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I'm Working on Decentralizing the Internet for you and your Future Generations

I'm Working on Decentralizing the Internet for you and your Future Generations

Andrew Kamal's photo
Andrew Kamal
·May 17, 2020

Some Background

Since 2011, I have been involved in the Blockchain world and with cryptocurrencies. This is from knowing early on about Bitcoin, to being involved with a variety of different crypto startups such as BitToken, WeCrypto, CrowdCoin, BlockStarLabs, EtherStone, HopePay, MatchPay, StartHub Messenger, and side projects such as CrowdWave, CrowdToken, and DigitalCPR's Blockchain Accelerator. What fascinated me about Bitcoin early on was the decentralization aspect to it. I believed "POW" could represent free markets electronically and that centralized cryptocurrencies had no use-cases besides the digitization aspect of it. Infact, I believed that the greatest benefit to centralized currencies were given to the creators of said "currency". That being said, I have been working on a project under my blockchain startup Lonero to further promote decentralization. The project which I been actively working on is a library and SDK for building decentralized and distributed computing projects. Something that I believe is the decentralized internet, in which you can have interconnected peers processing data and transmitting information without a centralized entity. True, others are competing in this space. I and many other blockchain orgs, startups, and engineers are actively building projects for the new internet in hopes of further promoting the principals of privacy and freedom. We want a truly free and open internet.

Repository and What it is

The repository for this SDK project I have is seen here. I welcome anyone to check it out, star it, make pull requests if they can contribute, etc. Infact, this is part of the reason in all honesty I went on HashNode. That being said, this SDK is actively still being developed and in terms of what I hope to support is the following:

  • Working on an alternative to current data transferring and wireless communication protocols
  • Making sure this is distribution friendly, decentralized and not in support of a central entity or censorship
  • Working on a way to streamline blockchain development for individual companies with few commands or lines of code

My hopes in terms of getting this off the ground, is a freer internet for all people. One that doesn't rely on an opinionated central authority, sell your data off, or have ever growing problems with monopolization. We have Google doing questionable things, Mark Zuckerberg saying some questionable things, and us arguing on the ethics of how our data is being used. You can use sentiment analysis for things beyond advertising and finance, and the current internet looks like it is on its way to a black mirror episode really quick.

Don't get my wrong. Decentralization still doesn't entirely prevent abuse. There could be alot of similar problems happening in the new internet. However, it does further prevent monopolization, central authorities, lack of privacy and numerous of other things in ways the traditional internet doesn't. This includes preventing censorship of thought and opinion, just as we have been seeing in oppressive regimes.

Usage Guide

Now before getting started on usage and all that, I want you to keep in mind this is still in beta. I know I will get some comments being like, "well this part is incomplete", or "this part is x". I actively work sometimes up to 125 hours a week, and I been committing a large sum of those hours towards a single project. This is why I need more people to see type of work. That being said, this is the current usage guide as of the time of this article (this comes directly from my documentation):

One way to get started is by installing the SDK. Let us start by running:

npm install decentralized-internet

Now let us:

$ cd node_modules
$ cd decentralized-internet
$ ls

Now, multiple folders are setup for routing, but the easiest folder to cd into for looking at the components is addon so:

$ cd addon
ls

Now you can see there are four main components to this project:

  • CluserPost
  • GridBee
  • LNRChain
  • Reinvent the Internet

Those are the core folder/component names of what we will be looking at.

What is Clusterpost?

Clusterpost is a grid computing tool that allows you to offload processes to a CouchDB database. However, for this SDK the migration is suggesting to use BigChainDB over CouchDB on the basis of decentralization opportunities. Clusterpost is also utilized for remotely scheduling and executing computational processes.

Here you can look at the code so:

$ cd clusterpost
$ sudo ./setUpDevelopment.sh
$ sudo nano conf.production.json

Let us start with looking at the following configs in the conf.production.json file

{
    "host": "localhost",
    "port": 8180,
    "plugins": {
        "vision": {},
        "inert": {},
        "lout": {},
        "h2o2": {},
        "hapi-auth-jwt": {},
        "clusterpost-auth": {
            "privateKey": "someRandomKey",
            "saltRounds": 10,
            "algorithm": {
                "algorithm": "HS256"
            },
            "algorithms": {
                "algorithms": [ "HS256" ]
            },

Here, you see the default port it should run on is 8180, you are welcome to change that if needed or open the port. Also you see the plugins or default NPM packages the production environment uses and the default algorithm for clusterpost’s authentication.

Next let us change the credentials as needed:

},
            "mailer": {
                "nodemailer": "nodemailer-stub-transport",
                "from": "clusterpost server <insertemail@here.com>",
                "message": "Hello @USERNAME@,<br>Somebody asked me to send you a link to reset your password, hopefully it was you.<br>Follow this <a href='@SERVER@/public/#/login/reset?token=@TOKEN@'>link</a> to reset your password.<br>The link will expire in 30 minutes.<br>Bye."
            },
            "userdb" : {
                "hostname": "http://localhost:5984",
                "database": "clusterjobs"
            }
        },

You need to setup the login either through nodemailer or the database program you are using and change the credentials so that clusterpost will be able to authenticate into the database.

