IPv6 has always been a part of Bitcoin’s design, given that Satoshi Nakamoto originally planned for the internet protocol to be part of Bitcoin because of its peer-to-peer capabilities, and he is not stopping to promote how Bitcoin should work with IPv6.
And the man pursues this mission at the IEEE International Conference on the Internet of Things and Intelligence Systems in Bali, Indonesia. On the sidelines of the conference, Satoshi—aka Dr. Craig Wright—discussed the role of micropayments in Bitcoin, the problem with the internet today, and IPv6 in Bitcoin’s roadmap.
“The aim of Bitcoin is to be a micropayment system,” the Bitcoin creator said, sharing with the viewers of CoinGeek Backstage that the lack of micropayment systems on the internet was due to nobody figuring it out 15 years ago, resulting in the advertising model we have today.
“The advertising model undermines everything. If you want an internet that is valid, viable, continues and doesn’t end up in a complete disaster—that is the social media community world of today, where citizens are devalued because they are the product—then you need to start paying for everything,” he said, explaining that in order to fix the internet, we need to integrate a direct peer-to-peer communication that could only work on IPv6.
“If you’re doing that, then you can start Internet of Things devices, communicating machines, saving information,” he added.
Dr. Wright confirmed that Bitcoin was IPv6-enabled right from the start and supported IP-to-IP communications—which was the main goal of shifting from an IPv4 internet protocol to IPv6.
“There were additions that needed to be made to simplify things because although you can connect IP-to-IP on the internet, you don’t want to type in an IP address every time you go to something, especially IPv6 addresses,” he explained.
As to how transitioning to the latest internet iteration with a blockchain powered Internet of Things (IoT) deployed on it, Dr. Wright shared a few examples pertaining to the automobile industry and how it can enable cars to become more efficient:
“It [IPv6] enables direct communication between everything automotive cars, industrial Internet of things, the ability to save information and audit it in real-time, enabling cars or computer-aided of technology to improve efficiency in corporations, enabling direct communication on roads between vehicles so that it reduces traffic fatalities, that traffic can be redirected because cars know where all the others are, where they’re going synonymously so that you can track people, etc..”
In closing, the Bitcoin creator reminded the viewers that shifting to IPv6 is inevitable due to the overpopulation of IP addresses in the current internet protocol.
“We already have exceeded the number of people on earth who can have an IP address, and when we go into machines, it’s going to be worse. So there are 4 billion, of which only 2 billion are usable IPv4 addresses…You don’t communicate directly and it breaks many services. With IPv6, you have direct end-to-end connectivity. It works all the time, and that can scale beyond everything we’re talking about,” he concluded.
Watch: IPv6 Forum’s Latif Ladid on IoT and Blockchain
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