Parallel Economy Building with @Starkerz - 2. What is the SPK Network

Yup!

Yes please, thanks mate. Drop me a message on @thedeltron on discord would be great to chat

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SPK Network. What is the SPK Network? We get asked this a lot.

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Well, imagine Amazon Web Services.

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I'm not sure if you're aware of what that is. AWS, otherwise known as.

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It's an infrastructure operation system that allows you to run digital platforms very easily,

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but also very expensively. And AWS will provide you with the infrastructure,

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the backend infrastructure that you need to run those platforms efficiently.

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The problem then is that AWS controls your infrastructure.

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So now you're kind of at the whims of AWS. They control the infrastructure to do

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encoding of video, content delivery of content, uploading, processing,

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account systems, all sorts of different things that you need, backend things that you need

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to run a content platform where you're supposed to have free speech and discussion.

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As the users, as normal people, we see these things as public squares

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where you can go debate, discuss. You should be able to discuss things in public on

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these platforms. The platforms are run on the backend by things like AWS, which is,

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don't get me wrong, it's a fantastic service in terms of the technical ability that it provides.

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But from the political point of view, from the free speech point of view,

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it's very limited and it's controlled and it's a centralized system.

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Because AWS, a regulated entity that's registered and listed in the USA,

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is at the whims of the US government and the laws in the country.

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So as the laws change, AWS has to clamp down on various operators of

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infrastructure on its services. This is the problem with the centralized world.

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The old centralized world is manipulatable and controllable.

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Same thing for Google. Think about Google Drive.

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Google Drive hosts millions of files and they're hosted on Google servers.

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Google doesn't know what half those files are,

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which is kind of sketchy if you ask me, because it means there's loads of content

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on Google Drive that Google isn't able to understand what it is.

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Well, many would say that's a bit of a threat. But either way, Google controls those

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files. So if they do find a file that they don't agree with or they don't like, they can limit it.

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They can put restrictions on that file. They may be ordered to put restrictions on that file

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by a government entity. Otherwise, their employees will face the consequences of the

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government wrath. So coming back to SPK Network, it solves these problems.

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The SPK Network is a

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network whereby the community themselves, the members of the community, me and you,

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we run the infrastructure that AWS runs,

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but we run it for ourselves in the service of our own community.

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We run the infrastructure and the storage capabilities of Google Drive, but we run

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it ourselves for our own communities in the service of our own communities.

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This is incredibly important because once the community can run its own infrastructure,

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the people within that community have digital freedom.

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They have sovereignty in the online space,

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as long as they're running on the infrastructure

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that's provided by their own communities.

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Now, you can't just say, "Oh, I'm going to run infrastructure."

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You have to be able to incentivize that infrastructure to keep it online,

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to keep it economically viable. And this is what the SPK Network does.

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Initially, it focuses on peer-to-peer storage. So anyone can run an IPFS storage node,

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and get incentivized and rewarded for running those nodes and storing files that the network

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wants it to store. And people, operators and platforms,

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and people with large amount of content

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that they can't store themselves, operating on that network,

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they can put money into the network and say here's a contract with some

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money on it and some files on it. I want you, Mr. Community Member,

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Mr. Computer Operator, Mr. Normal Person,

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to help me back these files up. And we're going to ping you at random

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to check to see if you are backing up what you say you're storing.

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And if you are, the system's going to release funds to you

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and incentivize you for providing the infrastructure.

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And that infrastructure may well be something as small as just your spare space

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on your laptop that you just sit in there idle anyway,

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or a spare server that you're running, or a server that you

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can spin up and run for yourself for $5 a month.

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It's the ability for the community to run its own storage infrastructure

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and store peer-to-peer, and then allow platforms and media people and

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people that need access to decentralized file storage to come in

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and incentivize those people and say we're going to pay you for storing this content.

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We're going to pay you for storing this file. We're going to pay you for storing this code.

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And if enough people are volunteering their spare storage space on their computers,

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on spare services that they've got, it means that the storage potentially can

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be way cheaper than the current orthodoxy of centralized internet storage.

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Again, if it's centralized, it can be blocked. It can be censored. It can be stopped,

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controlled, and regulated. When it's run by the community, when the storage is done by

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the community, it's regulated by the community. And the community will store

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what it wants to store, when it wants to store, how it wants to store it,

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at the market price it decides to store it at.

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So these things are incredibly important, incredibly powerful.

