How to make money with Bitcoin?

So now that you know a couple of things about the rise and fall of Bitcoin, we can finally move into the money-making methods.

There are quite a few methods to make money with the help of Bitcoin, but in this guide, I’ll cover just the main ones – if I had to list them all, this guide would be at least three hundred pages long.

The list isn’t composed in any specific order. Some methods work better (or faster) than others, but – generally – it depends on the person.

Method #1 – Buying Bitcoin

No, I’m not joking.

There are huge groups of people who “invest” into Bitcoin by simply buying it. This is a risky method, of course, but probably the simplest one to perform.

There are a couple of types of such investors. Some people just buy a certain quantity of the coin and forget about it for a year… or ten. These people usually have no real intention to profit short-term – they often believe in the successful future of cryptocurrencies and hope that their investment now will one day bring them a tenfold profit.

Another type of Bitcoin investors are the people who do loads of research, read all of the available predictions on how to make money with cryptocurrency and spend weeks analyzing data and statistics. These people tend to have a very specific time frame in mind – most of the time, they are looking to invest short-term and just need to know when to do it. Also, these investments tend to be smaller when compared to the long-term ones – after all, people invest having done a ton of research beforehand, but if their investment fails, they could just move on to the next time frame.

If you’re thinking about how to make money with Bitcoin or how to make money with cryptocurrency in general, buying Bitcoin can be a great starter – or a disastrous one. It can make you huge amounts of money real fast or might drive you to the brink of debt. It all depends on one single factor – the amount of research you’ve done beforehand.

Method #2 – Accept Payment in Bitcoin

Have you heard of Fiverr? It’s a site where people pay $5 for some sort of a service done by other freelancers. Now take this same concept, but imagine Bitcoin coming into the place of USD.

All you need to do for this method to work is as follows:

• Think of a skill you’re good at. This can frankly be anything – starting from copywriting and digital marketing to painting or singing. Pick your strongest quality (or qualities) and think of ways you could monetize them.
• Create a cryptocurrency wallet. If you’re reading a guide on how to make money with Bitcoin, chances are this step seems obvious and you’ve done it long ago. But just in case, let this serve as a reminder – a crypto coin wallet holds your cryptocurrencies safe and ready to use, just like a wallet for your physical money. If you still haven’t got one – research and create it ASAP!
• Find a way to charge people. A good place to start is to offer your services on online forums and marketplaces, stating that you only take payments in the form of Bitcoins or other cryptocurrencies. Do this long enough, and you might eventually want to create a designated website for this same purpose and teach others how to make money with Bitcoin.

If you’re thinking about how to profit from Bitcoin (and if you’re serious about it), doing research is going to be unavoidable. Without it, it’s like trying to drive a car at night with the headlights off – sure, you MIGHT make it, but the chances are not worth the risk.

Method #3 – Mining

One of the most popular ways of how to profit from Bitcoin is Bitcoin mining. There can be two forms of mining – your own, personal mining or cloud mining.

If you want to mine individually (meaning, with your mining rig), it might not be the best way of how to make money with Bitcoin. Bitcoin is considered to be one of the tougher cryptocurrencies to mine since it’s a subject of mainstream success and a lot of people want to pitch into the hype, yet there’s a limited supply of it. A single rig, as good as it could be, might struggle to produce significant profits, especially when you consider the electricity and maintenance prices.

Cloud mining, however, has become very popular over the last few years. It’s a great alternative when it comes to mining because you don’t need to buy any hardware or software, assemble or even DO anything – all you need to do is pay a one-time fee for a contract and that’s it! Usually, at the end of every month, you’ll receive your earnings. The amount will be based on your plan of choice and the electricity bill at the facility that the cloud mining service is based on.

Overall, cryptocurrency mining is a very popular method for people searching on how to make money with Bitcoin. It does require some knowledge and expertise in the field to be able to perform it successfully (especially if you want to build your rig), but the effort is definitely worth the results.

Method #4 – Investing

And no, not the buying-bitcoin-and-then-selling-it type of investing.

There are quite a few choices you have when it comes to investing in Bitcoin. You could make money with Bitcoin by investing in startups, companies, stocks or even blockchain development itself.

