Imagine if Satoshi Nakamoto gave a public keynote at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Record that session. Transcribe it. Now turn it into code.
The result would probably look a lot like Orchid. We are proud to be among the project’s very first partners, providing staking services for the OXT token as well as Orchid nodes and VPN bandwidth.
Conventionally, online privacy has involved some combination of either trust in the privacy services provider (such as a VPN service) or reliance on altruism to maintain multi-hop relays (such as Tor).
Why is this an issue? The Orchid whitepaper lays out the network privacy tradeoffs nicely:
While VPNs work well enough for most use cases, they suffer from inherent weaknesses in the centralized trust based model. Users have little assurance that their VPN provider is not secretly logging and sharing data due to government coercion or the lure of additional revenue. … Current peer to peer systems such as Tor or I2P construct multi-hop circuits to hide route information from any single party. However these systems are free and thus suffer in terms of both performance and security.
The imminent tokenized future addresses these shortcomings. It is why Bloq is excited to do its part to help build this network.
Orchid CEO Dr. Steven Waterhouse (Seven) agrees: “Bloq is a leader in the blockchain space and will play an important role in helping grow the Orchid network. Incentivization is the missing piece in peer-to-peer privacy, and making it easy for people to earn tokens by delegating their stake to bandwidth providers will do exactly that. Bloq is a key partner in our goal of creating a community that makes the Internet a more free and private place.”
In short, Orchid sits precisely at the intersection of this decade’s two most vital technology topics: online privacy and tokenized networks. The economic incentives that Orchid provides will supplement the altruistic spirit that has long supported peer-to-peer online privacy with a powerful value network that encourages increased performance, reliability and security.
Matthew Roszak is co-founder and chairman of Bloq.