FAQ

Bitcloud is an open source software platform for cryptographically supported, distributed grid-based, network services (i.e., beginning with storage) that are automatically managed and maintained by randomly assigned consensus synchronization operations. (Phew. You asked for it.)

The Bitcloud project is a heirarchy-free, consensus driven project. The worker-contributors are the owners of the project and its development of the Bitcloud platform.

Bitcloud has learned from a variety of previously developed projects (including LAFS, etc.), with lessons reflected upon current Bitcloud design. However, no known project currently has the design and/or strategy that Bitcloud seeks to implement. Still, the Bitcloud team always looks to cooperate with compatible projects versus compete.

The timeline is currently under development. However, current-state timeline appears to indicate the likelihood of design completion before 05/2014, Alpha version completion on or before 7/2014, and Beta version completion on or before 9/2014.

The fundraising campaign will begin along with the start of coding work, and will be managed in paralell using a phased approach.

As an open source project, developer resources are donated but also not reliably available on a full-time basis, so timelines are subject to change.

We offer a great deal of information for our project, and documentation is continuing to be developed. Of course, this website is a great initial information resource, since it contains the overview of what the Bitcloud team plans to accomplish. A blog and a forum will also run of this website which will provide current project information.

Apart from the above, we offer a technical wiki - see link at the top of this page - for those with greater technical undestanding of the programming world. Bitcloud project has a github page, which also hosts one location of our white paper (both technical and non-technical).

The team also uses and communicates on a freenode IRC channel where we discuss the project. You are welcome to ask questions within this channel, along with Facebook, twitter, and other social networking pages.

The very reason that bitcoin chose to decentralize the recording of transactions. The problem with centralisation is that it gives to much power to those who hold the data. In the case of bitcoin, they wish to grant the use of currency back to their user - where governments can not increase the currency in circulation leading to inflation.

Now, with our project, we wish to do the same thing with the internet - we wish to grant internet users back their power. By removing the ISP, we remove the problems of filtering, bandwidth throttling etc., and to keep anonyimity (we plan to link into the TOR system). By distributing the system, we ensure that no one can have complete power over the system - each node needs another node, and so can not exist soley and thus have little power over the user.

There are many ways to help out! As this is a programming project, of course we need programmers, so if you have any experience in programming, than you are more than welcome to join us, for almost any language (we are aiming for cross platform, even to mobile devices).

We also need people in other disciplines - we keep up social media sites which need to be updated. We also need a more general PR team, to handle user responses.

For those with a more artistic touch, we are also creating videos for this project, and need icon and graphic creation, music creation etc.

So, feel free to join :).

As mentioned above in the "find out more question", there are multiple avenues of contact. For more specific contacts, we are operating our own email address. On top of this, we do operate two IRC channels - #bitcloud and #bitcloud-dev - on the freenode network, where you can answer a question and it will be answered quite quickly by whicher team member is online.