259b06fd6126fe4e2b1bf101e7d01"
                ],
                "inputs": [
                    "22f6cbb46c9d8566f6cdb3882dbd77bc473432c097b704c14457babd66da993d",
                    "d0e6c3ff06b1125d70a707f57b4888a96aa56fe26fbf0fc80ce7d560acc77f63",
                    "b220185a9f0f1a6af34e4b1ad882b7634d2fe9db3d1f8d7fdbc0815856abc06e"
                ],
                "outputs": [
                    {
                        "uxid": "4594bb2382ac97aa0cf3ae0eeeae2d2a0dbe96a6293d0bd715e2ce7165080977",
                        "dst": "2X6eRFh6pp6rUHj74NJXLcmTg1TnDaPyYCw",
                        "coins": "1000",
                        "hours": 1876583
                    },
                    {
                        "uxid": "931267f628963f9faccfaaa4973cb20a4d28a02a8c97a89f83f91d3413af7af7",
                        "dst": "Qq7dG2S5jwNgpayJzBf7kTtfWmpfSQPCQ6",
                        "coins": "244631",
                        "hours": 1876583
                    }
                ]
            }
        }
    }

---

go run ./cmd/cli/cli.go checkBalance -a 2X6eRFh6pp6rUHj74NJXLcmTg1TnDaPyYCw
{
    "address": "2X6eRFh6pp6rUHj74NJXLcmTg1TnDaPyYCw",
    "amount": 1000
}

---

Wooohooo. CLI works. It feels pretty awesome to use.

I do not understand why the terminal feels so much better than a gui wallet.

Update:

90 commits.
- The Command Line Interface is done.
- The first version of the WebRPC interface is in the repo!



Almost done with check box for floating on exchange.

Now have to fix the remaining wallet bugs.

Update:

Development:

The CLI in next push will have
- adding private key to wallet by private key hex
- transactions for spending outputs held by a single address by private key
- working send

The wallet gui will be fixed in dev head, within the next few days.

Update:

We need to fix the GUI on the dev branch.

We need to debug the CLI (command line interface, for exchange))

We need to get the WebRPC (for exchanges)

We need to start building out the community.
- need a chat room
- need a forum or BBS
- need a messaging system

We need to get the three white papers done and the website
- Coin / Consensus Paper
- Meshnet Paper
- Aether Paper

We have to decide if we will float and do the first market internally or use a third party.

We have to get the roadmap up on the website.

We have to create the third version of the website.

We have to get a windows installer (to install under program menu)

We need to do ansible and docker, build/installation automation scripts.

Skycoin Website:

The website is a flat file. No-script (no javascript).

This was first version of website (which was complete shit). It was actually very bad.



Second version is much better.



In the third version
- will be stripped down (fewer text, fewer icons, nothing that is not needed)
- will be focused on directing the user to the wallet download or to the roadmap and infographics
- links to wallet download, white paper, github, roadmap (infographics)
- remain very focused on why user is at website and what they are trying to do. With very little text/icons to distract them

Aether: Skyhash

This is the new internet

The first version of Skyhash/Aether is done
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXD_rdwoKsc
- https://github.com/gagliardetto/skyhash-pub-sub
- github.com/skycoin/skyhash

- A person takes their public key and publishes content
- The content is replicated peer-to-peer to all subscribers to the public key

There are no servers. It is completely peer-to-peer.

This can be used for
- static websites (shops)
- IoT pub-sub channel
- DNS (looking up public keys, by human readable identifiers)
- caching static content
- blogs
- twitter
- image boards
- building TOX like communication system
- server orchestration
- replacing Bitorrent/IPFS

We trying to get a developer to work on the content browser for Aether.

Instead of going 120 hops in the network, to get data. It will just get the data from whoever is near you that has copies.
- in the current internet, if a content publishers server is in Los Angeles and the requester is in Hong Kong, ever content request and packet will go from Hong Kong to Los Angeles, for each request.
- in Aether, the first copy of the data goes from Hong Kong to Los Angeles, and each subsequent copy can be served from a local content cache or another user

This is also called "Content Addressable Storage" or "Source Independent Networking".

For instance, a file is requested by the SHA256 hash of the data contained in the file. You do not care where the file is downloaded from, as you can verify the contents of the file once it has been received from any source.

If you are using 100 MB/s over 100 hops of fiber (going through 100 routers). You are using 20x the network resource usage, as if you are going through only 5 hops
- resource usage is number of hops times bandwidth usage per hop

So by pushing content to the edge, the aggregate network resource usage is reduced and latency is reduced.

This also enables Multi-cast and enables a higher level of network redundancy (automatic geographically distributed content mirroring).

The next generation HTML, websites, services, social media and video streaming will be built on this principal. The existing model of a CDN is an intermediate stage of the evolution of this type of "EdgeNet". The military, commercial and home IoT and the next generation of "cloud" services will largely be enabled by networking protocols designed on these principals.

We have our object format and serialization format defined and are starting to integrate it into Aether.

We are building the skycoin consensus and block distribution on top of this model, because of the security and speed advantages. It also has the advantage of being a simple three packet protocol.

Aether: Tox-like messaging

Aether at the basic level, enables cryptographic, peer to peer replication pub-sub channels.

We can take two public keys
- have pubkey A subscribe to pubkey B's pubsub channel
- have pubkey B subscribe to pubkey A's pubsub channel

- A publishes a message to B
- the message is replicated peer-to-peer to all subscribers to pubkey A
- B receives the messages
- B publishes an ACK into their message stream, confirming that they have received the message from A

So we now have a two way channel
- can be used like Bitmessage
- can implement Tox like messaging
- can implement a cryptographic ratchet
- can implement asynchronous messaging (for configuring servers, SSH, process monitoring, status monitoring, etc)

The implementation is completely in golang, so no buffer overflows.

