If you’ve seen The Social Dilemma, you know all too well that today, people are being turned into products. Everything we do online – all of the data we upload and all of our digital activities – is tracked and oftentimes used against us. Targeted advertising is just the beginning.

Personal data is used by algorithms to make incredible important decisions, like whether someone should receive financial or health support or benefits. In China, people are now even receiving “scores” for their behaviors. It sounds like Black Mirror, but it’s real life.

That’s the scary part. The good news is that things don’t have to be this way. ThreeFold is building the engine for an Internet where people can finally be autonomous with their data.

With today’s Internet, infrastructure is centralized. Companies provide services in exchange for your personal data, which is stored on servers in hyper-scale data centers owned by private companies.

In ThreeFold’s model, those servers are called 3Nodes, and rather than sitting inside centralized data centers, they sit inside the homes or offices (or small data centers) owned by independent people and organizations called Farmers. But the data inside is owned by the person or persons who put it there. They maintain access right as well. From a technical standpoint, data is dispersed across 3Nodes by an algorithm that makes it such that nobody can access it. In addition, connections are peer-to-peer, meaning data goes directly between sender and recipient rather than passing through intermediaries as it does today – bringing further levels of security.

Thus, people can finally have data autonomy, knowing their data is safe, and truly theirs.

Just like a brain is an interconnected network of neurons, the Internet (or internet) is a global interconnected network of computers and devices that communicate with each other via the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). The communications infrastructure of the Internet consists of hardware components and a system of software layers that control various aspects of the architecture.

To create a new Internet from scratch, ThreeFold had to start at the operating system (OS) level. An operating system is a software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. And this is how Zero OS was born

🔗What makes Zero OS special?

Zero OS is a stateless and lightweight operating system. Given it has no shell, remote or server interface, it is much safer than the big majority of the OSs on the market. When storing your data on Zero OS, it is fingerprinted and made available only when requested by you or those you provide access to.

The state of an application represents its state of being in a given moment in time. Think of a stateless transaction as vending machines, a single request and a response. In ThreeFold’s Internet infrastructure, this can be represented as data being accessible only when requested. The only way to access data on Zero OS is via the private key (or fingerprint) of a user. In that sense, the data is not accessible unless the data owner requests access to it.

🔗How does Zero OS apply to developers?

Thanks to its lightweight architecture, Zero OS is a perfect fit to run microservice architectures and emerging IT workloads such as IoT, Blockchains, Big Data, and more. A key benefit of microservice architecture is the freedom it offers you to choose the best runtime for the task at hand.

Let’s take the example of decentralizing service-oriented developing teams. A common challenge there is that most of the time they don’t really understand the applications they are exposing. But no one knows the data infrastructure of the applications better than those who craft them.

ThreeFold permits decentralized developer teams with the ability to share keys (access) to the developing environment on Zero OS and the gateways to the world wide web within the secure peer-to-peer overlay network. This is game changing. Also with all the automation frameworks provided, it creates the perfect environment to develop current and emerging technologies.

Put shortly, decentralized development and integration is now officially an organizational or cultural change, not a technical one anymore.

🔗Zero OS allows anyone to provide sovereign capacity

Given stateless systems separate the OS configuration and user data, Zero OS simplifies the maintenance and the deployment of digital workloads, while making it impossible to hack into user data on a hardware level.

3Nodes provide all the storage, compute and network primitives for a new internet infrastructure. Given they are booted with Zero OS, anyone can now participate in the Internet economy without jeopardizing user data sovereignty and security.

Conclusively, Zero OS is ultra secure, perfect to develop current and future technologies, and enables anyone to take part in the planet positive and data sovereign Internet brought by ThreeFold.

Learn more about Zero OS and the grid primitives here.

🔗Decentralization

In 1989, the Internet changed the world as we know it with the introduction of the World Wide Web. With time the Internet empowered people to share information in a decentralized way. Shortly after, big companies like Facebook, Google, and Apple emerged, providing many solutions that revolutionized the way we live. The “sharing economy” has grown exponentially over the last 5-10 years. This is thanks to a more simplified information flow and well-developed technology, which:

• Enables a much easier integration of independent players into the sharing economy.
• Eliminates the need for extensive management and structure of marketplace operators.

We are entering a flat-structure economy. An economy where fewer managerial levels are needed for the system to function. New technologies such as blockchain and the Internet of Things facilitate this ongoing trend. Participants can now interact on a peer-to-peer basis, forming marketplaces and organizations according to pre-agreed, programmed contracts.

🔗The current Internet is centralized

Despite the growth in popularity for decentralized systems, organizations, and currencies, the Internet remains centralized. The centralization within the Internet industry brought many barriers to entry. Indeed, to compete in the highly competitive market of Internet capacity dominated by big IT companies, massive investment, and IT development are needed.

But what is really scary is that the current industry exploits the market tremendously. Data is officially the most valuable asset on earth for a few years, and about 20 companies rule over more than 80% of the cloud industry. In other words - these companies together have more than 80% of the world’s information. In recent years, we noticed the dangers that can arise with the wrong intentions within the data industry with the ‘Cambridge Analytica Scandal’, also highlighted in the movie ‘The Great Hack’.

ThreeFold has been developing technology that allows the decentralization of the Internet infrastructure - removing the need for data centers, and allowing anyone to take part in the Internet capacity market. Adding capacity to the ThreeFold Grid (TF Grid) makes you a ThreeFold Farmer (TF Farmer). The more decentralized the Internet gets, the more secure and effective it will become. The already is the largest grid of compute and storage in the world.

🔗How To Participate

The process of becoming a ThreeFold Farmer is very straightforward. Anyone can join the ThreeFold Grid by downloading the ThreeFold Zero-OS onto their nodes and connecting them to the ThreeFold Grid.

By doing this you will become an operator of a “micro data center” and with that earn ThreeFold Tokens. With or without experience in the field, anyone can become a ThreeFold Farmer. By becoming a ThreeFold Farmer, you empower a new neutral Internet that belongs to humanity - not corporations.

Blog written in 2019, updated January 2021.