Safety Detectives: Please share your company background, how you got started, and your mission.
BitDust: In short, BitDust is an open-source project of a worldwide distributed peer-to-peer network that provides online storage, safe communications, and full control of your own private data. A key benefit, in my opinion, is to be as independent as possible. BitDust network doesn’t have any centralization, so there is no governance or monitoring of the users required (or even possible). It may sound much too optimistic, but that is my lifestyle: all or nothing!
We started many years ago with my friend Vincent who thought of the first idea and designs of a distributed storage network, but with a few different principles that BitDust has at the moment. After a couple of years, he decided to leave the project, but I found myself very enthusiastic about the project’s future and continued the development. Many things have changed since that moment, many people helped me on the way throughout the years, many new ideas have arisen and changed the main concept of the network organization and direction of the project. If we are talking about amission, I believe these words are very descriptive: “Digital freedom and maximum control of your private data.”
SD: What is the main service your company offers?
BD: A completely free-to-use and open-source App that you can download from the website or get from the App Store and install on your device: Server/VPS/PC/desktop/mobile/tablet/etc. Any operating system should work just fine—it is highly portable because it is written entirely in Python.
The first version of the app will provide just a few essential features:
- Create identity in the network – register yourself
- Restore your identity from the private key backup
- Find other users in the network by “nickname”
- Secure encrypted and independent private and group chat online with other people
- Upload/download files to the network
- Share files with other users
Currently, I am building the front-end part of the Android App.
SD: What is something unique that helps you stay ahead of your competition?
BD: I saw many similar projects of a distributed storage networks. Many of them have many unique features; in the last few years, those things have been booming.
Definitively there is a big difference with traditional centralized solutions provided by IT giants. But I believe BitDust is not able to win this competition and is not even going to try to win. Instead of going to an existing market, BitDust is actually going to create a new one.
I will try to explain this subject in a bit of a different way, with an example. There is competition between Windows, Apple, and Google because they provide commercial and licensed operating systems and are selling devices based on those, but they are not competing with Linux, which is totally free and open-source. Instead of that, their own OS sometimes is based on early Linux versions. And if we are talking, for example, about operating systems for cloud virtual servers, Linux has no competitors at all.
In other words, the BitDust project is trying to provide an alternative way to do similar things within a society where no competition is required at all.
SD: What do you think are the worst cyberthreats today?
BD: Clouds and SaaS are the main threats in my opinion. More and more online services and companies are now going to the cloud and just four companies will own the whole world’s IT in a few years: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and IBM. Remember what happened with the latest US elections when they just shut down the whole social network and banned Donald Trump in the social apps. They accumulate too much power and it is just a question of when they will get merged together and become unstoppable.