Jack Davies blog series delves into finer details of Metanet

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The Metanet concept was first introduced by nChain Chief Scientist Dr. Craig Wright less than a year ago. Speaking at the CoinGeek Week Conference, Dr. Wright unveiled the concept as a vision for new paradigms for the Internet and data sharing.

The Metanet protocol is defined by inventor Dr. Craig Wright in concept as a ‘value network,’ which would relegate the Internet to a sidechain of a more comprehensive Bitcoin blockchain.

“The Internet becomes a sidechain to the Bitcoin blockchain. The Metanet is a value network — the entire global system of online activity and data connected commercially.”

Now, nChain researcher Jack Davies has taken this a step further, in a new blog series designed specifically to raise awareness and understanding of the Metanet in concept, and the Metanet protocol which supports its development.

In part one of the Metanet blog series, published on Medium, Davies wrote: “The Metanet represents a complete and utter redefinition of the paradigms that pervade the existing Internet infrastructure — particularly with respect to human interactions and the value we ascribe to them.”

Davies said that the Metanet helps address a fundamental problem with the Internet — that high quality data cannot be available free of charge.

He argues that information comes at a cost, and that these costs cannot be accurately met by the current structures of the Internet and data sharing, and that information quality benefits when true value is ascribed to the information.

“The broad solution, therefore, is an internet-like platform that puts the value of data at the centre of everything,” Davies wrote. “When it is expensive to deploy thousands of bots to spread falsehoods, when the mere act of reading an article requires a cost barrier, we are forced to think: how much do I value this data as information?”

He added, “It is here where the issues we face with the current Internet begin to fall away. By incorporating financial costs — however small — into our online behaviour, we are asked to express how much we truly value information with our wallets. Here lies one of the central goals that the Metanet, running natively on top of Bitcoin SV, can achieve.”

The series of blog posts is expected to cover the concept in overview, as well as specifics in relation to the Metanet protocol, with a view to raising awareness amongst BSV developers towards the end goal of a more valuable global data sharing infrastructure, powered by the technological superiority, and particularly the mass scalability, of BSV.