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The SPK Network's starting off with storage, but it will move to content delivery

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infrastructure, so the community members themselves can deliver the content

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to anyone else that's consuming content in different parts of the world.

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It will also do uploading, encoding of content

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so that the whole chain, at least of a video platform,

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can be done on the SPK Network, initially.

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But that doesn't stop there. It moves on to many, many other things.

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You don't just have to have video capability.

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Any image server that's got tens of thousands of images on it, instead of

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paying Wasabi, whatever, God knows whatever, ten thousand dollars a month,

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six thousand dollars a month to store those images with backup by

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Wasabi, and if Wasabi is ever pressured to censor that stuff they can do that.

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This is the alternative where it's Wasabi, but it's run by the community instead,

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and the community does all the backing up so they can back up all the file

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image storage servers for various platforms, whichever platforms wants to get involved

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and use this. It also means that community members are going to be able to build

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companies. And they're able to provide decentralized storage services to existing

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operators in the digital world. People that need decentralized storage,

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people that don't want to leave all their files on one server or two servers,

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they want to store certain files on five, six, seven, eight servers

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and they're happy to pay a little bit of money for that. Especially if they're going

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rates lower because people are just using their spare storage space, to help

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back this stuff up. So that's kind of the SPK Network in a nutshell.

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In the future I see this being used for things like AI, Artificial Intelligence

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where currently, for example, you know the

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ideals around AI is that it's open, it's open for everyone to be able to use,

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you can see the code you can see what language models it's trained on. Well, that kind of stopped

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very abruptly in the last 3-4 years, where now these companies have started closing

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what they train their AI on, so you can't really tell where it was trained from.

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They started closing down the source code, so you can't understand the source code and how

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it's written and how it works. So these AIs are very political. They've become very political,

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what a shocker, you know. Well really, ideally, we don't want that with our AI, we want open AI,

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we want truly open AI. And you can run AI open to a certain extent with limited funding,

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where people run their own nodes and then run them openly but that's not really sustainable

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because as that stuff scales people need business models in order to sustain. So what you

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really need is a way to incentivize the infrastructure operators. So the most basic form

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of AI use case for the SPK Network is that it can just store the source code.

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You can just store open, public source code all over the world, on multiple people's servers

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instead of storing it on centralized, censorable servers.

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The other thing that it can do by virtue of the fact that it's running on the Hive blockchain,

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and of course other open blockchains as well, you can directly demonstrate with the

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code that's stored by the community itself. It can be openly demonstrated that that AI

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is trained on open blockchains, where you can see the history, you can see the political ideology

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of the community. You can see the transactions, the back and forths, the communications,

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the arguments, the disagreements. Everything, you can see it all on the chain, so you

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can say, well is this chain for me? And then, is the AI I'm using being trained on the historical model

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of that chain? I don't want it chained on some shady back-end database, God knows what

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political ideology and how it comes to its conclusions. I want the source code open,

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I want it stored by the community in an open, distributed database.

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Off-chain, because most of this stuff is too heavy for on-chain. And then I want to run

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the programs and the servers that operate these AI, often incentivized layers that are incentivized

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from neutral layers with no ICO, no pre-mine, no CEO, no founders, no venture capital, no conflicts

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of interest running these public neutral layers that then incentivize the storage

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and the operation of the code of these AIs. And then lastly, I want to be able to see where

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the AI is trained, what public database was it trained on, and who runs that public database?

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Is it immutable? Can you shut it down? Is it secure, was there a pre-mine or an ICO? Is there a CEO,

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someone that can be pressured and controlled? If not, I like that public database. That's why

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we run our stuff on Hive. Hive meets those criteria; it is not centralized, it's not censorable,

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it's released in a fair, open way and it's neutral, so it allows you to permissionlessly operate these

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ecosystems on top, so that you can get fair open use cases. And we think that AI,

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Hive plus the SPK Network – Hive is the training model, the storage, the tech storage and

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SPK Network as the incentivization for the infrastructure operation

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and the storage of the code and kind of more heavy aspects of the AI infrastructure

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can all be run and incentivized on community operated nodes. And so now you actually

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have open AI. Now that is definitely one use case. Another use case that I've seen that's

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currently being built on the SPK Network is a Google Drive replacement, so you can store your

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files in your own folder but you can say, Hey can I get these backed up? I'm willing to put a little

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bit of money in each month. Hopefully cheaper than Google can do, because it's

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again it's community operated servers on – hopefully people's spare hard drives, so it should

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be cheaper because that stuff's already free anyway. It's sitting there idle. And then I can

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back up my files – My Google, the files that I would have stored on Google, I can

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back them up on the SPK Network and have them in a folder that I can access.

