After his presentation at the recently held CoinGeek Week Conference in London, nChain’s Dr. Craig Wright talked to CoinGeek’s Becky Liggero about Metanet and how it will revolutionize how people do business.
It’s hard to overstate the potential of nChain Chief Scientist Dr. Craig Wright’s Metanet project, which he describes as “redoing the internet in a way.”
He explained, “We’re going to use the internet as just one of any ramp people can get to create a full commercial capitalist peer-to-peer network so that anyone can route any packet, get any data, watch any video, stream anything, create any data, create any game, any application, whatever else, and get paid for it.”
While it takes its cue from the internet as we know it, the Metanet, running on the Bitcoin SV chain, ensures that the data transmitted is more reliable and of greater utility.
“Bitcoin is an immutable ledger, and to get value out of anything, to be able to sell, to buy, to trade, you need to have some way of knowing that your contract is safe, and Bitcoin allows that. It allows you to actually value all the data. Now the internet is this big source of data, many of it, much of it is actually wrong and there’s a lot of errors, but information is what really is important, and sourcing information from data, that’s the difficult part,” Wright said.
Wright sees people interacting on the Metanet as incentivized to provide valuable knowledge. “Now if we can put value on information, and we can have data actually valued, then the actual value of the internet starts to fulfill the promise of actually helping all of us, of increasing our knowledge, not getting the errors, but having people paid to fix them, and have the truth,” he said.
He sees the initial applications for it coming around January or February 2019. “I’m not going to promise anything before Christmas. We’ve got to scale,” he said.
Meanwhile, Wright also corrected the misconception that it is mining nodes that made for a decentralized peer-to-peer network. “‘Peer’ is because two people exchange, not because it’s settled by a miner. Miners are paid to ensure the security of the peer-to-peer network, but the peer-to-peer network in Bitcoin used to exist. It was there in 2009, but it got dropped,” he said.
According to Wright, it is only with Bitcoin SV that Bitcoin remains a peer-to-peer network as envisioned when the cryptocurrency was first created. “Bitcoin, with routing protocols we’re introducing, with changes to the system that were there from 2009 and got dropped, the fixed version of those will allow us to actually recreate that peer network that should have existed back then,” he said.
Broadly, Wright believes the Metanet is the perfect avenue for people to create and cooperate with each other. He said, “I want to actually see a network where every person on Earth can connect, can earn money, can send data, can work anywhere in the world, and not only that, but a system that can open up to a machine, human to machine, and all types of things, enabling trillions of devices to seamlessly connect and share data securely.”
For an industry like, say, gambling, the Metanet will provide for optimal transparency. “It will change the gambling industry as we’ll have records that are completely honest and open. It will allow regulation to be enforced, and people looking at different areas can then start shopping for an honest version of the truth,” Wright said, adding, “They can see regulator A versus regulator B, which one’s more honest? Which one’s easier to work with? Which one has better fees, allows more profitability, allows them to have their business model in a more effective manner? And then they can sell that to their clients, and get people in because they can make more money by having an honest, open gaming system.”
Watch Dr. Craig Wright’s presentation, Going Meta on Bitcoin, at CoinGeek Week Conference Day 3 below.
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