Building a more trustworthy and lucrative internet with future technology

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“The internet is broken” is a phrase I’ve been hearing for multiple years now. What’s puzzling is nothing has changed yet, even though we have the technology available to fix it.

When we say the Internet is broken, it means our digital economy is upside down—fake news is rampant, search results are mediocre, content creators are left behind, and the “Big Five”—Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL), Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), Meta (NASDAQ: META), and Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL)—own all our data. With the marriage of blockchain, AI, and IPv6, all of these pain points will be alleviated, and we can build a more trustworthy and lucrative digital economy for all.

The Metanet is a new internet in development that makes the most out of these technologies by combining them, using blockchain as its backbone. Jake Jones, Head of Infrastructure and Business Program Manager of the BSV Association, is an expert on the Metanet and shared his thoughts with CoinGeek at IEEE COINS in London.

“One of the coolest parts about blockchain is the fact that you can timestamp things globally, and then you can use that as data provenance,” he said.

“You can also track the integrity of that data from origin all the way through till it gets to you, and you can ensure that that data hasn’t changed before it’s gotten to you from its point of origin,” he said.

“So that’s how we’re going to take care of the misinformation and the fake news problem that’s going on today,” Jones added.

In addition to solving the misinformation issue, blockchain enables micropayments, the key to monetizing our data and digital content.

“At the moment, our data is controlled by big tech companies. What we want to do with the Metanet internet is to enable micropayments using the blockchain, and this will enable us to have control of our data,” Alessio Pagani, nChain Research Director, told CoinGeek.

“We can store our data on the blockchain, encrypted of course, and then monetize our data so that when someone wants to have access to our data, they have to send us a micropayment, and this will enable us to create new economies where our data is valuable not only for the big tech companies, but for us,” he said.

Richard Baker, Founder and CEO of Tokenovate, was also at IEEE COINS and shared with CoinGeek the benefits of an embedded digital cash system that blockchain enables.

“When we introduce the Bitcoin protocol, we introduce a money system to IP networking. And that means we get an embedded digital cash system within an IP network,” Baker explained.

“It means that we can now start to think about peer-to-peer data and peer-to-peer money, and that means we’ve got a micropayments system in-built in our IP network, and now devices can be appropriately rewarded for the data of the signals they send,” he said.

“But actually, that means also you and I, in the way that we interact with websites and applications that rest on an IP network, can also benefit from an embedded money system, a micropayments architecture,” Baker added.

As Baker pointed out, IoT devices can and should be rewarded for the data they send, but we cannot do this at scale without unique IP addresses being issued to each device. This is where Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) comes in.

“Basically, with IPv6, we have restored the end-to-end model, which means through peer-to-peer, because every device will get a unique IPv6 address. Direct communication between people is not yet possible on the Internet. IPv6 would restore that,” shared Latif Ladid, Founder and President of IPv6 Forum.

“By restoring this end-to-end model, you can restore many things. You can restore security between the two people. You can do VPNs between people and between devices, especially if you have millions of devices. You want them to be secure so that nobody can access them. Only you will have access to them,” he explained.

“Restoring the internet model is fundamental for any new innovation down the road,” Ladid added.

Giovanni Franzese, Head of IP Commercialization at nChain, summarized by saying that one of the main features of IPv6 is the ability to auto-generate IP addresses.

“This is what you need in IoT devices to enable the peer-to-peer communication in a secure way. Through blockchain, we can secure the transaction, peer-to-peer, between IoT devices,” Franzese said.

Of course, we cannot discuss the future of the Internet without discussing the role of AI, the hottest buzzword today.

With so much data flooding in—often autonomous—we will need AI to manage and interpret everything and ensure these digital messages arrive where and when they should. Jones explained why combining blockchain with AI is important to keep everything in check.

“We need blockchain for AI because we need to be able to understand where data is coming from,” said Jones.

“When we’re feeding that data into the algorithm, we know where it’s coming from. We can track it. We can look at how it’s changing the algorithm, and we can look at the time stamps and be confident that the data hasn’t changed again through being communicated,” he added.

With blockchain as the backbone for this new Internet and a tsunami of data to keep track of at all times, choosing the right blockchain that eight billion people can count on is essential.

“We expect a lot of volumes when we have to trade data and payments, and we need an infrastructure layer that enables all those use cases,” said Pagani.

“BSV blockchain enables that because it’s the only blockchain that is scalable enough to support all those data or those payments. And it’s also very cheap. So when you have to exchange or sell micropayments, you don’t want to pay big fees, but you need a blockchain that is very cheap to transact,” he added.

Watch IEEE COINS Conference: Intersection of blockchain, AI, IoT & IPv6 technologies