The dawn of the Great Web
by serejandmyself on 2020-04-01
TL;DR
cyber is a search-engine for the Great Web, the new epoch in information processing. With the rise of intelligent blockchain systems, the world of computing has already changed. cyber provides the desired search instrument for these state of the art computers, via its simple and robust consensus protocol.
Why cyber?
Original protocols of the Internet, such as: TCP/IP, DNS, URL, and HTTP/S have brought the web to a stale point. Considering all the benefits that these protocols have produced for the initial development of the web, along with them, they have brought significant obstacles to the table.
Introducing cyber: A decentralized google for provable and relevant answers. Cyber is an inter-planetary search engine & a state of the art consensus computer, built with the help of go-IPFS and cosmos-SDK. Cyber introduces a protocol for provable communication between consensus computers of relevance. Cyber is based around a simple idea of content-defined knowledge graphs, generated by web3-masters (users) via the use of cyberlinks. Cyberlinks are a simple, yet a powerful semantic construction for building a predictive model of the universe. They are simply a connection of two IPFS hashes, enriched semantically and backed by a user’s token weight.
Our values
Cybers mission is to create a universal search protocol to (a) build an open semantic field of the internet with the help of blockchain technology and cyberlinks, and (b) decentralize the infrastructure of the web with the help of blockchain.
We believe it is vital to state that values are what keeps the world spinning around or rather what keeps it from spinning around the wrong way.
We do not believe in captchas. We do not believe in KYC. We do not believe in licensing and any other similar to the above-mentioned corporate bullshit. We believe in code. We believe in innovation and in making use of our knowledge to make the world a slightly better place for our children.
With that in mind, what I’m trying to say, is that cyber, cyber.page or cyb are not just technological results. They are much more. At its base lay the values of the team behind cyber. We hope that our project can re-create certain values of what we believe the blockchain paradigm stands for. With that said, we are open to communication and will be happy for any feedback on our Github or via our forum.
The solution
To keep this somewhat short, I will not go into any details in this article, as per why there are issues (technologically and ideologically) with the current web and how it infects us similar to a virus in every aspect of our lives.
The web demands change. Blackbox intermediaries, such as: Google, Amazon or Facebook became religion-like and with it regulatory organs. Information is tampered with. Cyber utilizes the already available brand-new web-stack to deliver the Great Web to everyone who wishes to join it. A true web-3 technology. The first of its kind. Allowing for a fair and an incentivized general-purpose search of real and relevant answers.
Within the network, masters generate knowledge graphs with the use of what we call cyberlinks. A cyberlink is simply a link between two content-based links (for now, read IPFS hashes). This allows for a naturally enriched semantic link. The link is required for the computation of relevance of subjects and objects within the knowledge graph, in other words, ranking and indexing.
IPFS provides cyber with the superpowers that were inaccessible to previous architectures of general-purpose search engines. Such as significant benefits with regards to resource consumption.
To achieve determinism, we need to agree on the things we do, and here is where cyber introduces a consensus computer, its implementation is a 64-bit Tendermint consensus computer of relevance for 64-byte string-space. The computer process the links, along with computation, storage and the bandwidth. Computation and storage in case of a basic relevance machine can be easily predicted based on bandwidth, but bandwidth requires a limiting mechanism.
The relevance machine
The relevance machine is in some way a mirror of the will of the universe that surrounds us. It enables a simple construction for the search mechanism via querying and delivering answers. This mechanism is based on the will of the users building the knowledge graph.
Instead of deducting the meaning inside of the consensus computer (and returning to the blackbox principle of web2), we have designed a system in which extraction of the meaning is incentivized. This is achieved due to masters needing CYB tokens to express their will, based on which, the relevance machine can compute rank. In other words, we can be sure that if someone is willing to back it up, it is subjectively relevant to this someone at this moment and time.
With the help of Resource Credits (RC) and the user’s stake, we have developed a very simple bandwidth model. The principal goal of this model is to reduce the daily network growth to a given constant. This is done to help heroes (validators) to forecast any future investment into infrastructure. RC and recovery windows allow the network to determine bandwidth and its load. Of course, this also provides a basic anti-spam mechanism.
The relevance machine works just like the human mind. It neither stores the past, nor the current (full) state to maintain usefulness. Or more precisely, it always remains relevant. As a result, the cybernomics (economy) of CYB tokens, serves not just as will-expression and spam-protection mechanisms. It also functions as an economics regulation tool that can align heroes processing the knowledge graph and create demand for market processing.
cyber~Rank
IPFS hashes (or content identifiers or simply - CIDs) are vital for the network. CIDs as primary objects are robust in their simplicity. For every CID, cyber ~Rank is computed by the consensus computer without a single point of failure.
cyber~Rank is a token weighted PageRank with economic protection from Sybil attacks and self-centred voting. Every round the Merkle root of the rank tree is published. Consequently, every computer can prove to any other computer the relevance of value for any given CID. This allows us to create a cryptographically provable map of information, down to the very source, inside cyber.
