TLDR: The Ultranet, a new type of marketplace that is fully-decentralized, private, and censorship-resistant with its own native hyper-deflationary cryptocurrency called Ultra (aka "digital oil"), will be launching on **February 25th at 9am PST**. See the rest of the post for details, read the white paper [here](https://ift.tt/2Si0HpF), sign up [here](http://ultranet.one) to be notified, ask questions on [r/Ultranet](https://ift.tt/2UkNezT), review the code [here](https://ift.tt/2Sc4tkp MotivationToday, the world’s major technology platforms (Amazon, Alibaba, Google, Baidu, Facebook, WeChat, etc) are controlled by a relatively small group of people with relatively limited oversight. As a result, virtually all of our information is owned by people who may not have our best interests at heart, and the basic rules that govern virtually everything we do online get decided through opaque processes that we have very little transparency on and input into. Moreover, the owners of these platforms can exhibit an unprecedented amount of sway over our political process not only through traditional lobbying but also through their control over us as their users. Thus we are left with a situation in which what we say, what we see, what we hear, what we buy, and, if the trend continues, what we can and can't do with our lives, is ultimately out of our control, with little indication that things will change anytime soon. Is a world where a handful of platform oligarchs rule over us the kind of world we want to live in? Or could there perhaps be a better way to organize society’s technical infrastructure?# Summary and LinksThe Ultranet is the peoples' answer to the platform oligarchy.* **Summary:** The Ultranet is first and foremost a decentralized private marketplace with a native cryptocurrency called Ultra (aka "digital oil") that can be purchased through a private decentralized exchange embedded in the Ultranet software. The Ultranet is designed such that each user who runs the software downloads and stores a cryptographically-secured copy of all of the listings, orders, ratings, and all other marketplace data through a novel concept we introduce called a "block pool." This means that as long as a single node somewhere in the world is running the Ultranet software, all data, including all listings and all reputation data, will be preserved. This is in stark contrast to virtually all platforms that exist today, which are subject to censorship of listings and/or outright take-down, the latter of which results in all reputation data being lost. Indeed, we are not aware of any marketplace that exists today, centralized or otherwise, that offers a comparable level of censorship-resistance and privacy (the Ultranet is pseudo-anonymous like Bitcoin), and the Ultranet achieves this while maintaining full feature parity and user experience parity with existing centralized marketplaces. The Ultranet also introduces Ultra, a hyper-deflationary cryptocurrency that is burned every time an order is placed on the system and by merchants in order to promote their listings, resulting in exponentially increasing scarcity over time (i.e. hyper-deflation). We refer to Ultra as "digital oil" because it is steadily burning away over time, unlike nearly all existing cryptocurrencies which do not actively burn or deflate over time (including Bitcoin and Ethereum).* **White paper:** You can read the white paper to learn more about how it works here: [http://ultranet.one/white\\\_paper.pdf\]([http://ultranet.one/white\_paper.pdf](http://ultranet.one/white_paper.pdf))* **Subreddit:** You can join the Ultranet subreddit to ask questions here: [r/Ultranet](https://ift.tt/2Ul5CIZ **Code:** You can review the code [here](https://ift.tt/2Sic7tD **Launch date:** The Ultranet launches on **February 25th at 9am PST** and you can sign up to be notified here: [http://ultranet.one\]([http://ultranet.one](http://ultranet.one/))# FeaturesBelow are its main features:* It offers a higher level of privacy and censorship-resistance than any marketplace platform that exists today.* It is fully decentralized and pseudo-anonymous like Bitcoin and everything is generally end-to-end encrypted.* As long as a single node somewhere in the world is running, all data, including all listings and reputation data, is preserved.* This is made possible through a new concept we introduce in the paper called a “block pool.”* It comes packaged with a rich graphical user interface that provides a user experience that is on-par with existing non-decentralized, non-private alternatives (and that we think is superior in many ways).* The software includes a built-in decentralized cryptocurrency exchange platform, a built-in decentralized messaging platform, and a hyper-deflationary cryptocurrency called Ultra.* The decentralized exchange embedded in its software allows any user to seamlessly exchange Bitcoin for Ultra without involvement from any third parties, a feature made possible by a new concept we introduce in the paper called “interchange” (Monero can also be used).* The complexity of the decentralized exchange mechanism is completely abstracted away from the user, making the experience feel identical to depositing and exchanging coins on a centralized exchange.* The messaging platform is end-to-end encrypted and fully-decentralized.* Ultra, the cryptocurrency native to the Ultranet platform, is hyper-deflationary in the long run (much more so than Bitcoin in fact), and can power a network effect to bootstrap usage of the platform.* We refer to Ultra as “digital oil” because, unlike Bitcoin or Ethereum, it is constantly “burning” away over time through commissions as users make purchases, thus making it more and more scarce.* These features are implemented on a new type of blockchain written entirely from-scratch in Go.* In the paper we also present a proposal that uses the decentralized exchange concept to scale blockchains to thousands of transactions per second without compromising on decentralization or censorship-resistance.* The Ultranet is completely open-source, which means that everything from the UI to how listings are ranked is collaboratively modifiable and upgradable. As such, through the power of global collaboration, the hope is that Ultranet can become the first "Decentralized Platform Monopoly."
Submitted February 03, 2020 at 11:47PM
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