Latest news with #StephanFebruary
Coin Geek
23-06-2025
- Coin Geek
OverNode is a 'Sneakernet' for the digital world
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... We're looking forward to the first release of OverNode. Developed by long-time blockchain developer Stephan February, it's a Swiss Army knife of social, news, and commerce functions where everything is peer-to-peer. February sat down with 1Sat Ordinals' David Case for a Q&A and explanation of how to make all these networking functions work in a distributed way without any centralized servers. It's not simple! OverNode's first mobile app features a wallet, marketplace, news feed, contacts list, private messaging, microblogging and audio spaces, and a timestamp archive. Yes, other apps already do all these things, but they all have centralized servers coordinating all this activity behind the scenes. Basing it on a true P2P, distributed network between individual devices is not an easy task. February recently discussed OverNode and its features with Kurt Wuckert, Jr. on the CoinGeek Weekly Livestream. This Q&A with Case dives deeper into the technical details of how it works. What's a Sneakernet, and what are the challenges? 'Sneakernet' means transferring information (digital or otherwise) by physically transporting it from one location or device to another. Though it's an information-age term that usually refers to copying data onto portable media and carrying it around, the concept is also similar to physical mail services. Sending, delivering, and receiving the information are three separate processes that may occur at different times, and there is no central function monitoring everything. Building a Sneakernet (or 'store-and-forward' service) for digital devices isn't an easy problem to solve, February says. Even in the physical world, there are issues: a message can get lost or delayed before it reaches its destination; it could be delivered to the wrong place; or the receiver may not notice it. There's no 100% guarantee a sent message will get through. He says this challenge of building a digital, delay-tolerant network inspired him to build OverNode. 'What can I do today, not only to make Sneakernet viable, but also to solve a problem I've seen persistently happen with distributed systems in general (not just P2P), which is the problem of altruistic nodes operating on the network.' But what's actually happening, i.e., how exactly do you make a store-and-forward service work? Case asks. Direct messaging is one thing, but if you have a news/chat group similar to Signal or Telegram, how do you ensure all group members can see a post intended for them? Essentially, nodes on the network have specialized functions while remaining P2P nodes and not acting as centralized servers. One of these is simply called 'store-and-forward,' there are also bootstrap services with distributed hash tables (DHT), which are a way to discover other peers, note their addresses, and help establish connections between them. Once a user starts their mobile app, their device announces its presence to the bootstrap service, and its live status is 'gossiped' to others on the network. This announcement doesn't go to the entire network, but a subset of it—maybe other devices nearby, using a nearest-neighbor algorithmic technique like Chord. February says he's been using Kademlia DHTs—the idea is to have a key-value store, the state of which is distributed and replicated automatically among several different peers. The information stored on the DHT could be your device's IP and perhaps a long-term stable moniker, e.g., your personal handle, that would identify someone joining the network and be used to announce its status. The bootstrap service can determine the 'closeness' of other nodes, which doesn't refer to physical distance but the mathematical equivalent using consistent hashing. Everyone's hash table will, therefore, be different, and the system can find the most efficient other nodes that may have the information an individual node is looking for. February describes it as a form of Six Degrees of Separation, but in practice, it happens very quickly, with everyone's table updated with the relevant information. BitTorrent uses similar techniques for large file-sharing. By the way, OverNode's interface also looks nice! If you're interested in hearing all the technical details, the Case/February video has a lot of other interesting points. Case also talks about the similar challenges involved in BSV's Overlay Networks, keeping track of massive amounts of data on a distributed network and being able to trust the information you're receiving. The two also dive into the economic model behind OverNode and similar networks, as well as how SPV payments can be layered into the services. The purpose of the social network-style app February is building now is mainly to prove OverNode's concept of the distributed 'data plane.' If it works, it'll have far wider-reaching use cases and consequences. Watch: New token protocol and Ordinals with Stephan February title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen="">
Coin Geek
02-06-2025
- Business
- Coin Geek
Stephan February untangles Overnode, P2P networks
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... On the latest episode of the CoinGeek Weekly Livestream, Stephan February, architect of Overnode, joined Kurt Wuckert Jr. to tell him about his latest project. This episode was an insightful deep dive into peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, the use cases for micropayments, and more. title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen=""> Who is Stephan February and what is Overnode? February has been on the CoinGeek Weekly Livestream before. He's a coder and dedicated BSV builder who has developed software, token protocols, and much more. 'Overnode is not a wallet, but it has a wallet built into it,' February explained. It's a native mobile app that joins two networks; its own peer-to-peer mobile network and the Bitcoin network itself. Overnode has its own P2P network, so it can do Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) and exchange arbitrary data separate from the Bitcoin network, February noted. What is the practical use of Overnode? February explained that Overnode was born out of an obsession with computing and P2P networks in general. He doesn't want to have a backend for it; unlike other apps, there's no server to coordinate user activity. This will be local-first for data and will not have such a server. February wants Overnode to be as useful as Twitter, Slack, and Telegram. He envisions micropayment-incentivized rules in Spaces, such as someone being able to pay .1 BSV to grab the mic and shut everyone else up for a minute in a Space. He also sees how micropayments could be useful for invite-only Spaces, paying hosts, banning specific identities, and so on. Unlike in Bitcoin, where P2P means person-to-person, in Overnode, it means peer-to-peer networks. Overnode is a P2P gossip network resembling a mesh; once he properly grasped it, he saw how all sorts of use cases are possible. What are the incentives to run and secure Overnode? Looking back to torrent networks, February explained how there are seeders and leeches. The latter contributes nothing to the network, and he has a few choice words for them. These networks relied on altruism, but that's not necessary now that we have micropayments. With them, we can financially incentivize hosting, connecting, sharing, etc; you can get paid for people moving, storing, and sharing data in the network. Having this network of incentivized operators that assist in the liveness of data further opens up the potential for what is possible, all without the need for an expensive backend server. Wuckert noted that Satoshi Nakamoto preferred true peer-to-peer transactions, with IP addresses being the original way. Paying public keys was seen as an OK compromise if the user was offline. He thinks Overnode could bring back many of those original ideas; it's somewhat cypherpunk in that sense. February said he wanted to go back and re-examine some of the assumptions from the cypherpunks in the early 2000s. As he builds out Overnode, he realizes he is architecting systems of serverless interaction, and he can see the beginnings of a circular data economy which can evolve. For example, he can curate information and charge a fee for access. How will you get past Overnode becoming a tool for grey and black markets? February said he only cares to the extent that he doesn't want it to be used to harm people. However, he is also trying to build the application in such a way that harm reduction incentives are implemented at the edge without infringing upon the liberty of individuals. There will be tools to allow individuals to distance themselves from this 'dark' activity. As with the Internet, there are ways to distance yourself from it. For example, there could be curated, verified marketplaces that are known as safe. What is the problem that Overnode solves? February isn't sure this is a problem for most people, but it is for him. He doesn't like how the Internet has evolved over time, and he doesn't like how human interactions are brokered by web browsers and social media platforms. He's always been interested in what the world would look like if we had Bitcoin in the heyday of P2P networks in the late 90s and early 2000s. While the platform model is great for many things, coordinating human activity is one. But there are downsides, and he wants to enable peer-to-peer interactions with true data privacy. Essentially, it's his contribution to trying to solve the platform dystopia we find ourselves in. To hear more about criticisms of Overnode, what adoption might look like, why tokens aren't products, and more, check out the livestream episode here. Watch: Peer-to-peer electronic cash system—that's micropayments title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen="">