Blockchain-based startups are a very popular choice when it comes to investing in a cryptocurrency-related field. Already, some notable startups have made it into the mainstream success (i.e. Brave’s Basic Attention Token). You would need to do some digging and find out the next best thing, but if you’d be right and invest in the startup while it’s still in its early days of infancy, you might just hit the jackpot and grow your profits to the roof.

Companies that deal with Bitcoin or blockchain development (or research) are also a good option for investments. You’d have to look over their info – White Paper, their goals and work ethics, results, statistics, etc., and if their overall view seems attractive, you could think about investing in their projects or the company itself.

You should be careful with investments, though – especially when it comes to cryptocurrencies. It is no secret that the cryptocurrency market is a very unpredictable place. Always do your homework and research the objects that you plan to invest into, or else the question of “how to make money with Bitcoin?” might turn into “how to get out of debt (no Bitcoin)?”.

With the long awaited geth 1.5 (“let there bee light”) release, Swarm made it into the official go-ethereum release as an experimental feature. The current version of the code is POC 0.2 RC5 — “embrace your daemons” (roadmap), which is the refactored and cleaner version of the codebase that was running on the Swarm toynet in the past months.

The current release ships with the swarmcommand that launches a standalone Swarm daemon as separate process using your favourite IPC-compliant ethereum client if needed. Bandwidth accounting (using the Swarm Accounting Protocol = SWAP) is responsible for smooth operation and speedy content delivery by incentivising nodes to contribute their bandwidth and relay data. The SWAP system is functional but it is switched off by default. Storage incentives (punitive insurance) to protect availability of rarely-accessed content is planned to be operational in POC 0.4. So currently by default, the client uses the blockchain only for domain name resolution.

With this blog post we are happy to announce the launch of our shiny new Swarm testnet connected to the Ropsten ethereum testchain. The Ethereum Foundation is contributing a 35-strong (will be up to 105) Swarm cluster running on the Azure cloud. It is hosting the Swarm homepage.

We consider this testnet as the first public pilot, and the community is welcome to join the network, contribute resources, issues, identify painpoints and give feedback on useability. Instructions can be found in the Swarm guide. We encourage those who can afford to run persistent nodes (nodes that stay online) to get in touch. We have already received promises for 100TB deployments. Note that the testnet offers no guarantees! Data may be lost or become unavailable. Indeed guarantees of persistence cannot be made at least until the storage insurance incentive layer is implemented.

Note that the testnet offers no guarantees! Data may be lost or become unavailable. Indeed guarantees of persistence cannot be made at least until the storage insurance incentive layer is implemented.

We envision shaping this project with more and more community involvement, so we are inviting those interested to join

How does Swarm work?

Swarm is a distributed storage platform and content distribution service; a native base layer service of the ethereum Web3 stack. The objective is a peer-to-peer storage and serving solution that has zero downtime, is DDOS-resistant, fault-tolerant and censorship-resistant as well as self-sustaining due to a built-in incentive system. The incentive layer uses peer-to-peer accounting for bandwidth, deposit-based storage incentives and allows trading resources for payment. Swarm is designed to deeply integrate with the devp2p multiprotocol network layer of Ethereum as well as with the Ethereum blockchain for domain name resolution.

This hash of a chunk is the address that clients can use to retrieve the chunk (the hash’s preimage). Irreversible and collision-free addressing immediately provides integrity protection: no matter the context of how a client knows about an address, it can tell if the chunk is damaged or has been tampered with just by hashing it.

Swarm’s main offering as a distributed chunkstore is that you can upload content to it. The nodes constituting the Swarm all dedicate resources (diskspace, memory, bandwidth and CPU) to store and serve chunks. But what determines who is keeping a chunk? Swarm nodes have an address (the hash of the address of their bzz-account) in the same keyspace as the chunks themselves. Lets call this address space the overlay network. If we upload a chunk to the Swarm, the protocol determines that it will eventually end up being stored at nodes that are closest to the chunk’s address (according to a well-defined distance measure on the overlay address space). The process by which chunks get to their address is called syncing and is part of the protocol. Nodes that later want to retrieve the content can find it again by forwarding a query to nodes that are close the the content’s address. Indeed, when a node needs a chunk, it simply posts a request to the Swarm with the address of the content, and the Swarm will forward the requests until the data is found (or the request times out). In this regard, Swarm is similar to a traditional distributed hash table (DHT) but with two important (and under-researched) features.

