Converging IPv6 & Bitcoin for a decentralized future

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Bitcoin sparked the peer-to-peer revolution, in which users no longer depend on intermediaries. However, this revolution has been limited by the insufficient IP addresses in the IPv4 internet protocol. Now, IPv6 is taking over, and according to nChain’s Alessio Pagani, its convergence with Bitcoin lays the foundation for a decentralized future.

Pagani is the director of research at nChain, the London-based industry leader in enterprise blockchain solutions. At the IEEE COINS Conference, he joined CoinGeek’s Becky Liggero to discuss the intersection of Bitcoin and IPv6 and why they are critical for the Metanet.

At nChain, Pagani’s team is working on IPv6 Bitcoin-certified addresses. He revealed that this is enabled by IPv6’s address size, allowing users to create cryptographically generated addresses and link them to private keys that they control.

“You can now use the same private key to generate a Bitcoin address. Now, you can have a wallet that generates an IPv6 address and also a Bitcoin address. Your wallet will control how you exchange value and how you exchange data. This is the way to create new Web3 Metanet experiences.”

Integrating the IPv6 address into the blockchain gives it “an unprecedented level of security.”

nChain’s products are geared towards enabling users to own their data in the digital economy. Pagani noted that this is only possible with decentralized identities (DiDs), which enable you to own your data fully and move it at will among third-party platforms.

This data ownership is the basis of data monetization, which is only possible with a blockchain network that supports micropayments. Pagani singled out AI as an industry ripe for impact by data ownership and monetization. AI models feed on massive amounts of data, most of which has been scrapped from the public internet without the knowledge or consent of its owners. As these AI models continue to deliver more value, it will be critical to compensate the people on whose data they were trained.

Pagani concluded that only BSV blockchain can handle the volume and scale of global data.

“BSV blockchain enables that because it’s the only blockchain that’s scalable enough to support all that data and payments,” he said.

Watch IPv6: The solution to IPv4’s address limitations