The rank is calculated by using the outgoing and the incoming weight of the current state of the staked tokens in the system and the current and the previous ranks in the system. The rank mechanism also utilizes the current bandwidth (load) of the system and is hence - a dynamic property. The rank is constantly recalculated by the validators using GPUs.
Ironically, the ranking mechanism is based on none other but the PageRank. Yes, the one that was developed by Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The key problem with the original PageRank is that it wasn’t resistant to Sybil attacks. However, a token-weighted PageRank is limited by a token-weighted bandwidth model and does not inherit the problems of the native PageRank. It is resistant to Sybil-attacks.
The beauty behind the ranking mechanism is that it only accounts for the current intention of the masters and encourages rank inflation of cyberlinks. At first, this might seem a bit unclear. But, it is vital for the system, to (a) not to be interfered with. Which is ensured by the users staking their tokens against a given CID. And (b) is essential in order not to get cemented in the past. As new cyberlinks are continuously added they dilute the rank of the already existing links proportionally. This means that this is a constantly self-evolving, mind-like mechanism where the relevance of information is always up to date with the will of the users.
Web-3
We couldn’t find a real web-3 browser (not a web2-based pseudo-tech), so we implemented our own. Cyb can be easily delivered from within any P2P network. It allows embedding objects into snippets, which means that web3-masters can interact with the search results directly… For example, you could buy items directly within cyb, and thanks to a transparent conversion, e-commerce can flourish and in turn, develop local markets. More so, those snippets can be interactive, meaning you could play a game, view a wallet balance, etc… Directly from your browser.
Right now the work on cyb is frozen until cyber itself evolves. However, this is not a mere fantasy. First of all, cyb has some implementations and you can check the code here. Second and most importantly, we have created cyber.page, which currently serves as a web2-based gateway for cyb. cyber.page already has some cool features, like an inbuild IPFS node, the ability to deliver content directly from a P2P network, explorer-like features, basic sparks (snippets), etc, which you can check out here.
The DAO(s)
cyber is being launched by cyber~Congress. An Aragon-based DAO, responsible for the launch of the distribution games that will help to achieve a better allocation, the gift with over 1 million ETH, ATOM and urbit addresses, the future cyber~FundClassis development fund, working on the protocol and, of course, the launch of cyber~Foundation, the community governed Aragon-based DAO, which will govern the protocol and will be charged with a pot of ETH. Allowing for a community-run governance mechanism for the fund and for the chain itself.
The (un)imaginable future
The future is unimaginable, but it has a shape. At its base lay information. The alchemy of today is being able to process that information. We are living in a world where knowledge strives to be distributed.
Our proposed semantics of linking data offers a mechanism for predicting meaningful relations between objects by the consensus computer. The source-code of the relevance machine is 100% open-source. All of our code is 100% open-source. Every bit of data accumulated by the consensus computer is available to anyone if one has the resources to process it.
Though the system presents the necessary service to allow for an alternative to a conventional search engine, it is not limited to this use case.
The system is extendable for numerous applications and makes it possible, for example, to design economically rational, self-owned robots, that can autonomously understand objects around them. It is also possible to construct cyberlinks with ’proof-of-location’, based on remarkable existing protocols such as FOAM, hence creating a provable location-linked object.
cyber allows for off-line search! IPFS makes it possible to easily retrieve a document from such an environment without a global internet connection. cyberd itself can be distributed by using IPFS. This creates the possibility for universal, off-line search!
cyber allows for programmable semantics. Currently, the developers of successful apps have very limited ability to explain to Google how to structure search results in a better manner. The cyber approach gives this power back to developers. Developers are now able to target specific semantics cores and index their apps as they wish.
Cyber can analyze its state based on a huge internal knowledge database that is constantly evolving. What’s more interesting is that a consensus computer may be able to continuously build a knowledge graph on its own, predicting the existence of cyberlinks and applying these predictions to its current state. This means that we can create rather crazy things, for example: war predictions, economic failure or success predictions, etc.
Cyber can be used to create amazing social networks, universal oracles, prediction markets and much more. For now, our forces are concentrated on creating the first episode, creating a meaningful and innovative search protocol. With it, creating an internet which works for you, not the other way around. Google made search available, cyber makes it accessible and open.
Don’t believe, don’t fear, don’t ask – cyber…