• Vitalik’s whitepaper the Ethereum dev core realised
• When she reached the first hills
• A small river named Duden flows
• Self-sustaining due to a built-in incentive system

Documents and the Swarm hash

On the API layer Swarm provides a chunker. The chunker takes any kind of readable source, such as a file or a video camera capture device, and chops it into fix-sized chunks. These so-called data chunks or leaf chunks are hashed and then synced with peers. The hashes of the data chunks are then packaged into chunks themselves (called intermediate chunks) and the process is repeated. Currently 128 hashes make up a new chunk. As a result the data is represented by a merkle tree, and it is the root hash of the tree that acts as the address you use to retrieve the uploaded file.

With the long awaited geth 1.5 (“let there bee light”) release, Swarm made it into the official go-ethereum release as an experimental feature. The current version of the code is POC 0.2 RC5 — “embrace your daemons” (roadmap), which is the refactored and cleaner version of the codebase that was running on the Swarm toynet in the past months.

The current release ships with the swarmcommand that launches a standalone Swarm daemon as separate process using your favourite IPC-compliant ethereum client if needed. Bandwidth accounting (using the Swarm Accounting Protocol = SWAP) is responsible for smooth operation and speedy content delivery by incentivising nodes to contribute their bandwidth and relay data. The SWAP system is functional but it is switched off by default. Storage incentives (punitive insurance) to protect availability of rarely-accessed content is planned to be operational in POC 0.4. So currently by default, the client uses the blockchain only for domain name resolution.

With this blog post we are happy to announce the launch of our shiny new Swarm testnet connected to the Ropsten ethereum testchain. The Ethereum Foundation is contributing a 35-strong (will be up to 105) Swarm cluster running on the Azure cloud. It is hosting the Swarm homepage.

We consider this testnet as the first public pilot, and the community is welcome to join the network, contribute resources, issues, identify painpoints and give feedback on useability. Instructions can be found in the Swarm guide. We encourage those who can afford to run persistent nodes (nodes that stay online) to get in touch. We have already received promises for 100TB deployments. Note that the testnet offers no guarantees! Data may be lost or become unavailable. Indeed guarantees of persistence cannot be made at least until the storage insurance incentive layer is implemented.

Note that the testnet offers no guarantees! Data may be lost or become unavailable. Indeed guarantees of persistence cannot be made at least until the storage insurance incentive layer is implemented.

We envision shaping this project with more and more community involvement, so we are inviting those interested to join

How does Swarm work?

Swarm is a distributed storage platform and content distribution service; a native base layer service of the ethereum Web3 stack. The objective is a peer-to-peer storage and serving solution that has zero downtime, is DDOS-resistant, fault-tolerant and censorship-resistant as well as self-sustaining due to a built-in incentive system. The incentive layer uses peer-to-peer accounting for bandwidth, deposit-based storage incentives and allows trading resources for payment. Swarm is designed to deeply integrate with the devp2p multiprotocol network layer of Ethereum as well as with the Ethereum blockchain for domain name resolution.

This hash of a chunk is the address that clients can use to retrieve the chunk (the hash’s preimage). Irreversible and collision-free addressing immediately provides integrity protection: no matter the context of how a client knows about an address, it can tell if the chunk is damaged or has been tampered with just by hashing it.

Swarm’s main offering as a distributed chunkstore is that you can upload content to it. The nodes constituting the Swarm all dedicate resources (diskspace, memory, bandwidth and CPU) to store and serve chunks. But what determines who is keeping a chunk? Swarm nodes have an address (the hash of the address of their bzz-account) in the same keyspace as the chunks themselves. Lets call this address space the overlay network. If we upload a chunk to the Swarm, the protocol determines that it will eventually end up being stored at nodes that are closest to the chunk’s address (according to a well-defined distance measure on the overlay address space). The process by which chunks get to their address is called syncing and is part of the protocol. Nodes that later want to retrieve the content can find it again by forwarding a query to nodes that are close the the content’s address. Indeed, when a node needs a chunk, it simply posts a request to the Swarm with the address of the content, and the Swarm will forward the requests until the data is found (or the request times out). In this regard, Swarm is similar to a traditional distributed hash table (DHT) but with two important (and under-researched) features.

