What problem does Substratum solve?
The current version of the world wide web, how we currently experience the internet, has become increasingly centralized, censored and is faced with many ways to be controlled. Data must travel through designated hardware access points (usually servers and hubs) and this creates centralization and risks of censorship.
This leads to problems ranging from censorship at the behest of national governments to a bias in the curation of content users see based on opaque, unaudited curation algorithms.
The decentralized web (also called Web 3.0) is a web controlled by independent and privately-owned computers that allow for a web experience that is both secure and open, without using gatekeepers.
The Substratum Network is made up of different nodes, networks of peer-to-peer computers, who then should be able to deliver secure content anywhere in the world using cryptography, ending the need for solutions like VPNs or Tor.
The Substratum Network incentivizes network users with its own cryptocurrency token to essentially rent out their unused computing resources as a hosting platform for websites. Hosting costs are billed through per-request micro-transactions, inhibiting he payment of unutilized resources.
Competitors to Substratum are blockchain projects like Shift, Storj, Maidsafe, Internxt and IPFS. Each project having its own way of trying to solve the storage of data in a decentralized way, while incentivizing people to share their spare disk space. Substratum, of course, will also be competing with centralized data hosting solutions like AWS (Amazon Web Services).
The code, at this moment, is not open-source. Substratum will become a fully open-sourced project upon launching version 2 in the beginning of 2018.
The question remains if decentralized data hosting is going to be able to compete with centralized solutions like AWS. Taking in account the scalability advantages centralized solutions have, this is not a given. Ultimately, the average end users care more about the price rather than the solution being decentralized.
