1 – Quote of the Week – Who Spoke/Wrote these Words?
“Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own.”
The author of this quote was none other than Satoshi Nakamoto, who wrote it on November 7th, 2008 in the cryptography mailing list.
2 – Is Utopia P2P a Cryptocurrency Project?
When an industry or market is in the very early stages of development, there is a rush to capitalize on new opportunities. With every signal of increased market potential, there is a surge of investment and development seeking to capitalize on that potential. In the cryptocurrency industry, the price of Bitcoin has traditionally been that indicator. In Bitcoin’s 11 year history, with every market bull run, a surge has followed. The surge of development has not always been positive for the industry. In fact, it can be argued that much of the development that has come about, especially in the latter years, has been detrimental to the industry and to popular perceptions. This is partly due to the ease with which new startups can create a copycat digital currency, compose a whitepaper and draw up a project roadmap.
If you want to judge whether a project team is driven by purpose or greed, look to the reason for the new coin’s existence. Is it essential to the achievement of a wider goal, does the coin effectively facilitate the project’s purpose, or is the goal the coin itself without an identifiable and differentiated purpose besides the enrichment of the project team itself? Clues that a project team may be motivated by greed rather than purpose include the selling of coins that are promised in the future (Conducting an ICO), the allocation of coins to the team itself (Self-serving Distribution), more work promised in the future than has actually been delivered in the past (Fanciful Roadmap ahead with almost nothing behind), retaining the power to stop or reverse network transactions (absence of true decentralization).
Let us now examine the 1984 Group in the context of those clues. The team began their project in secret back in 2013. In 2017 and 2018, when the greed was palpable in the industry and the temptation for self-enrichment by conducting an ICO was at a peak, what did the team do? They continued working diligently in secret until 2019, when rather than conduct an ICO to collect funds, they conducted a beta test and paid out tens of thousands of dollars to users for their help in refining the client software. After launching the mainnet on November 18th 2019, the distribution was fixed with 100% of new coins going to miners. All transactions on the network are final and cannot be reversed, they are immutable with no central authority retaining the power to alter that reality.
Utopia is a project unlike any other in the industry. There is a good reason why the 1984 Group’s efforts are not referred to as the “Crypton Project”, because Crypton is not the goal but rather an associated instrument that helps facilitate the wider and far more important goals of the Utopia project itself; the creation of a new kind of internet. Utopia’s P2P ecosystem seeks to redefine the way in which users around the world interact and communicate with each other. Utopia seeks to make encrypted e-mail, which was previously only available to the most technically sophisticated of users, available to the masses. Utopia seeks to make private instant messaging, which is promised by WhatsApp and Telegram as long as you give them your phone number, an actual reality. Utopia seeks to make group chats, forums and feeds available in an encrypted and private form. Utopia seeks to enable P2P file sharing without the constant threat of surveillance or takedowns. Utopia seeks to make permissionless, censorship resistant websites possible without relying on centralized indexing of those sites. Utopia seeks to accomplish all of these goals on the same Peer-to-Peer platform with a fully integrated, private, native cryptocurrency that helps to facilitate the exchange of value and therefore trade and commerce across the network. It is a travesty to call Utopia simply a cryptocurrency project, because it is clear that Utopia P2P transcends the cryptocurrency industry, seeking to accomplish important and necessary goals far loftier than any other project in the space.
3 – Permissionless Websites
One of the many goals of the Utopia P2P project is making the self-hosting of websites possible within the ecosystem. The reason this is such an important goal is because currently, in order for a person or organization to make a website available on the clearnet, permission must be sought from a domain name registrar. This may seem like a reasonable obstacle, however anytime permission is a prerequisite, it means permission may be taken away. It is this authority to withdraw permission which enables censorship by government and eventually corporate entities.
Currently, the only version of permissionless websites that exist are servers configured to receive inbound connections through Tor alone (onion services). These are where the online dark markets currently reside. However, the Tor network is not a complete ecosystem in any way resembling Utopia. This deficiency is apparent in the fact that there is no way to access a censorship resistant database of these onion services. One must rely on the clearnet to explore the darknet, which is rather ironic and a serious handicap to the Tor network.
Utopia has no such deficiency and in fact, according to the team behind Utopia, “besides websites, you may make available any of your web resources, email, SSH server, audio/video streaming, and so on…”. Users are invited and encouraged to experiment and create their own self-hosted, censorship resistant websites by following the helpful guide of user Saahil (uNS-verified):
Utopia version: utopia://utopiaecosystem.com/how-to-host-website-for-idyll-browser
Clearnet version: https://utopiaecosystem.com/how-to-host-website-for-idyll-browser
4 – Client Update with Mining Statistics
It has been approximately one month since Utopia’s last update and on March 7th, 2020 the 1984 Group pushed out a new update, version 1.0.5763.
TheMerchant is pleased to confirm that both the reward rate and abort rates have seen significant improvement, with improvement in the latter naturally helping to push the former even higher. Abort rate appears to have collapsed down to approximately 5% over the first 24hrs with the reward rate showing very high consistency at the 99% level.
The latest update includes the following associated release notes:
Whats new in version 1.0.5763
- Several optimizations were completed to increase the reliability of the application
- Corrected an issue with the message selection in IM
- In API added and corrected validations of transmitted arguments
- Optimized work of the list of financial operations
Fixed in version 1.0.5763
- No tray notifications when receiving messages from the Channel
- New session does not start in the opened earlier private channel if the receiver of the message restarted the application
- Synchronization of the amount fields disappear on the Request Cryptons
- Added space before the message when copying, deletes the last symbol when copying is performed again
- The identical messages are not delivered to the private chat on the channel
- Bug with the long exit from the client after the lengthy work
- In uWallet when scrolling down with the scroll wheel in the balance displayed area, the content shifts in the absence of the scroll bar
- One card disappears from uWallet if you scroll through all the cards through the bottom pocket
- Scroll bar is blinking when sending a message in the private channel if that chat does not have a scroll
- In the window with the transaction information (on the Ukrainian language), PK does not fit when reviving an approval from Cryptons, icon of the card is shifted by 2px
- In the list of date ranges, February 29 cannot be selected
Known issues in version 1.0.5763
- Names of languages are not displayed in the application in the drop down list Settings->General
- Possibility of adding an unexisted language to the channel through API
- Window with the Reject-e transaction does not appear if you make it on the remote card
- The number with the amount of channels is changing in My Channels and Bookmarked sections after conducting a search
- When editing/ creating a channel, coordinates are not displayed in the geoTeg line, in the channel preview the bottom scroll button is shifted
- User that created a channel does not see his record in the Last registered channel block in the Sync Channels window
- After deleting the history of the channel, it appears with the group of the empty image designs
- Incorrectly displayed text transfer in uNS Registry->Search
- Channel goes offline for all users in the Channels tab and auto join does not happen when the owner changes the title of the channel
- Number of problems with the content display for different languages
- OS – specific bugs
5 – Personal Note from The Publisher
Here’s where to find the “Rabbit Hole” that is Utopia for those who may be reading on the surveillance landscape of the clearnet: https://u.is
TheMerchant Public Key: 0093DEFD354D78D4F035CF04A935DD211A9765B8779C68D30A9DA0B3EB06554F
Request contact authorization from TheMerchant to receive uMail versions of TheMessage and to purchase CRP, the future of private P2P commerce.
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Utopia’s leading forum for the exchange of both CRP and uNS records. Zero-Profit Escrow Service is available from TheMerchant to help establish trust.
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