Swarm alpha public pilot and the basics of Swarm
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With the long awaited geth 1. The current version of the code is POC testnet bitcoin explorer insurance. The current release ships with the swarm command that launches a standalone Swarm daemon as separate process using your favourite IPC-compliant ethereum client if needed. The SWAP system is functional but it is switched off by default.
Storage incentives punitive insurance to protect availability of rarely-accessed content is planned to be operational in POC 0. So currently testnet bitcoin explorer insurance default, the client uses the blockchain only for domain name resolution. With this blog post we are happy to announce the launch of our shiny new Swarm testnet connected to the Ropsten ethereum testchain.
The Ethereum Foundation is contributing a strong will be up to Swarm cluster running on the Azure cloud. It is hosting the Swarm homepage. We consider this testnet as the first public pilot, and the community is welcome to join the network, contribute resources, and help us find issues, identify painpoints and give feedback on useability. Instructions can be found in the Swarm guide. We encourage those who can afford to run persistent nodes nodes that stay online to get in touch.
We have already received promises for TB deployments. Note that the testnet offers no guarantees! Data may be lost or become unavailable. Indeed guarantees of persistence cannot be made at least until the storage insurance incentive layer is implemented scheduled for POC 0.
We envision shaping this project with more and more community involvement, so we are inviting those interested to join our public discussion rooms on gitter. We would like to lay the groundwork for this dialogue with a series of blog posts about the technology and ideology behind Swarm in particular and about Web3 in general.
The first post in this series will introduce the ingredients and operation of Swarm as currently functional. The objective is a peer-to-peer storage and serving solution that has zero downtime, is DDOS-resistant, fault-tolerant and censorship-resistant as well as self-sustaining due to a built-in incentive system.
Testnet bitcoin explorer insurance incentive layer uses peer-to-peer accounting for bandwidth, deposit-based storage incentives and allows trading resources for payment. Swarm is designed to deeply integrate with the devp2p multiprotocol network layer of Ethereum as well as with the Ethereum blockchain for testnet bitcoin explorer insurance name resolution, service payments and content availability insurance. Nodes on the current testnet use the Ropsten testchain for domain name resolution only, with incentivisation switched off.
There are two major features that set Swarm apart from other decentralised distributed storage solutions. While existing services Bittorrent, Zeronet, IPFS allow you to register and share the content you host on your server, Swarm provides the hosting itself as a decentralised cloud storage service.
Swarm aspires to be the generic testnet bitcoin explorer insurance and delivery service that, when ready, caters to use-cases ranging from serving low-latency real-time interactive web applications to acting as guaranteed persistent storage for rarely used content. The other major feature is the incentive system. The beauty of decentralised consensus of computation and state is that it allows programmable rulesets for communities, networks, and decentralised services that solve their coordination problems by implementing transparent self-enforcing incentives.
The idea of having separate protocols shh for Whisper, bzz for Swarm, eth for the blockchain was introduced in May by Gavin and Vitalik who imagined the Ethereum ecosystem within the grand crypto 2.
The Swarm project is a prime example of a system where incentivisation will allow participants to efficiently pool their storage and bandwidth resources in order to provide global content services to testnet bitcoin explorer insurance participants.
We could say that the smart contracts of the incentives implement the hive mind of the swarm. Incentives are also explained in the devcon2 talk about the Swarm incentive system. More details to come in future posts. Swarm is a network, a service and a protocol rules. The Swarm protocol bzz defines a mode of testnet bitcoin explorer insurance. At its core, Swarm implements a distributed content-addressed chunk store. Chunks are arbitrary data blobs with a fixed maximum size currently 4KB.
Content addressing means that the address of any chunk is deterministically derived from its content. The addressing scheme falls testnet bitcoin explorer insurance on a hash function which testnet bitcoin explorer insurance a chunk as input and returns a byte long key as output.
A hash function is irreversible, collision free and uniformly distributed indeed this is what makes bitcoin, and in general proof-of-work, work. Irreversible and collision-free addressing immediately provides integrity protection: The nodes constituting the Swarm all dedicate resources diskspace, memory, bandwidth and CPU to store and serve chunks.