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And if one of them goes down, there's still two, three, four more copies of it depending on

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how much you're incentivizing. So these models make sense,

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they make sense to do in a decentralized way.

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The other thing that I've seen that's starting to happen, is people are starting to encode the files

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so there's people starting to store files that they do they have no idea what those files are

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and only the original issuer has the key. What that means is, well first of all you can get privacy

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of storage. And you know, you never really know that with Google. And the flip side is

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that Google stores files that it doesn't know what are, which is even more worrying probably.

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But if you can do this via community, and you can store encrypted files,

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the community members may not want to store encrypted files, but some of them will.

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Some of them in freer, fairer jurisdictions will.

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So now you can store encrypted files, and the originator has the key, or an NFT.

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You can tie that to an NFT.

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And what that means is now you can have actual decentralized subscriptions to content.

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Anyone paying the subscription fee, either for a monthly fee or for access to an

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individual piece of content, can be given the keys to release the encrypted data

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off the SPK Network, backed up by the community.

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There is no middleman there.

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There is no corporation, no entity, no founder, no CEO, no entity that can be called up

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to shut things down. That is true use of decentralized technology.

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And it's a use case whereby you can apply subscriptions, paywalls.

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You can apply decentralized storage, operation of code and servers, all incentivized

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by the SPK Network. Peer-to-peer storage, massive, massive use cases.

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And that's really what the SPK Network is.

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For us, it's really important because we run a platform called 3Speak.

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It's a video platform. And that's where this whole thing came from.

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We're like, well, how do we truly decentralize a video platform?

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Because you can't store video on-chain.

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It's too heavy to store on-chain.

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So the only thing you can do is store the text references on-chain.

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But you can't store the actual videos. The videos need to be stored on servers.

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So all these decentralized platforms, all these freedom of speech platforms that are

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video-based, they've all got their videos stored on centralized servers.

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And those servers are shutdownable, censorable, and manipulatable, corruptible.

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So it just doesn't work.

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In the current modern day and age, you can't have decentralized video storage.

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But when you are able to store those videos using IPFS,

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where you can incentivize the node operators,

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and the node operators are the individual community members like me and you,

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now you have a way to decentralize the storage of video.

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If you do the same thing for content delivery, the same thing for encoding,

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where community members can run their own nodes of those things.

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The whole chain of the video platform experience is now run by the community,

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and it's decentralized, which means it's way harder to shut down.

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It's way harder to have a centralized, manipulatable entity in charge of things

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and controlling things. It means it's run by the community, for the community.

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And those are huge use cases for us, because now we can just plug in the SPK Network

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to our existing platform, and we can run all of this in a truly full Web3 decentralized way,

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where no part of the infrastructure is run on any of our servers as a video platform.

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So we recommend Rumble.

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We recommend Odyssey.

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You need to use a neutral layer that has no ICO, no pre-mine.

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Some of these so-called neutral layers that you're using,

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we know, Odyssey, that you're using layers to do your storage that have 70% pre-mines, man.

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70% pre-mines.

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What are you doing?

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Do you even understand this?

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There has to be no pre-mine.

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These layers that you're using, they have CEOs.

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They have community figureheads.

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You need to make sure that those things don't exist.

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Once they don't exist, then you have a neutral layer that can't be shut down and manipulated.

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But while you have those things, while you have huge pre-mines, you have securities risk.

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Now, we like, for example, with Odyssey, you've already been sued by the SEC for this.

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Why are you going to another place to do your storage,

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which will eventually get the same treatment if enough controversial content gets

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stored on the network? You need to use networks that are actually neutral,

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where no one can be called up to shut the thing down.

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That's what the SPK Network is, and it can be plugged into any of these video platforms,

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and it can fully decentralize the backend so that you don't have shutdown risk.

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You don't have corruptibility risk, that your community actually controls and runs

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the infrastructure behind your platform.

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So that you can basically build yourselves out and focus on the front-end experience.

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Focus on making it look pretty and run nice.

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That's the SPK Network.

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It needs to be going into as many platforms as possible, so that we actually decentralize

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the internet, decentralize these content platforms so that they can't censor,

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they can't be shut down, they can't be sued by governments to control the speech on there.

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So that the community itself can regulate and run its own ecosystem.

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Alright, peace out.