1 – Utopia Trivia – Who Spoke/Wrote These Words?
“The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.”
The author of this quote was none other than George Orwell in his celebrated manual, “1984”.
2 – Introducing Utopia’s Proof of Routing (PoR) for Crypton (CRP) Mining
The traditional Proof of Work (PoW) model of Bitcoin that many in the cryptocurrency industry are familiar with is a cryptographic mechanism used to achieve consensus; agreement on transactions that are to be accepted on a distributed network of mining nodes. The “mining” of Bitcoin is the reward or compensation for helping to establish that consensus by doing the computational work to solve a cryptographic puzzle and in so doing helping to secure the network. Therefore “Proof of Work” in Bitcoin is a security model implemented to verify the authenticity of transactions.
Utopia is a project unlike any other in the cryptocurrency industry because it is about far more than simply establishing a new digital currency, it is about establishing a new internet. The native digital currency of Utopia, Crypton, is the economic unit of value for this new, private, internet. Cryptons are created using an entirely new model of cryptocurrency mining. The lifeblood of the Utopia P2P ecosystem is the relaying of encrypted packets across the network. It is this communication between nodes that enables the existence of the network. The more nodes online, the more robust and stable the network becomes. Nodes require a moderate amount of RAM for storage of network data and a high quality internet connection with a public IP for routing of network data.
Cryptons are created as a reward or compensation not for solving a cryptographic puzzle, but rather for contributing to this essential routing of network data. The model of Crypton mining, therefore, may be described as a “Proof of Routing”, because nodes only begin to generate CRP rewards after they have established enough incoming network connections to meaningfully contribute to the routing of network data, helping to establish the lifeblood of the ecosystem itself. This work of routing may be considered among the most meaningful forms of cryptocurrency mining because genuine value is being delivered every second by mining nodes to all network participants. Helping to establish a new form of fully encrypted, private, P2P internet is no easy task and the mining of Cryptons provides the proper incentive to make it all happen.
3 – Should You Mine or Buy Crypton (CRP)?
With the latest release of version 1.0.5763 of Utopia, mining bot stability is the highest it has ever been. This allows us to calculate with a high degree of certainty the cost of production for CRP and compare that value to the market price in order to determine the most cost-efficient way to accumulate Cryptons. However, it must be emphasized that because mining in Utopia helps to support the network, all things being equal, it is always better to mine than to buy.
The current Reward Per Thread (RPT) is 0.0096 CRP, which produces an output of 0.9216 CRP per thread per day. Because mining is accomplished predominately using Virtual Private Servers (VPS), which are normally paid for on a monthly basis, we will consider the monthly output of a mining thread; 27.6 CRP. With a VPS costing $40/month, the cost of mining would be $1.45 with the assumption of 100% bot and server uptime. A 20% cumulative penalty between bot uptime (due to mismanagement of aborted bots) and server uptime (due to your provider) results in a mining cost of $1.81 per CRP. With a VPS costing just $25/month and a 20% cumulative penalty, the cost of mining drops down to $1.13 per CRP. Only those users who have managed to locate a reliable VPS provider with a cost below $25/month and are managing those servers effectively are able to bring their mining cost below $1 per CRP.
The current, temporarily reduced, high-volume selling price of CRP at TheMarket (Channel ID: E95109799EC5047783C867F6AF6D4568) is $1.00 per CRP. Clearly, this analysis demonstrates that for all users with a VPS cost of $25/month or above, they are far better off simply buying CRP than mining it. Naturally, this conclusion assumes the user is motivated financially and intends to minimize the cost of Crypton accumulation. If the motivation is primarily rooted in supporting the network, then mining should be maintained, even at an additional cost to the user for the benefit of the network.
4 – The Open-Source Software Question
When it comes to software that is designed to protect privacy of communication and identity, the most natural question that arises is one of trust. How can it be trusted? The most widely accepted answer to this question is the software that is openly available for public scrutiny is the one that can most easily be trusted. This is considered the gold standard because any proprietary, closed-source software may have existing security issues that are hidden and unable to be exposed publically. This latter form is often described as “security by obscurity”. If achieving the highest standard of trust in software was the singular consideration for a project, and gaining world-wide adoption and usage were secondary, then undoubtedly open-source would be the way to go. However it is the intent of this article to demonstrate that in special circumstances, certain trade-offs become necessary in order to achieve wider project goals.
Before we proceed further, let us reproduce below the 1984 Group’s response to this important question of why the Utopia software is not open-source, as taken from the FAQ section of their website:
“We may disclose certain parts of code, specifically related to communication and encryption. However, the decentralized protocol will not be released. Utopia is very knowledge-intensive software. A lot of time, effort and resources went into this product, and we do not want to share all of our know-how as it will result in forks which in turn may result in instability of our main network. Fork will lead to the division of the community, while our intention is the unification of the community of like-minded individuals. The bottom line here is that a lot of software is closed source, and this does not hurt them a bit. In addition, we will audit our code.”
Let us consider the examples of Gmail and Bitcoin. Both utilize open-source software and both may be considered to have succeeded by how widely they are used. However, one is a peer-to-peer protocol for digital currency, while the other is a centralized service for electronic mail. How did they each achieve their success if they are open-source and may be copied by anyone? The popular use of Gmail may be attributed in part to the ease with which the service functions, how well the software is designed, but there’s another critical component as well; the responsiveness of the service. Running such a centralized service for over a billion users has tremendous infrastructural resource costs that can only be covered by corporate behemoth of Google’s (or Alphabet’s) size. While it may be true that making the code behind the service open-source means that anyone can open a competing service, if they do not have the capital to compete, they will not get very far. Gmail succeeds as a centralized service even with open-source code, because the edge is in the ability to deliver the service, not the software itself.
What about Bitcoin; it has no such centralized crutch, how did it succeed while open-source? When Bitcoin was first released in early 2009, it had very little competition in the market because it was creating the market we now recognize as cryptocurrency. Early in its existence, most people did not see the value it was creating. It gained adoption and established its dominant network effect very slowly over time early on. If in those first few weeks and months we had the release of “Super Bitcoin”, “Bitcoin Gold” and “Bitcoin 2.0”, by teams that were well capitalized and motivated to sieze the market opportunity, would the original “Bitcoin” have had the room to grow that it did in those early days? That’s debatable, but its certainly not guaranteed. What if Satoshi Nakamoto had a team around him who had been working on Bitcoin for many years, developed the P2P potential of the protocol and was motivated by the possibility of redefining the internet as we know it, by empowering people to have completely private communication, association and commerce? Then we would have the 1984 Group, Utopia, and the perceived high risk of dividing the community and thereby hampering the overarching goal of the project. It is because of these special circumstances that the team chose the path that it did. The middle path they are attempting to navigate is one that involves an audit of their code to help establish that trust. But ultimately, they want to redefine the internet as we know it and in order to do that, they want to avoid the release of a “Utopia Private”. Who can blame them?
5 – Personal Note from The Publisher on 10th Edition
Effective after the release of this 10th Edition, publication of TheMessage will be suspended for an indeterminate number of weeks as TheMerchant takes a hiatus from his full-time efforts on Utopia. TheMerchant’s confidence in the Utopia P2P platform and its native digital currency Crypton remains very high and with every client update climbs even higher. Unfortunately, other responsibilities necessitate this pause, but I look forward to a future when I can return full-time to Utopia and restart publication of TheMessage. Until then, safeguard your privacy and maintain your integrity in the face of the daily onslaught on both!
Honour Above Greed,
TheMerchant
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