But what testnet bitcoin explorer insurance who is keeping a chunk? Swarm nodes have testnet bitcoin explorer insurance address the hash of the address of their bzz-account in the same keyspace as the chunks themselves. Lets call this address space the overlay network. The process by which chunks get to their address is called syncing and is part of the protocol. Indeed, when a node needs a chunk, it simply posts a request to the Swarm with the address of the content, and the Swarm will forward the requests until the data is found or the request times out.
In this regard, Swarm is similar to a traditional distributed hash table DHT but with two important and under-researched features. All wire protocol messages between nodes are relayed from node to node hopping on active peer connections. This flavour of the routing scheme is called forwarding Kademlia. The node caches all relayed chunks locally so they can be the ones to serve it next testnet bitcoin explorer insurance it is requested.
Furthermore, this caching behaviour unburdens the original custodians from potential DDOS attacks. SWAP incentivises nodes to cache all content they encounter, until their storage space has been filled up.
In fact, caching incoming chunks of average expected testnet bitcoin explorer insurance is always a good strategy even if you need to expunge older chunks. Thus it is rational to remove chunks requested the longest time ago. The upshot is that nodes will end up fully utilizing their dedicated resources to the benefit of users. Such organic auto-scaling makes Swarm a kind of maximum-utilisation elastic cloud. On the API layer Swarm provides a chunker. The chunker takes any kind of readable source, such as a file or a video camera capture device, and chops it into fix-sized chunks.
These so-called data chunks or leaf chunks are hashed and then synced with peers. Currently hashes make up a new chunk. As a result the data is represented by a merkle tree, and it is the root hash of the tree that acts as the address you use to retrieve the uploaded file. If the preimage is an intermediate chunk, it is interpreted as a series of hashes to address chunks on a lower level. Eventually the process reaches the data level and the content can be served.
An important property of a merklised chunk tree is that it provides integrity protection what you seek is what you get even on partial reads. For example, this testnet bitcoin explorer insurance that you can skip back and forth in a large movie file and still testnet bitcoin explorer insurance certain that the data has not been tampered with.
On top testnet bitcoin explorer insurance the chunk merkle trees, Swarm provides a crucial third layer testnet bitcoin explorer insurance organising content: A manifest is a json array of manifest entries. An entry minimally testnet bitcoin explorer insurance a path, a content type and a hash pointing to the actual content. Manifests allow you to create a virtual site hosted on Swarm, which provides url-based addressing by always assuming that the host part of the url points to a manifest, and the path is matched against the paths of manifest entries.
Manifest entries can point to other manifests, so they can be recursively embedded, which allows manifests to be coded as a compacted trie testnet bitcoin explorer insurance scaling to huge datasets i. Manifests can also be thought of as sitemaps or routing tables that map url strings to content.
Since each step of the way we either have merkelised structures or content addresses, manifests provide integrity protection for an entire site. Manifests can be read and directly traversed using the bzzr url scheme. This use is demonstrated by the Swarm Exploreran example Swarm dapp that displays manifest entries as if they were files on a disk organised in directories. Manifests can easily be interpreted as directory trees so a directory and a virtual host can be seen as the same.
A testnet bitcoin explorer insurance decentralised dropbox implementation can be based on this feature. The Swarm Explorer is up on swarm: However, since chunks are synced to other nodes, Swarm is immutable in the stronger sense that if something is uploaded to Swarm, it cannot be unseen, unpublished, revoked or removed.
For this reason alone, be extra careful with what you share. If you want your updates to show continuity or need an anchor to display the latest version of your content, you need name based mutable addresses. This is where the blockchain, the Ethereum Name Service and domain names come in. A more complete way to track changes is to use version control, like git or mango, a git using Swarm or IPFS as its backend. In order to authorise changes or publish updates, we need domain names.
For a proper domain name service you need the blockchain and some governance. Tools are provided to interact with the ENS to acquire and manage domains. If you use the Swarm proxy for browsing, the client assumes that the domain the part after bzz: Our roadmap is ambitious: Watch this space, bzz…. You may use these HTML tags and attributes: Swarm alpha public pilot and the basics of Swarm Introduction. There are no comments.