• Vitalik’s whitepaper the Ethereum dev core realised
• When she reached the first hills
• A small river named Duden flows
• Self-sustaining due to a built-in incentive system

Documents and the Swarm hash

On the API layer Swarm provides a chunker. The chunker takes any kind of readable source, such as a file or a video camera capture device, and chops it into fix-sized chunks. These so-called data chunks or leaf chunks are hashed and then synced with peers. The hashes of the data chunks are then packaged into chunks themselves (called intermediate chunks) and the process is repeated. Currently 128 hashes make up a new chunk. As a result the data is represented by a merkle tree, and it is the root hash of the tree that acts as the address you use to retrieve the uploaded file.

With the long awaited geth 1.5 (“let there bee light”) release, Swarm made it into the official go-ethereum release as an experimental feature. The current version of the code is POC 0.2 RC5 — “embrace your daemons” (roadmap), which is the refactored and cleaner version of the codebase that was running on the Swarm toynet in the past months.

The current release ships with the swarmcommand that launches a standalone Swarm daemon as separate process using your favourite IPC-compliant ethereum client if needed. Bandwidth accounting (using the Swarm Accounting Protocol = SWAP) is responsible for smooth operation and speedy content delivery by incentivising nodes to contribute their bandwidth and relay data. The SWAP system is functional but it is switched off by default. Storage incentives (punitive insurance) to protect availability of rarely-accessed content is planned to be operational in POC 0.4. So currently by default, the client uses the blockchain only for domain name resolution.

With this blog post we are happy to announce the launch of our shiny new Swarm testnet connected to the Ropsten ethereum testchain. The Ethereum Foundation is contributing a 35-strong (will be up to 105) Swarm cluster running on the Azure cloud. It is hosting the Swarm homepage.

We consider this testnet as the first public pilot, and the community is welcome to join the network, contribute resources, issues, identify painpoints and give feedback on useability. Instructions can be found in the Swarm guide. We encourage those who can afford to run persistent nodes (nodes that stay online) to get in touch. We have already received promises for 100TB deployments. Note that the testnet offers no guarantees! Data may be lost or become unavailable. Indeed guarantees of persistence cannot be made at least until the storage insurance incentive layer is implemented.

Note that the testnet offers no guarantees! Data may be lost or become unavailable. Indeed guarantees of persistence cannot be made at least until the storage insurance incentive layer is implemented.

We envision shaping this project with more and more community involvement, so we are inviting those interested to join

How does Swarm work?

Swarm is a distributed storage platform and content distribution service; a native base layer service of the ethereum Web3 stack. The objective is a peer-to-peer storage and serving solution that has zero downtime, is DDOS-resistant, fault-tolerant and censorship-resistant as well as self-sustaining due to a built-in incentive system. The incentive layer uses peer-to-peer accounting for bandwidth, deposit-based storage incentives and allows trading resources for payment. Swarm is designed to deeply integrate with the devp2p multiprotocol network layer of Ethereum as well as with the Ethereum blockchain for domain name resolution.

This hash of a chunk is the address that clients can use to retrieve the chunk (the hash’s preimage). Irreversible and collision-free addressing immediately provides integrity protection: no matter the context of how a client knows about an address, it can tell if the chunk is damaged or has been tampered with just by hashing it.

Swarm’s main offering as a distributed chunkstore is that you can upload content to it. The nodes constituting the Swarm all dedicate resources (diskspace, memory, bandwidth and CPU) to store and serve chunks. But what determines who is keeping a chunk? Swarm nodes have an address (the hash of the address of their bzz-account) in the same keyspace as the chunks themselves. Lets call this address space the overlay network. If we upload a chunk to the Swarm, the protocol determines that it will eventually end up being stored at nodes that are closest to the chunk’s address (according to a well-defined distance measure on the overlay address space). The process by which chunks get to their address is called syncing and is part of the protocol. Nodes that later want to retrieve the content can find it again by forwarding a query to nodes that are close the the content’s address. Indeed, when a node needs a chunk, it simply posts a request to the Swarm with the address of the content, and the Swarm will forward the requests until the data is found (or the request times out). In this regard, Swarm is similar to a traditional distributed hash table (DHT) but with two important (and under-researched) features.

