Review on Substratum by Robiul Islam
The idea behind Substratum does indeed have the potential to change the way…
The idea behind Substratum does indeed have the potential to change the way that we think about access to information in a digital age. There has been too much power placed into the hands of centralised web hosts at the expense of users. Substratum is helping to achieve those ends by creating a truly decentralized internet where users are able to benefit from spare computing power of their neighbors next door. It empowers those nodes that want to become their own hosts. It also allows them a chance to earn extra income. There are of course challenges that Substratum has to overcome. There are strong competitors and the cryptocurrency market is currently going through some choppy conditions. They will also have to think of a way to properly incentivize hosts to use Substratum over regular cryptocurrency mining.
Pros
- What Substratum is trying to achieve is to give all of those who are connected to the network the opportunity to become their very own web hosts. They are the “nodes” that form part of the broader decentralised network. If you wanted to become a host on the Substratum network, all you would have to do is download the latest Substratum software. This is open source meaning that anyone can download the code and work on it themselves. Once you have downloaded the software, you can launch it and you start syncing with the broader network. What it is allowing you to do is to essentially run your own server which will connect with the other computers on the network. Other users can then access the internet and the content that you are collectively hosting.
Cons
- Although the idea of Substratum is no doubt intriguing, there are a number of other blockchain based projects that offer a similar concept and have been in circulation for a longer period of time. For example, you have Golem (GNT) which is making use of the Ethereum network to build a large decentralised virtual super computer. You also have cloud storage based projects such as Filecoin that are also about to come online with extensive ICO funds backing them. It is also less clear that there will be a great incentive for participants to host on the Substratum network. For example, hosting will require the resources of the PC in the form of CPU power and storage. Mining cryptocurrency is similar and uses GPUs for Proof-of-Work algorithms or the hard drive for Proof-of-Capacity protocols.