The messages are stored, by everyone replicating the public key
- so if a server is offline when the message is published, when the server comes back online, it will receive the message
- if the server is online, it will receive the message instantly and will see response

This is a very powerful messaging primitive. Especially when you have mobile devices or an unreliable network that is going on and off. This type of network can deliver messages, even over latencies of minutes, hours or months. It is
- source independent
- asynchronous
- scale invariance in time

For instance,
- you can put a node on a ship sailing between japan and new zealand
- when the node on the ship is near japan, it will drop off new messages and get new messages for any pubkeys the node is subscribed to.
- then when it sails to New Zealand, it will drop off the messages and grab the latest messages
- it will still operate automatically, to distribute blogs and tweets, even if the internet cables are cut and the satellites have been shotdown and it takes two months to send a message back and forth. Only a single copy of a blog posts or static data needs to enter the country, to be replicated peer-to-peer.

The latency can literally be days or months and the protocol still operates reliably (scale invariance in time).

Also, all applications built upon the distributed object store, will operate automatically offline with no additional coding
- Google maps works while you have internet
- when you lose internet, you no longer have a working map
- when a map application is run off of map data in the asynchronous, distributed object store there is no difference to the application between being online and offline. You can cache the map for a whole country locally and it will operate the same regardless of internet connectivity.

I think this will find a lot of applications for drones (drone swarms, mobile communication nodes), satellites, mobile devices (cell phone applications), IoT or mobile networking.

Meshnet

The data channel and control channel is separated now. We have three things left to do, before its working again. It could be one or two weeks, before the full stack is working end-to-end.

I think we will have someone get the VPN application working again, so that we will have at least one useful application to run over the network.

The long term goal of Aether is to create content and website that are internal to the network only.

Aether will look exactly like IPFS
- there will be a content browser
- you will put in a public key, then slashes, to navigate to content example: ipfs://QmYwAPJzv5CZsnA625s3Xf2nemtYgPpHdWEz79ojWnPbdG/readme
- then it will find peers and fetch the content

Roadmap:

Our application stack is
Skycoin + Skywire (Meshnet) + Aether (Skyhash) + CX (application language)

We almost have the coin completed. Then Skywire and Aether in development/demo state.

Do we have any small exchanges, that want to QA the command line interface and web-RPC? I think twelve of them messaged us but do not remember the names.

We could enable shape-shift type functionality in the wallet. We are ready to do that now.

You may have a weird keyboard. Japanese keyboard or Windows 10 bug? Sometimes electron (embedded chrome) can have problems with language localization and might do unicode characters and then we only use ASCII internally. I have not tried to put in a unicode wallet seed, to see what it does.

I put in "123456" for seed and checked the wallet and seed said "123456" in wallet file. Another developer on OSX tried and could not replicate problem.



- the seed can generate an infinite number of private keys, public keys and addresses
- there is one private key per address

The password feature is "wallet encryption". We are still implementing wallet encryption. Wallet encryption will encrypt your private keys and the seed, so that if the wallet file is stolen, no one can spend your coins, without knowing the password. We are using sha256 + secp256k1hash (very slow on ASIC, GPU, CPU 1000x attempts per second max) for password derivation function and then ChaCha20.

---

We added a lot of new features to the wallet and have not had time to QA everything.
- we now have a version number, so we can automatically upgrade old wallets to newer wallet formats
- we now have a "last seed" value, so that we can generate an infinite rolling series of addresses quickly
- the software now supports multiple addresses and adding new addresses to the wallet
- we are moving the seed and private key values into their own area, so we can encrypt them for wallet encryption

These upgrades and changes to software broke the GUI and we are cleaning that up now.

Ok. This is annoying thing, that golang forces you to do. The skycoin folder must be in the gopath ($GOPATH)

- You can do "go get github.com/skycoin/skycoin" and go will automatically install skycoin to the go path
- then do cd $GOPATH/src/ to look around your gopath and see what is in there
- symlink the $GOPATH/src/github.com/skycoin/skycoin folder, to a folder in your home directory or development directory, for easy access
- ln -s $GOPATH/src/github.com/skycoin/skycoin $HOME/skycoin

Then it will work

We are creating
- ansible scripts
- docker scripts
- dev ops scripts for automatic setup, verifying configuration, asking user where they want the files to go etc
- scripts for automating build and containerized deterministic builds
 
In theory, three things need to happen
- Golang must be installed and must work
- The skycoin directory must be in the gopath
- The golang libraries in the GLOCKFILE, must be in the gopath

Then it will work perfectly 100% of the time. So we need to automate doing those three things.

Update:

Someone try
- run a skycoin node with go run ./cmd/skycoin/skycoin.go
- go run ./cmd/cli/skycoin.go

This is the command line interface.
- do `go run ./cmd/cli/skycoin.go help GenerateWallet`
- etc

You should be able to
- generate wallets
- generate addresses
- check balances
- create transactions
- inject transactions into the network
- track transaction status

This is new code and still being heavily tested/modified. I would not use the 12 word wallet phrase feature yet.

We wrote too much code and added too many features at the same time. I was not watching them and they went wild, without polishing enough and we need to polish the existing things first.

We will expose the same functions over WebRPC and we are 100% done for exchange listing.
- Then we need to find a small exchange who wants to do QA and testing. Then will list and test there.

The marketing people want to
- have white papers up (the three papers)
- have website done with infographics
- do marketing for one month
- then do listing on the first large exchanges
- then add large exchanges over time (not all the exchanges at once)