g_simonsson
An international effort could easily deploy reflective materials here to reduce solar radiation on Earth. Though I wonder how much it would cost to achieve even a 0.01% reduction in radiation, as well as what material would be most cost-effective to deploy.
Internet users who may be less technical and may not care about surveillance or Internet freedom would still be interested when they hear "hey if you install this app you get a few $ (worth of tokens) per month just for sharing your bandwidth"
And as Orchid is a P2P market place with no middlemen or fees, it should find a market equilibrium that is more efficient than VPNs, with a lower price per data relayed.
Basically, the deal is that our investors bought the right to future Orchid Tokens, which is a new token used for payments within the Orchid Network. Since it's a utility token it's value should be driven by the utility of the network - the size, health and of course user count of the network.
Since there is a huge market for VPNs which overlaps with the utility of Orchid in terms of enabling access where there is censorship, if Orchid can grab a small part of this market then the utility of the network would drive the price of the token.
Whether this is the right model remains to be seen, and like any project there could be a conflict of interest if investors push for features that are not aligned with the project vision.
The difference is that, unlike traditional startups that are in control of their IP and the deployment of their software, once the Orchid Network is deployed, no one controls it but the users who run nodes. They choose what software to run for their source, relay and exit nodes, and no one can force them to upgrade to some new version. This is similar to other decentralized networks such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.
In practice the developers and teams behind decentralized networks do hold some power of software upgrades from their reputation and control of github repos, etc. But if push comes to show and for example we try to add payment fees or adds or other types of monetization, then users are very likely to simply reject such upgrades or even outright fork client software (thus effectively forking the network once such clients are deployed).
It is my hope that this is a structure that allows for both raising money from VCs and still end up with a truly decentralized network. We'd love to get feedback on this and understand what we can do to ensure that the network remains controlled by it's users and not (too much) influenced by any specific group.
https://www.coindesk.com/saft-arrives-simple-investor-agreem...
There is a fixed number of Orchid Tokens that are used for payments within the network of relayed traffic (source nodes pay relay and exit nodes).
The only way for anyone to gain financially is for these tokens to appreciate in value, which is tied to the utility of the network.
So there's no exit, rather it's a continuous token incentive for all stakeholders similar to the Ethereum network which was funded by selling the promise of future tokens.
The only two operational systems I'm aware of using probabilistic payments is blockchain Proof-of-Work, where mining rewards can be viewed as probabilistic (though with annoyingly high variance) and blockchain-based lotteries.
IMO probabilistic payments can replace payment channels in quite a few blockchain-based systems such as https://gridplus.io/ (basically in systems/apps where a service is provided that is (very) granular and continuous (video streaming would be another example))
One of the reasons why there's is a lot of Ethereum-based projects currently raising a lot of money is because token-based systems avoid relying on the traditional financial system for payments and value transfers. If your app is using traditional payments it can be shut down by your payment provider.
Blockchain-based tokens allow users to be in control of their own funds and not have their payments tracked or tied to their identity. I'd say that's a pretty big win.
Moreover ERC20-based tokens allows for engineering of incentives in a way that is far more efficient than company shares. It can accelerate network effects in a way that was simply not possible before blockchain technology.
There's certainly economic incentives for all participants, and what I find interesting is that since we're open sourcing all the code, anyone can easily deploy another network with a different token (model).
This puts pressure on us to propose fair token model/allocations else we risk disruption by forks or simply new Orchid networks.
In general some of the hardest problems / known weaknesses of the protocol at this stage is:
* Client bootstrap - what entry nodes to connect to? (saurik answered this in response to other questions)
* Current software connects to Ethereum nodes using an Ethereum light client, as Ethereum network traffic is not hardened it can easily be fingerprinted and blocked by GFW and others.
* Difficulty of medallion Proof-of-Work, basically it boils down to that if it's easy to join the network as a relay or exit node, then it's easy for a large attacker to join with many nodes. Making it harder for attackers to join / maintain active position in the network also makes it harder / more expensive for regular nodes.
* Payment anonymity. Currently it's as pseudo-anonymous as regular Ethereum transactions. Whitepaper has some discussion on future improvements there.
(2) The main driver here is economics - relay and exit nodes are paid by users for their bandwidth and relay of traffic. This forms an emergent, decentralized market that hopefully will find an equilibrium where there is plenty of overlay/secure bandwidth available at what the market prices it.
So far our models and simulations on this are limited, so we cannot make strong statements on how this will scale in practice. However, if we look at Bitcoin/Ethereum transaction (miner) fees, we see a live example of a working decentralized market that is very responsive and adjusts to supply/demand without any central intervention/control.