• Vitalik’s whitepaper the Ethereum dev core realised
• When she reached the first hills
• A small river named Duden flows
• Self-sustaining due to a built-in incentive system

Documents and the Swarm hash

On the API layer Swarm provides a chunker. The chunker takes any kind of readable source, such as a file or a video camera capture device, and chops it into fix-sized chunks. These so-called data chunks or leaf chunks are hashed and then synced with peers. The hashes of the data chunks are then packaged into chunks themselves (called intermediate chunks) and the process is repeated. Currently 128 hashes make up a new chunk. As a result the data is represented by a merkle tree, and it is the root hash of the tree that acts as the address you use to retrieve the uploaded file.

With the long awaited geth 1.5 (“let there bee light”) release, Swarm made it into the official go-ethereum release as an experimental feature. The current version of the code is POC 0.2 RC5 — “embrace your daemons” (roadmap), which is the refactored and cleaner version of the codebase that was running on the Swarm toynet in the past months.

The current release ships with the swarmcommand that launches a standalone Swarm daemon as separate process using your favourite IPC-compliant ethereum client if needed. Bandwidth accounting (using the Swarm Accounting Protocol = SWAP) is responsible for smooth operation and speedy content delivery by incentivising nodes to contribute their bandwidth and relay data. The SWAP system is functional but it is switched off by default. Storage incentives (punitive insurance) to protect availability of rarely-accessed content is planned to be operational in POC 0.4. So currently by default, the client uses the blockchain only for domain name resolution.

With this blog post we are happy to announce the launch of our shiny new Swarm testnet connected to the Ropsten ethereum testchain. The Ethereum Foundation is contributing a 35-strong (will be up to 105) Swarm cluster running on the Azure cloud. It is hosting the Swarm homepage.

We consider this testnet as the first public pilot, and the community is welcome to join the network, contribute resources, issues, identify painpoints and give feedback on useability. Instructions can be found in the Swarm guide. We encourage those who can afford to run persistent nodes (nodes that stay online) to get in touch. We have already received promises for 100TB deployments. Note that the testnet offers no guarantees! Data may be lost or become unavailable. Indeed guarantees of persistence cannot be made at least until the storage insurance incentive layer is implemented.

Note that the testnet offers no guarantees! Data may be lost or become unavailable. Indeed guarantees of persistence cannot be made at least until the storage insurance incentive layer is implemented.

We envision shaping this project with more and more community involvement, so we are inviting those interested to join

How does Swarm work?

Swarm is a distributed storage platform and content distribution service; a native base layer service of the ethereum Web3 stack. The objective is a peer-to-peer storage and serving solution that has zero downtime, is DDOS-resistant, fault-tolerant and censorship-resistant as well as self-sustaining due to a built-in incentive system. The incentive layer uses peer-to-peer accounting for bandwidth, deposit-based storage incentives and allows trading resources for payment. Swarm is designed to deeply integrate with the devp2p multiprotocol network layer of Ethereum as well as with the Ethereum blockchain for domain name resolution.

This hash of a chunk is the address that clients can use to retrieve the chunk (the hash’s preimage). Irreversible and collision-free addressing immediately provides integrity protection: no matter the context of how a client knows about an address, it can tell if the chunk is damaged or has been tampered with just by hashing it.

Swarm’s main offering as a distributed chunkstore is that you can upload content to it. The nodes constituting the Swarm all dedicate resources (diskspace, memory, bandwidth and CPU) to store and serve chunks. But what determines who is keeping a chunk? Swarm nodes have an address (the hash of the address of their bzz-account) in the same keyspace as the chunks themselves. Lets call this address space the overlay network. If we upload a chunk to the Swarm, the protocol determines that it will eventually end up being stored at nodes that are closest to the chunk’s address (according to a well-defined distance measure on the overlay address space). The process by which chunks get to their address is called syncing and is part of the protocol. Nodes that later want to retrieve the content can find it again by forwarding a query to nodes that are close the the content’s address. Indeed, when a node needs a chunk, it simply posts a request to the Swarm with the address of the content, and the Swarm will forward the requests until the data is found (or the request times out). In this regard, Swarm is similar to a traditional distributed hash table (DHT) but with two important (and under-researched) features.

• Vitalik’s whitepaper the Ethereum dev core realised
• When she reached the first hills
• A small river named Duden flows
• Self-sustaining due to a built-in incentive system

Documents and the Swarm hash

On the API layer Swarm provides a chunker. The chunker takes any kind of readable source, such as a file or a video camera capture device, and chops it into fix-sized chunks. These so-called data chunks or leaf chunks are hashed and then synced with peers. The hashes of the data chunks are then packaged into chunks themselves (called intermediate chunks) and the process is repeated. Currently 128 hashes make up a new chunk. As a result the data is represented by a merkle tree, and it is the root hash of the tree that acts as the address you use to retrieve the uploaded file.

