Power To The People: Interview with Internet of People

Last updated on January 3rd, 2022 at 10:28 am

When John Lennon sang “Power to the People” in 1971 he had no clue that a digital revolution will hit us hard with its mass adoption of the internet. Maybe he would hold $IOP coins if he would be still alive, as “Internet of People” is an ambitious project which dais out to give the internet users their power back, the power of controlling their data. Their recently released Blue Paper amazed us, so we had to ask for an interview – and we got one. Enjoy reading the answers of Markus Maiwald from Internet of People.

General Informations about “Internet of People”

Website: http://iop.global/ | http://join.libertaria.world/
Blue Paper (White Paper): http://iop.global/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/IoP-Bluepaper.pdf
Wallet: https://github.com/Internet-of-People/iop-core/releases/tag/v6.0.1
Community at Discord: https://discord.gg/gsRKp6T
Coinmarketcap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/internet-of-people/
Exchange: Bittrex

SmartOptions.IO: Hello Markus, thank you for taking time to answer this little interview. We at SmartOptions.Io love the IoP project and can imagine a bright future for this outstanding project.

Markus Maiwald (Internet of People): Glad for having me here! I can promise, this is one of the very few interviews you will see in 2017 😉

We are currently with both projects, Libertaria and IoP in the release phase and under heavy time pressure. Excuses if my answers seem to be somewhat short, I just have to make sure that after our IoP Bluepaper later our Titania Paper gets out there as well.

SmartOptions.IO: Firstly, we are very happy with our own investments in IoP and we are optimistic for 2018, when we skim through the Blue Paper and the roadmap. Markus, please explain our readers in a nutshell why they should jump on board as well.

Markus Maiwald (Internet of People): Foremost I like to thank you for your trust in our projects – since many months we were developing mostly in stealth mode and just a tiny but outstanding and loyal community was supporting us. This might be the reason why we are still very undervalued with roughly 5mio USD. After the latest releases, this could certainly change quickly. So if anybody likes to invest in this project, then now is still the time to get in – we were already 5x higher and I don’t see any reason why this shouldn’t happen again. Especially after our project finally gets into prototype stages. I am pretty sure the first MVP (decentral chat prototype) will hit the street soon – maybe in December. From there we have proven what we can do – and that we deliver. I want to emphasize, that we are the only project out there in the whole crypto space, that builds a truly decentralized stack, following the examples and protocols of Libertaria and the ideology of the Decentral Society Foundation.

Together with Libertaria, we aim to build the Person-to-Person Economy and the Real Sharing Economy. We are not sitting on one centralized blockchain where people have to pay tax (gas) to the owners to be able to take part. Our stack is really decentral, permissionless and non-discriminating.

SmartOptions.IO: That sounds just great – especially the part with the upcoming MVP :). Please tell us a bit more about what Internet of People (IoP) and Libertaria are building and what the difference between those both is.

Markus Maiwald (Internet of People):  The Internet of People (IoP) is an infrastructure for apps and payments that are not server based. Instead, it is completely decentralized and based on nodes. Those nodes could run on home computers or even smaller devices like a Raspberry Pi (fully) or smartphone (in part). The IoP token is a currency that is used for payments on the IoP.

Libertaria is building the protocol and libraries as well as the next gen blockchain called Hashgraph.

SmartOptions.IO: Why do they work together?

Markus Maiwald (Internet of People):  The idea came because everybody is just competing and fighting each other. But to change the world, we should not try to set up a business and use blockchain as buzz to get rich and build another next Uber – this makes me just sick and I am so bored. Instead, those that really mean it should join forces and build something, that the world needs, that no company or government can take down, something that people want to use because it is useful and doesn’t use them or their data as a product or requires their (crypto-)money and makes “them” rich. So here three projects joined forces:

1. Decentralized Society is a Foundation backing all up – it is the Think Tank and delivers the Ideology behind it.
2. Libertaria is more focused on research and development of protocols, networks, backend and standards and how this DS could be solved by technology.
3. IoP is a world-class unique specialist in Blockchains, dApps, mobile networks – IoP builds the actual apps that run in the sense of Libertaira

We decided to join those forces to finish the decentralized stack quicker and set up sth that can compete with the distributed platform solutions of industry supported projects like eth, neo, eos, lisk, etc.

We are sick of their promise of a decentralized bling-bling app that ends up as a silo solution on an outdated blockchain that is just 3 times faster than slow Bitcoin. We are often very astonished how such a technology could raise millions of dollars that mostly could run much more efficient and with lower costs without a blockchain.

So the analogy would be: They are Microsoft and Windows – we are building an OpenBSD Unix (Libertaria) or Linux with Ubuntu (IoP). We are open, a community project and free. We are a true FOSS project and our source code is open under the GPL3 license.

We do the stuff because we want and because we can. And if some country is afraid about what we are doing – then they have to send drones – otherwise, you cant stop us.

Cross Info: Community First

SmartOptions.IO: You guys think really outside the box and  break down the barriers. This is really interesting and we would love to go deeper into the details. What can you actually do with IoP?

