Twister: Decentralized, P2P analog Twitter

Today I want to tell you about such an interesting project as Twister.

Twister is a microblogging service (similar to twitter) , but it is distinguished by several very interesting technologies that were used simultaneously.
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Namely: Bitcoin Block Chain, Bittorrent DHT, Bittorrent Swarm .

In other words, it is a completely anonymous, decentralized microblogging service that incorporates the best of Bittorrent and Bitcoin.

Now there is a boom of decentralized services, Bitcoin, Bittorrent, Bitmessage , Tox messenger, they are united by the common idea - to be independent from everyone, to be out of control.

The creator of Twister, Miguel Freitas , believes that microblogging provided tremendous assistance in various protests in many states. But, unfortunately, the policy of “information security” of states goes against the freedom of speech, and under the pressure of certain structures, incorrect messages or entire accounts have been deleted.

And of course, sometimes the state requires de-anonymization — from companies — after receiving all the records about the user's visits.

It was the idea of ​​lack of freedom of speech in a convenient format that prompted him to create this service.

What should include a convenient way to disseminate information?
- An interface that will be understandable to most users
- Mobile support
- Protection from global control and espionage
- Normal usernames (Comparing Twister and Bitmessage)

The author of this messenger in his whitepaper makes a comparison with existing federal social networks and such an application as Bitmessage.
Unfortunately, all these properties have not previously been encountered in any of the services or protocols.

And now let's talk what Twister consists of.

What and what is used

Bitcoin block chain

A chain of blocks from the Bitcoin system is used to store registration information, in other words, when you register in the system - the data about you is sent to everyone. This allows you to protect you from theft of your nickname in the system and does not allow other people, under the guise of you, to publish false information.

Please note that the block chain is different from Bitcoin.

Bittorrent DHT

This technology is used to send your messages to the network, transfer personal messages and other content that may be in the network.

As soon as you write a post - it will be sent to the DHT network and stored with you for further distribution.

Please note that each member of the network does not store all the network data (it is likely that if you have few subscribers, that information from your blog will be unavailable if you are not connected to the Internet)

Bittorrent swarm

Swarm - swarm
This technology is used to almost instantly update information among subscribers or people nearby.
It works in parallel with DHT, which allows to solve the same problem in various ways, additionally unloading the main DHT network from requests.

Generate new blocks

Having read to this point, you may ask, " But wait, the generation of blocks in a bitcoin network requires a lot of computational resources, who is doing this and what is the reward ?"

You are right, by default you do not generate new blocks on the network, but you can start generating them, and as a reward you will be able to send an advertising message that will be displayed to all network users.

User interface

Twister - consists of two parts - the demon and the web interface.
The web API interface requests information from the local daemon, the division into two parts allows you to implement various interfaces to Twister.

The original interface looks like this:

Features and network status

- Similar to Bitcoin - if you lose the secret key - you will lose access to your account without the possibility of recovery.
- Now, on average, there are about 500 active nodes and about 18,000 units in a chain in the network.
- All that is on Twitter is here as well - an indication of the user through the @ sign, hashtags, search by hashtags and users, support account description, the ability to download an avatar.

These features may sound ridiculous, but do not forget - this is a P2P decentralized system , everything is much more difficult to implement in it than with the traditional client-server approach.


The project is very young and actively developing.
Now there is no ready, compiled version of Twister, but everyone can compile their own twister.
Assembly instructions: OS X , Windows , Linux

Links

The official site is twister.net.co
Official repository github.com/miguelfreitas/twister-core
Web interface github.com/miguelfreitas/twister-html.git
Whitepaper arxiv.org/pdf/1312.7152v1.pdf

Now the interface is being Russified, you can help and see here github.com/iShift/twister-html