Next while running the database you could run some tests, so:

$ cd test
$ nautilus .

You are free to look into the configs and test code as needed, but you can get started testing the default setup right away running: npm run or node filename.js

A good example would be

$ cd test
$ node createNewJob.js

The GridBee Framework

Now, let us take a look at the GridBee Framework, which is an open source library that allows web browsers to act as clients and communicate with BOINC. It is coded in JavaScript and the HaXe programming language.

Make sure to download HaXe and FlashDevelop. FlashDevelop is an IDE but is needed to compile the project file GridBee.hxproj.

If you are still in the clusterpost test folder then here is what to run in the terminal:

$ cd ../
$ cd ../
$ cd gridbee-framework-old
$ cd GridBee
$ nauilus .

Now you can see the project file GridBee.hxproj, right click it to open w/ FlashDevelop and press F8 to build.

You can also merge local storage with the BigChainDB that clusterpost is utilizing, and http requests to offload processes from your application and start optimally building a pipeline, but this is beyond the scope of this introduction.

Let’s Look at LNRChain

The LNRChain folder includes tendermint, and the basic app.js demo file, and is meant to be utilized for:

  1. Part of a pipeline where you can connect Tendermint to BigChainDB OR
  2. A sidechain for the SDK and LNRBeta and Bitcoin.

To access LNRChain, if you are still in the GridBee folder:

$ cd ../
$ cd ../
$ cd LNRChain
$ sudo chmod 777 tendermint
$ sudo nano app.js

Now you have just opened the app.js sample in the terminal, you should see:

// app.js
let lotion = require('lotion')

let app = lotion({
    initialState: {
        count: 0
    }
})

function transactionHandler(state, transaction) {
    if (state.count === transaction.nonce) {
        state.count++
    }
}

let connect = require('lotion-connect')
app.use(transactionHandler)

app.start().then(appInfo => console.log(appInfo.GCI))

This is Lotion’s multi-state sample file which allows you to run multiple states for the blockchain project you want to setup. Lotion is the npm module powered by the Tendermint consensus for you to make your own blockchain apps.

  • Please also keep in mind if installing from NPM, some of the versions have the Tendermint program or databases compressed as a tar.gz and you may need to uncompress them. (This was for file/packing size allocations during beta development).

Component #4: Reinvent the Net

Now is time for the final core component of this SDK. Let us start by accessing the source files:

$ cd ../
$ cd Reinvent-the-Internet
$ unzip The APIs & Shell.zip
$ nautilus .

Let us open the MSP430G2001.ccxml file with a text editor, i.e. “right click”:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<configurations XML_version="1.2" id="configurations_0">
    <configuration XML_version="1.2" id="configuration_0">
        <instance XML_version="1.2" desc="TI MSP430 USB1" href="connections/TIMSP430-USB.xml" id="TI MSP430 USB1" xml="TIMSP430-USB.xml" xmlpath="connections"/>
        <connection XML_version="1.2" id="TI MSP430 USB1">
            <instance XML_version="1.2" href="drivers/msp430_emu.xml" id="drivers" xml="msp430_emu.xml" xmlpath="drivers"/>
            <platform XML_version="1.2" id="platform_0">
                <instance XML_version="1.2" desc="MSP430G2001" href="devices/MSP430G2001.xml" id="MSP430G2001" xml="MSP430G2001.xml" xmlpath="devices"/>
            </platform>
        </connection>
    </configuration>
</configurations>

The fourth module (as one can tell), is hardware-oriented. The XML config shows that the driver is for a Texas Instruments dev board. This also means that the IDE that the fourth component was developed on was likely CCS Cloud.

Now you may be confused at this point as to what was the point of this module or what is it even for?

This part of the project was actually utilized for a hardware project in which somebody garnished underwater wireless signals through sonar conversion. However, similar use-cases can be done for anybody who wants to have a software defined network. This is your chance to expand the pipeline through low level hardware or code integrations and an optional part of the SDK.

To summarize we are:

  1. Offloading data
  2. Communicating Data
  3. Building our Blockchain
  4. Building our own SDN and wireless protocol

This is why things have been setup the way they are.

What's Next?

In terms of what is next, I am still actively working on further developing the software. Lots of patches need to be made as well as constant updates. I am looking for ways to shorten/minimize alot of the code. The data store methods need updating and about 70% of the code can slowly be changed over time for optimization and speed. Dependency management also has some ways to go. The core packages/sub-modules also need to actually be finished and worked on. The software is quite useful just the way it is, but I'm not gonna sit there and pretend I'm not working towards improvement. Also currently hoping it reached more popularity on Github as I actively work on how to guides and articles such as these. Regardless, I want to keep working towards the mission of a more open and free internet. This is one of the next technological milestones we need to meet as a society. I may still consider myself early level when it comes to lots of things, maybe even a newb, but I still want to contribute what I can.