Markus Maiwald (Internet of People):  Well, Libertaria’s protocols and IoPs Apps meet on Titania – the next generation supernode that is specialized to run dApps in containers.

This supernode will run IoP Profile Server and later the Open Graph. I won’t go too much into detail here, I like the interested reader to check out our Blueprints and various papers to this topic. But briefly, let me explain it so: Imagine, you could open your address book, and send your contact 100 IoP, and that’s it. The network will do the rest. If your contact is also part of the OpenGraph, the profile server and connected apps will handle the complicated rest. Imagine, your contact doesn’t have $IoP. but Pivx or Komodo? You can still send them the IoP, and via atomic swap, the right amount in piv or kmd will arrive.

Now you would say: but wait, why should anybody move IoP? Well, nobody needs to! It is an open network of protocols. If for example a wallet like Nxt just enables this library, then the wallet suddenly can “speak” this language and utilize this “Mercury” Protocol and all Nxt wallets would share the same userbase with all IoP Wallets. This is just one small example where we are heading to in just a few months, as the foundation now is ready and works, this is a realistic goal!

If you don’t want to use IoP Mercury, then you can tweak and configure the Titania node to your needs: You could setup Titania, fire up a PIVX Wallet, and start taking. No need to run your Desktop PC 24hrs or having a VPS Server somewhere on the Internet. You can run a tiny raspberry pi at home and let it act as a master node for Dash or Pivx. Here you have a huge incentive why to have at least such a Titania Node running, even in case you don’t use IoP.

If you read our Roadmap you will find the ambitious plans for 2018 were we are going to correct Bitcoins biggest problem: there is no incentive to run a node to support the infrastructure. I will not reveal now in detail but we are planing to offer Node-Services, that could earn transaction costs for the node owner. One could offer in his chapter notary services for example. Libertaria is working on a reference model how to replace local authoritives and basically all those services could be offered from trusted supernodes. Although this will take some months, I want to make sure that the users know how crazy we are and where we are heading to. 😉

Cross Info about the Use Cases of IoP:

SmartOptions.IO:  That is truly revolutionary and – as much as we hate this buzzword – exceptional REALLY disruptive. What about the data itself? Wouldn’t the tech gain to much power over the people that way? Privacy becomes more and more a serious issue – take Uber as an example, it has recently been hacked and the user data of 57M users became exposed. The upcoming GDPR laws, ect. and whatelse – How will an Internet of People handle this?

Markus Maiwald (Internet of People):  Another heart of the project is the ownership of data. We make sure, that People come first and IoT comes second. We protect peoples identites and allow people to maintain their own data. Privacy is key to us. Actually everybody is concered regarding the GDPR laws in EU and USA. Let me assure you, with IoP this is not even a blink of a concern. We released today the Bluepaper and inside you find our core values – among them is privacy and ownership of data well addressed. With us there is no censorship possible, no spying and no interception of any kind. People can interact freely and safe. 

Cross Info: Own Your Data

SmartOptions.IO:  We all know it is common sense to have a look for the team behind a project, before investing into it. What about Internet of People – who is actually creating this paradigm shift?

Markus Maiwald (Internet of People):  Well, our team is top notch coming from all around the world. Most people are already working since years in Open Source, they know what community is and they live the ideas of self-souvereignity and decentralization. I don’t want to boast here now about our qualifications – I brought them together despite their knowledge, and out of reasons. And I can tell you if you would ask Alex from Ukraine (whose house is left behind on the now Russian Krim side) – and Roberto from Venezuela – who is living under the constant fear of being jailed anytime for working on this project that is anti-socialistic – then you would get completely different answers. Yet still, everybody knows why he is part of the team and for what goal. You cannot compare this to any project out there that I am aware off – at least not with any that has a Company or Foundation (and ICO) in Switzerland or Singapore. In fact, if there is any project like this approaching us – we run away.

Part of our Team are developers and professionals with their very own story – that makes us unique.

SmartOptions.IO:  That sounds like a bunch of interesting people, all motivated intrisically, which is a very good thing for a project. A word for possible investors, especially for those who are not yet too much in Crypto and scared about a bubble burst. What is your point of view in regards to a possible bubble – and what will happen with Internet of People if it plops?

Markus Maiwald (Internet of People):  The market in total is not in a bubble – it is still in the early adopter stage and will go to the moon for the next years – although some parts are already crippling and I think some projects will crack away and burst. Mabye even implode. And we will see more regulations coming in. We have to be fast and make sure that the crazy assholes like politicians and policymakers come too late. If they are coming after End of 2018 then neither a market crash nor their crazy slavery laws can harm us any more. I can then assure any investor, that his tokens are safe, sound, private and secure.

Buying IoP will never be cheaper than nowadays. I am currently setting up a team that is working on implementing the consensus algorithm Algorand. Alone this could be worth hundreds of millions for companies like Visa – just, that I give a fuck and we will open source it. If we get this up as Prototype in the next 3 months then IoP will never be what it was before. And this is just one perspective. Look into our Roadmap and read carefully the blueprint and you will understand were we are heading to.

SmartOptions.IO:  Thank you so much for your time, Markus! Exciting times are ahead with the Internet of People – we wish you best of luck with the revolution, you already started.