With the long awaited geth 1.5 (“let there bee light”) release, Swarm made it into the official go-ethereum release as an experimental feature. The current version of the code is POC 0.2 RC5 — “embrace your daemons” (roadmap), which is the refactored and cleaner version of the codebase that was running on the Swarm toynet in the past months.

The current release ships with the swarmcommand that launches a standalone Swarm daemon as separate process using your favourite IPC-compliant ethereum client if needed. Bandwidth accounting (using the Swarm Accounting Protocol = SWAP) is responsible for smooth operation and speedy content delivery by incentivising nodes to contribute their bandwidth and relay data. The SWAP system is functional but it is switched off by default. Storage incentives (punitive insurance) to protect availability of rarely-accessed content is planned to be operational in POC 0.4. So currently by default, the client uses the blockchain only for domain name resolution.

With this blog post we are happy to announce the launch of our shiny new Swarm testnet connected to the Ropsten ethereum testchain. The Ethereum Foundation is contributing a 35-strong (will be up to 105) Swarm cluster running on the Azure cloud. It is hosting the Swarm homepage.

We consider this testnet as the first public pilot, and the community is welcome to join the network, contribute resources, issues, identify painpoints and give feedback on useability. Instructions can be found in the Swarm guide. We encourage those who can afford to run persistent nodes (nodes that stay online) to get in touch. We have already received promises for 100TB deployments. Note that the testnet offers no guarantees! Data may be lost or become unavailable. Indeed guarantees of persistence cannot be made at least until the storage insurance incentive layer is implemented.

Note that the testnet offers no guarantees! Data may be lost or become unavailable. Indeed guarantees of persistence cannot be made at least until the storage insurance incentive layer is implemented.

We envision shaping this project with more and more community involvement, so we are inviting those interested to join

How does Swarm work?

Swarm is a distributed storage platform and content distribution service; a native base layer service of the ethereum Web3 stack. The objective is a peer-to-peer storage and serving solution that has zero downtime, is DDOS-resistant, fault-tolerant and censorship-resistant as well as self-sustaining due to a built-in incentive system. The incentive layer uses peer-to-peer accounting for bandwidth, deposit-based storage incentives and allows trading resources for payment. Swarm is designed to deeply integrate with the devp2p multiprotocol network layer of Ethereum as well as with the Ethereum blockchain for domain name resolution.

This hash of a chunk is the address that clients can use to retrieve the chunk (the hash’s preimage). Irreversible and collision-free addressing immediately provides integrity protection: no matter the context of how a client knows about an address, it can tell if the chunk is damaged or has been tampered with just by hashing it.

Swarm’s main offering as a distributed chunkstore is that you can upload content to it. The nodes constituting the Swarm all dedicate resources (diskspace, memory, bandwidth and CPU) to store and serve chunks. But what determines who is keeping a chunk? Swarm nodes have an address (the hash of the address of their bzz-account) in the same keyspace as the chunks themselves. Lets call this address space the overlay network. If we upload a chunk to the Swarm, the protocol determines that it will eventually end up being stored at nodes that are closest to the chunk’s address (according to a well-defined distance measure on the overlay address space). The process by which chunks get to their address is called syncing and is part of the protocol. Nodes that later want to retrieve the content can find it again by forwarding a query to nodes that are close the the content’s address. Indeed, when a node needs a chunk, it simply posts a request to the Swarm with the address of the content, and the Swarm will forward the requests until the data is found (or the request times out). In this regard, Swarm is similar to a traditional distributed hash table (DHT) but with two important (and under-researched) features.

• Vitalik’s whitepaper the Ethereum dev core realised
• When she reached the first hills
• A small river named Duden flows
• Self-sustaining due to a built-in incentive system

Documents and the Swarm hash

On the API layer Swarm provides a chunker. The chunker takes any kind of readable source, such as a file or a video camera capture device, and chops it into fix-sized chunks. These so-called data chunks or leaf chunks are hashed and then synced with peers. The hashes of the data chunks are then packaged into chunks themselves (called intermediate chunks) and the process is repeated. Currently 128 hashes make up a new chunk. As a result the data is represented by a merkle tree, and it is the root hash of the tree that acts as the address you use to retrieve the uploaded file.

