Dear Elon Musk,
I, on behalf of our movement, congratulate you and your teams on all of your achievements. There are so many that we will probably forget lots but the ones that we really like are:
- beat the banking industry by creating an online, secure payment mechanism at a time when banks were considered to be the only trustworthy institutions for value transactions (on and offline)
- beat the car industry at their own game by changing the model and going fully electric when nobody thought that that was acceptable for car consumers.
And if that is not enough, beat the space industry in many ways:
- create a private company instead of depending on government-owned or sponsored companies
- create sustainability by making reusable rockets that turn around and come back to their launching site or land on a tiny drone ship in the ocean, amazing!
- create reliability by learning from your mistakes (which is a lot harder with single-use rockets).
- create belief and support in your thinking by giving back the ability to launch human beings into orbit from American soil and with American technology and people.
Like I said, many more things which I have not touched upon for which you and your teams deserve kudos. There is one more endeavor that I would like to mention and have a specific interest in: Starlink.
Starlink brings connectivity services to a global audience (not just the ones that are fortunate enough to live in the developed part of the world) by using (many!) low earth-orbiting satellites and taking a very different tack on doing so. Up against a whole industry that is preaching that internet connectivity is a land and sea-based play — fantastic.
You are living proof of what Buckminster Fuller said: “To change things you must make a new model that makes the old obsolete”. This is what you are doing with every step you take: create new models to change things and make them better.
ThreeFold and I believe that we are also changing models. We believe that the internet has become a place where a small number of companies (people) dominate and control the majority of it. They dominate as they have been able to create monopolies in providing compute and storage services having 80% of an exponentially growing market. Moreover, they have only succeeded in servicing about 50% of the earth’s population with their centralized datacenter based model. This is unacceptable.
Therefore we, ThreeFold, have accepted the challenge to change that model.
We are building a peer2peer grid of (dedicated) compute and storage capacity where we invite people to create capacity for other people to consume. We are moving forward and incentivizing people to do this everywhere: in houses, in schools, in universities, in city halls, lamp posts, electric vehicles, etc. Dream crazier, what about taking it one step further and extend this capacity creation model outside of this planet’s atmosphere?
When I read an article recently stating that Starlink is sending 10’s of thousands of computers in orbit to play “laser games” and by doing so create “faster than fiber” connectivity using open source software components I knew I had to reach out to make you aware of how we are changing a different model: create an (open-source) software stack that makes an autonomous, self-healing and sustainable compute and storage fabric in a peer-to-peer manner where people create and provide services as “farmers” and consumers “cultivate” that capacity by creating and consuming digital services.
Now here’s my dream: What about inviting a space-born farmer that can create a 100% sustainable compute and storage, what about super-secure storage facilities (have to go to space to get to the actual hardware) to store private keys for secure encryption purposes. What if you could not “just” create space-born faster than fiber connectivity but we could engineer space-born, autonomous (mini) datacenters?
We love dreaming if it puts the planet first. Please reach out if this has sparked your interest and you would like to engineer together.
I am a rocket scientist that got onto a slippery slope in the 90’s when the space industry was dominated by governments and “fail fast and learn” was not invented. I ended up in the internet industry where things were moving at lightspeed and now is the time to bring the to worlds back together.