About the Project
Personal information is becoming more valuable and significant in the rapidly developing digital world. Personal photos, files, data on relatives and children, etc. are currently stored separately in various centralized services and are often used without the permission of the data owner, sometimes even causing harm.
The lack of secure storage is a problem for Internet users. BitDust Technology solves this problem by giving users the ability to store their data fully encrypted on a decentralized network via an easy-to-use application, and to share data only with trusted contacts.
The BitDust network consists of users and supporters - these are roles, not different groups of people: by default every node both stores its own data on other nodes and provides a portion of its own disk space to others, see Sharing resources. Users are ordinary people using the network to manage their files securely. Data that a user uploads is archived, divided into blocks, each block is encrypted and then split into fragments with redundancy added, and finally the fragments are transferred to the computers of your suppliers. Your software continuously monitors every supplier to make sure your data is available.
Supporters maintain the BitDust network. BitDust will have multiple roles that will support the network and enable users to safely and securely store their private files. The roles which we currently offer are the supplier, the router, the ID server and the DHT seed node. The supplier contributes storage to the BitDust network, thereby enabling customers to store and access their encrypted files. The router helps other nodes to reach each other inside the BitDust network and send/receive encrypted packets. The ID server stores and publishes copies of identity files of other users, so that nodes are able to find each other and verify each other's digital signatures (see How authentication works) - there are many ID servers in the network owned by different people and every identity file is stored on several of them at once. The DHT seed node helps other nodes to join the distributed hash-table, which stores service information of the network. As a supporter you can fulfill multiple roles at the same time depending on your hardware.
There are supporting roles we plan to enable in the future: the Miner (or, as an alternative approach, the Merchant) and the ReBuilder. The blockchain within BitDust already works: the software includes a built-in wallet and storage contracts between customers and suppliers - at the moment this does not affect the operation of the network in any way, and the function can be disabled in the program settings, see Blockchain and storage contracts. Mining services also exist in the software, but are disabled by default; in the future miners will maintain the blockchain, which will be used to compensate supporters within the network. The ReBuilder is not implemented yet. The ReBuilder will restore, on behalf of the user, the data that was lost when one of the suppliers went offline.
Until the ReBuilder role is implemented, the mechanism of automatic data rebuilding is executed by the BitDust software on the user's own device: while the software is running, it monitors the suppliers, replaces unreliable ones and reassembles lost data fragments on the new nodes without any action from the user.
BitDust is written in Python using the pure Twisted framework; it is an open source project published under GNU AGPLv3.
An alpha version is already available for you to try out. If you want to join the project or support the team in any way possible, please contact us.
We aim to build a holistic ecosystem that protects your privacy in the network by establishing p2p communications between users and maximizing the distribution of information flows within the network. We believe that this technology will benefit society by increasing ownership of personal data and protecting data from unauthorized access or censorship.