With the long awaited geth 1.5 (“let there bee light”) release, Swarm made it into the official go-ethereum release as an experimental feature. The current version of the code is POC 0.2 RC5 — “embrace your daemons” (roadmap), which is the refactored and cleaner version of the codebase that was running on the Swarm toynet in the past months.

The current release ships with the swarmcommand that launches a standalone Swarm daemon as separate process using your favourite IPC-compliant ethereum client if needed. Bandwidth accounting (using the Swarm Accounting Protocol = SWAP) is responsible for smooth operation and speedy content delivery by incentivising nodes to contribute their bandwidth and relay data. The SWAP system is functional but it is switched off by default. Storage incentives (punitive insurance) to protect availability of rarely-accessed content is planned to be operational in POC 0.4. So currently by default, the client uses the blockchain only for domain name resolution.

With this blog post we are happy to announce the launch of our shiny new Swarm testnet connected to the Ropsten ethereum testchain. The Ethereum Foundation is contributing a 35-strong (will be up to 105) Swarm cluster running on the Azure cloud. It is hosting the Swarm homepage.

We consider this testnet as the first public pilot, and the community is welcome to join the network, contribute resources, issues, identify painpoints and give feedback on useability. Instructions can be found in the Swarm guide. We encourage those who can afford to run persistent nodes (nodes that stay online) to get in touch. We have already received promises for 100TB deployments. Note that the testnet offers no guarantees! Data may be lost or become unavailable. Indeed guarantees of persistence cannot be made at least until the storage insurance incentive layer is implemented.

Note that the testnet offers no guarantees! Data may be lost or become unavailable. Indeed guarantees of persistence cannot be made at least until the storage insurance incentive layer is implemented.

We envision shaping this project with more and more community involvement, so we are inviting those interested to join

How does Swarm work?

Swarm is a distributed storage platform and content distribution service; a native base layer service of the ethereum Web3 stack. The objective is a peer-to-peer storage and serving solution that has zero downtime, is DDOS-resistant, fault-tolerant and censorship-resistant as well as self-sustaining due to a built-in incentive system. The incentive layer uses peer-to-peer accounting for bandwidth, deposit-based storage incentives and allows trading resources for payment. Swarm is designed to deeply integrate with the devp2p multiprotocol network layer of Ethereum as well as with the Ethereum blockchain for domain name resolution.

This hash of a chunk is the address that clients can use to retrieve the chunk (the hash’s preimage). Irreversible and collision-free addressing immediately provides integrity protection: no matter the context of how a client knows about an address, it can tell if the chunk is damaged or has been tampered with just by hashing it.

Swarm’s main offering as a distributed chunkstore is that you can upload content to it. The nodes constituting the Swarm all dedicate resources (diskspace, memory, bandwidth and CPU) to store and serve chunks. But what determines who is keeping a chunk? Swarm nodes have an address (the hash of the address of their bzz-account) in the same keyspace as the chunks themselves. Lets call this address space the overlay network. If we upload a chunk to the Swarm, the protocol determines that it will eventually end up being stored at nodes that are closest to the chunk’s address (according to a well-defined distance measure on the overlay address space). The process by which chunks get to their address is called syncing and is part of the protocol. Nodes that later want to retrieve the content can find it again by forwarding a query to nodes that are close the the content’s address. Indeed, when a node needs a chunk, it simply posts a request to the Swarm with the address of the content, and the Swarm will forward the requests until the data is found (or the request times out). In this regard, Swarm is similar to a traditional distributed hash table (DHT) but with two important (and under-researched) features.

• Vitalik’s whitepaper the Ethereum dev core realised
• When she reached the first hills
• A small river named Duden flows
• Self-sustaining due to a built-in incentive system

Documents and the Swarm hash

On the API layer Swarm provides a chunker. The chunker takes any kind of readable source, such as a file or a video camera capture device, and chops it into fix-sized chunks. These so-called data chunks or leaf chunks are hashed and then synced with peers. The hashes of the data chunks are then packaged into chunks themselves (called intermediate chunks) and the process is repeated. Currently 128 hashes make up a new chunk. As a result the data is represented by a merkle tree, and it is the root hash of the tree that acts as the address you use to retrieve the uploaded file.

