Proof of Access Node Up and Running!

A little late to the party, but later is at least better than never! I'm joining in on the Call to action. Last night I finally got around to setting up my @threespeak proof of access node on the @spknetwork. If you happen to be new here, or not familiar with what this is all about, here's the brief description of what the SPK Network is:

The SPK Network is a decentralized Web 3.0 protocol that rewards value creators and infrastructure providers appropriately and autonomously by distributing reward tokens so that every user, creator, and platform can earn rewards on a level playing field.

And here's a much longer description: https://peakd.com/hive/@spknetwork/spk-network-light-paper

But what's a Proof of Access Node and.. what's the point?

I don't have a very deep technical understanding of this, but I'll attempt to explain it anyway. Hopefully someone more knowledgeful than me can be helpful and point out if I get something wrong.

It's known that blockchains are very good for storing text, but not very suited for storing video, image and other larger file types. These types of files needs to be stored off-chain.. On centralized servers to be specific. And as we know, the problem with centralized servers are, of course, they're prone to censorship by the owner or owners of said servers.

A truly decentralized blockchain (like Hive) implies it must also be censorship resistant. Which is certainly true for all text that is posted here. However, the images and videos that are pointed to in a post, simply aren't.

So this is where the SPK Network comes in; By providing a decentralized (and incentiviced) solution that easily allows any user to become a part of the file storage network, while earning some money from it, files can not be taken down by any one entity, thus making it censorship resistant. Which is one of the biggest points of all this.

In short, a proof of access node, is a users storage space on their own computer, which they've chosen to use for storing files for the network, while automatically getting rewarded for doing so.

This has never been done before.

If it works, it would be an enormous achievement.

Getting my node up and running

So let's give it a go! Sounds pretty complicated, right?

Well, the steps were extremely simple - I actually had the whole thing set up in about a minute without even looking at the docs, as I wanted try my own first to see how it went. I then checked the excellent video tutorial by @eddiespino to make sure I hadn't missed anything. I hadn't - i.e. it was so intuitive get it up and running that it only required a about a minute of clicking around in the 3Speak Desktop app to get it done. Though I'll admit I already had the app itself installed and logged into, so that part didn't take up any time.

I know the team has put a lot of effort into making it as user friendly as possible, and I can safely say they've succeeded in this.

What about rewards?

Well, only a couple of hours after I was up and running, I received my first rewards. Really! Check it out.

I mean, it's nothing to get rich off of, but that's not really the point is it. This is the first autonomous incentivized decentralized storage that has ever existed. And we're among the first people in the world to ever try out a system like this - actually, here's the list. And look, I'm there too!

Proof of Access Documentation

Here's my documented proof of access, if there was any doubt.

Conclusion

This works really really well! And I gotta say I'm very excited to be one of the first ones ever to try it out.

I'm also seeing some very exciting potential future use-cases that I'm very interested in; I've been doing a fairly large NFT project over on the WAX Blockchain, which have required me to rent an IPFS node to host all the graphics of my NFTs. This service costs me $20 bucks a month! And if I stop paying - without a backup server in place - the images of the NFTs would simply break, as nobody would be hosting them anymore.

I hope to be able to in the future, to upload the same graphics of my NFTs here on the SPK Network and both pin them myself, and hopefully get others to do the same, thus securing my NFTs existence forever - even if I were to stop paying for my centralized IPFS node.

If you made it all the way down here, thank you for your attention! I hope you found this interesting or somewhat useful.

And last but not least, I definitely urge you to try this out for yourself. Experience how easy it is, and make some money and get some upvotes in the process. If you have even a couple of gigabytes left over in your hard drive, this is a no brainer.

Join in on decentralizing the SPK Network!