The Bitcoin Masterclasses Series 2 with Craig Wright: ‘Redundant applications,’ distributed services, and why you need them

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We can have search engines that find things you’re interested in. We could have a music industry that’s actually disruptive. We could have communications networks without a central point of control (or failure).

IPv6, Multicast, and the BSV blockchain can form an internet much closer to the original vision, eliminating the need for large and centralized corporate cloud services. Find out how and why in the next session of The Bitcoin Masterclasses Series 2, an educational event led by Dr. Craig S. Wright.

The Series 2 Bitcoin Masterclass sessions have focused on building robust and resilient network infrastructure around IPv6 multicast addresses and subscriptions. There’s a little more of that in this session, but Dr. Wright also looks at some potential use-cases and how they might look once they’re built.

You can watch a video of this session’s presentation segment here. Each presentation is followed by a group workshop and Q&A session following the same topic. The entire two-day series is available for viewing on CoinGeek’s YouTube channel.

As discussed in the previous session, the more redundancy you can build into a network infrastructure, the more resilient it will be. However, there are other things to consider—physical location is one. Having operations in two separate buildings offers more protection, but that’s reduced if the buildings are next door to each other. Multiple internet providers are more reliable than just one, but not if they all lay their cables along the same conduit (which may all get severed by the same backhoe in a few seconds).

Now, about those services

Now that we’ve established how to structure a communications network based around multicast addresses and subscriptions, it’s time to start thinking again about truly distributing industries and the digital economy. To start with: how do we actually find what’s out there?

There are search engines on the internet today and review networks to help you find the services you want. But are they actually getting better? They’ll often point you to large corporate providers or their own advertisers who’ve paid money for prominence. Instead of “disrupting” older industries, today’s internet has merely recreated the same old gatekeeper models in a new form.

“We haven’t really disrupted anything, have we? We’ve just changed who’s in charge.”

Dr. Wright uses examples from the restaurant and music industries to describe how sales, promotion, and customer satisfaction could still be made better, thus restoring some of the internet’s original promise with Multicast’s more decentralized networks. It opens up many more channels for direct (i.e., no gatekeepers or middlemen) communication and interaction between merchant and customer, entertainer and audience, including the ability to process direct payments in any size.

None of this is about avoiding legal responsibility, he reminds, and distributed operations are just better databases that operate under existing rules and norms.

“A DAO is just a company. Proof of Stake is just shares. Voting rights in these things are just voting rights.”

Much of the work developers will need to figure out is how best to structure these new networks for resilience and efficiency, where best to place services, and what sort of micro-services (with micropayments) could facilitate better access to information, and what can be automated.

The whole idea of this is to have reliable, long-lasting, accessible (and verifiable) data, much like today’s network, but have it in a truly distributed way that finally eliminates the need for large “service providers.” The Bitcoin Masterclass series will continue in other locations around the world, each focusing on a new aspect of Bitcoin and blockchain services. Stay tuned for the next iteration, and watch for some inspiration.

Watch: Highlights from The Bitcoin Masterclasses 1 on Identity & Privacy