With the long awaited geth 1.5 (“let there bee light”) release, Swarm made it into the official go-ethereum release as an experimental feature. The current version of the code is POC 0.2 RC5 — “embrace your daemons” (roadmap), which is the refactored and cleaner version of the codebase that was running on the Swarm toynet in the past months.

The current release ships with the swarmcommand that launches a standalone Swarm daemon as separate process using your favourite IPC-compliant ethereum client if needed. Bandwidth accounting (using the Swarm Accounting Protocol = SWAP) is responsible for smooth operation and speedy content delivery by incentivising nodes to contribute their bandwidth and relay data. The SWAP system is functional but it is switched off by default. Storage incentives (punitive insurance) to protect availability of rarely-accessed content is planned to be operational in POC 0.4. So currently by default, the client uses the blockchain only for domain name resolution.

With this blog post we are happy to announce the launch of our shiny new Swarm testnet connected to the Ropsten ethereum testchain. The Ethereum Foundation is contributing a 35-strong (will be up to 105) Swarm cluster running on the Azure cloud. It is hosting the Swarm homepage.

We consider this testnet as the first public pilot, and the community is welcome to join the network, contribute resources, issues, identify painpoints and give feedback on useability. Instructions can be found in the Swarm guide. We encourage those who can afford to run persistent nodes (nodes that stay online) to get in touch. We have already received promises for 100TB deployments. Note that the testnet offers no guarantees! Data may be lost or become unavailable. Indeed guarantees of persistence cannot be made at least until the storage insurance incentive layer is implemented.

Note that the testnet offers no guarantees! Data may be lost or become unavailable. Indeed guarantees of persistence cannot be made at least until the storage insurance incentive layer is implemented.

We envision shaping this project with more and more community involvement, so we are inviting those interested to join

How does Swarm work?

Swarm is a distributed storage platform and content distribution service; a native base layer service of the ethereum Web3 stack. The objective is a peer-to-peer storage and serving solution that has zero downtime, is DDOS-resistant, fault-tolerant and censorship-resistant as well as self-sustaining due to a built-in incentive system. The incentive layer uses peer-to-peer accounting for bandwidth, deposit-based storage incentives and allows trading resources for payment. Swarm is designed to deeply integrate with the devp2p multiprotocol network layer of Ethereum as well as with the Ethereum blockchain for domain name resolution.

This hash of a chunk is the address that clients can use to retrieve the chunk (the hash’s preimage). Irreversible and collision-free addressing immediately provides integrity protection: no matter the context of how a client knows about an address, it can tell if the chunk is damaged or has been tampered with just by hashing it.

Swarm’s main offering as a distributed chunkstore is that you can upload content to it. The nodes constituting the Swarm all dedicate resources (diskspace, memory, bandwidth and CPU) to store and serve chunks. But what determines who is keeping a chunk? Swarm nodes have an address (the hash of the address of their bzz-account) in the same keyspace as the chunks themselves. Lets call this address space the overlay network. If we upload a chunk to the Swarm, the protocol determines that it will eventually end up being stored at nodes that are closest to the chunk’s address (according to a well-defined distance measure on the overlay address space). The process by which chunks get to their address is called syncing and is part of the protocol. Nodes that later want to retrieve the content can find it again by forwarding a query to nodes that are close the the content’s address. Indeed, when a node needs a chunk, it simply posts a request to the Swarm with the address of the content, and the Swarm will forward the requests until the data is found (or the request times out). In this regard, Swarm is similar to a traditional distributed hash table (DHT) but with two important (and under-researched) features.

• Vitalik’s whitepaper the Ethereum dev core realised
• When she reached the first hills
• A small river named Duden flows
• Self-sustaining due to a built-in incentive system

Documents and the Swarm hash

On the API layer Swarm provides a chunker. The chunker takes any kind of readable source, such as a file or a video camera capture device, and chops it into fix-sized chunks. These so-called data chunks or leaf chunks are hashed and then synced with peers. The hashes of the data chunks are then packaged into chunks themselves (called intermediate chunks) and the process is repeated. Currently 128 hashes make up a new chunk. As a result the data is represented by a merkle tree, and it is the root hash of the tree that acts as the address you use to retrieve the uploaded file.