The Bitcoin Bridge: MetaID wants users to take control of their data

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We live in a world where data is king. Those who own and control it have all the power. But that could be about to change; MetaID is a protocol built to allow users to retain ownership of their data and enable them to move it from platform to platform. Sunny Fung, founder of ShowPay and MetaID, is on The Bitcoin Bridge to chat about the progress the protocol is making.

Sunny starts off by clarifying that MetaID is a sub-protocol of the Metanet, the network created by Dr. Craig S. Wright as an alternative to the internet, not an application or platform in itself.

He talks about how the protocol has been doing since his last conversation with The Bitcoin Bridge back in April 2021. He’s excited to tell host Jon Southurst that there are now over 20 applications building on the MetaID protocol, mostly based in China.

Even though these apps are all being developed by different teams, they are all interoperable, and users can move their data from one platform to another.

“With MetaID we can have applications that are interconnected, and the data can flow free from different applications. Just imagine that you can chat with your friend on Facebook or even… he is using the Twitter he can receive your message from Facebook.”

This could be particularly useful to any social media users who have found themselves banned from a network or deplatformed. Sunny explains MetaID users just need to prove that they’re the owner of their data by using a private key and can then port all their data onto another site.

This utopian idea of data ownership and interoperability online is an ambitious one. And while Sunny may not have hooked up with Facebook and Twitter just yet, he is very excited about many of the platforms that are building on MetaID, including WeBot and Sensible Contract.

Sunny also talks about the attention that MetaID has been receiving in the BSV space for creating large transaction blocks. He estimates that MetaID is responsible for about 90% of the data involved in a record-breaking 2 gigabyte block mined on the BSV network in August. Currently, the BSV network is already the world’s largest public blockchain by all major utility metrics, including data storage, daily transaction volume, scaling ability, and average block size.

This was because people were incentivised to make large transactions on MetaID with the promise of MetaCoins. MetaCoins have a Proof of Transaction Size model, meaning that the more transactions created by users through MetaID applications, the more MetaCoins they received.

Sunny believes that reducing miner fees is a crucial way of onboarding people onto the Bitcoin SV blockchain, saying that this was “one of the major goals of MetaCoin.”

This ties in with his ultimate goal of providing a user-centric, data sharing protocol that puts the power back in the hands of online consumers. Sunny hopes this vision will go global, even putting a call out for developers across the globe to discover “the power of MetaID.”