A variety of applications made possible by the Internet has revolutionized global communication and made the lives of billions of people more convenient. At present, the adoption of the IPv6 standard has emerged as the primary necessity to deal with the billions of linked devices and users interacting throughout the world.
IPv6, the upgraded version of the Internet’s underlying communication protocol, has received a lot of attention recently for its potential to enhance the privacy, speed, and reliability of crypto and blockchain interactions through direct peer-to-peer communication.
The IPv6 standard provides trillions of 128-bit identifiers, allowing for each of the over 10 billion devices connected to the Internet to have its own unique IP address. With this, proper IP-to-IP or peer-to-peer communication can become a reality.
History of IP-to-IP connection on blockchains
Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, outlined IP-to-IP transactions as the standard method of sending Bitcoin payments in his white paper from 2008. In the event that one of the parties is unavailable, the transaction can still be broadcast to the entire network using a public “Bitcoin address” (a hash of the private key).
nChain Chief Scientist Dr. Craig Wright, who has been outed in 2015 as the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin and holder of the Bitcoin white paper copyright, then wrote a series of published works in late 2018 explaining how IPv6 may make Bitcoin’s IP-to-IP transaction scheme practical and secure, and how the original Bitcoin would fulfill the internet’s promise of payment capabilities by making it a core component of the protocol.
“Network systems work on an exponential growth curve. Things are exponentially less expensive each year and incrementally more powerful. This will drive applications and uses that people have not even thought of,” Wright wrote in his post entitled “Security in a world of IPv6 and Bitcoin.”
“As strange as it may seem, a well-defined and deployed cloud and IPv6 system can actually be far more secure than the traditional crunchy shell-firewall model. Now, with IPv6 jumbo blocks and BSV as a payment channel… We have a path to Internet of Value on demand,” Wright concluded.
Founder and President of IPv6 forum Latif Ladid agreed with Wright and emphasized how IPv6’s abilities and potentialities will be maximized when partnered with a scalable blockchain. Wright and Ladid, two of the brightest minds of modern technology are working together to combine the powerful capabilities of IPv6 and the BSV Blockchain, the largest public blockchain that has unlocked limitless scaling.
“Forty-five percent of the world population is using [IPv6] without knowing it. And I think we’ll see in the hype curve that, basically, IPv6 is booming. And also, BSV and blockchain are also on the same curve going upwards. So, they are going to be very good roommates in conquering the Internet in a very big style,” Ladid said.
Unique addressing and security
There are two significant benefits of IPv6 over its predecessor, IPv4. Although IPv6 has been around for a while, most of the internet community is still primarily using IPv4. The main benefit of IPv6 is that it supports an almost limitless number of addresses, rather than the only four billion that IPv4 does. This number is obviously insufficient to provide a unique IP address for each device connected to the internet.
“The current Internet works as such: so, instead of having end-to-end—if not, let’s say, peer-to-peer communication like we have on the phone—we have somebody in between us who is basically telling us, ‘I am the master, and you are my slaves. So, I’ll make you talk to each other, but I decide on [how] to do it,’” Ladid explained.
“The original design of the Internet is that the big mainframes talk to each other directly. In the meantime, we have the telecom world that has joined and they don’t give IP addresses to the users. They give only dynamic, if not, only private IP addresses, which makes them rather slaves instead of masters in the connection. So, people can’t talk to each other unless somebody else makes that possible,” Ladid added.
People and devices cannot directly connect (or transact) over IPv4 since they must share addresses, usually via NAT (network address translation) that employs changed headers. But IPv6 would give every gadget and person in the world a unique IP address for the next millennia to come, which will revolutionize the current internet through peer-to-peer communication.
And the BSV blockchain provides the perfect foundation for this because it can manage enormous volumes of data and transaction at fees that range from 1/100 to 1/1000 of a cent. In this case, Bitcoin will evolve from a network of nodes and miners into a network of users.
Instead of “trusting” their information to social media platforms and other businesses, users can have more assurance that their data is safe and will always be theirs to control. The combination of IPv6 and a scalable blockchain opens up a world of new ideas and possibilities.
