This project consists of a set of specifications for a hosting blockchain with related protocol and a related reference implementation. The main document is the Whitepaper. The official web presence can be found under http://blackgate.networld.to.
The goal of this project is to design and develop a truly distributed hosting protocol that is capable to host semi-static pages without any central hosting provider. The resulting paradigm shift could be summarized in the following sentence: Instead of going to a page, the page comes to you!
As semi-static pages we define all pages that have no database as backend, can be distributed in a static way and that evolve via file updates. The idea was taken from the blog generation engine Jekyll. In comparison to Wordpress, Jekyll generates static files, after writing a new blog entry or page. It does not need any dynamic component, like a database and can be hence distributed easily.
On access the background logic downloads the related blockchain of that page and based on different hosting metrics if the page should be stored and/or hosted locally. This distributes multiple pages on end-user devices and eliminates hosting provider. By having a smart hosting algorithm it can be guaranteed that pages are 24/7 online and that accesses are optimized for response times, or any other metric, resulting in a self-managed overlay network for hosting pages.
In order to protect the privacy of each node Tor Hidden Services are used. That not only protects senstive information like the geographical location of the node, that could be extracted from the IP, but also allows to host pages behind NATs and Firewalls.
The blockchain, a public ledger of page updates and clones, guarantees cryptographically that the content returned by a random node is the same as the content published by the content creator. All validations are performed on client-side and invalid pages are never shown to the user.
We encourage as many people as possible to read the specifications, check the source code and gives us feedback. You can start by reading the Whitepaper, contributing to the reference implementation (found in this repository), develop an alternative implementation, discuss with us changes, ...
Please contact us under blackgate@networld.to or approach us personally. We are looking forward to hear from you.