Prof Latif Ladid, President of the IPv6 Forum, recently discussed with us how IPv4 is deficient in regards to its limited address space, making many internet users merely ‘slaves’ to big telecom corporations.
He describes the potential for a global blockchain revolution and sees the uprising of IPv6 as an opportunity to end this master-slave relationship.
Root of the problem – IPv4 and its limited address space
In practice, there are currently around 3.7 billion publicly routable IP addresses. This may seem like a sufficient number at first, but the growing number of users and devices on the internet is growing far beyond this number.
Especially with the arrival of the Internet of Things (IoT), the limited address space in IPv4 is obsolete. This means that communication is hierarchically structured on the Internet.
‘So among the 69,000 networks that we have at the top of the peer with each other for free, but at the bottom where the end users are, they are not competing with each other,’ Ladid said.
To deal with this situation, only certain organisations and internet service providers (ISP) were given their own addresses and network address translation (NAT) was put into place. Prof Ladid compares the current situation in IPv4 to the phone number system.
‘One of the things that have been kind of introduced into the Internet is called network address translation, which means that people do not directly get an IP address similar to they do within the phone system. So when you give a phone number to people, you empower them to do a lot of transactions. And that’s very important for business.
‘And in the Internet, we don’t have the same facility, so it’s only a few people that can create services…so the entire world population today is slaves on the Internet, instead of being empowered by having their own IP address and multiple IP addresses to do their own transactions on a peer to peer level.’
The master-slave model of the current Internet
As the internet allows for much more complex communication, the lack of own addresses means that most people and businesses are excluded from building and offering services on the internet, e.g. publicly available web servers.
There are also issues regarding security, traffic monitoring and compatibility. Most importantly, it impedes true peer-to-peer connections and makes regular citizens and businesses dependent on ISPs or other workarounds like VPNs.
As only big corporations and telecom providers can offer services at an impactful scale. This has led to a centralisation of power on the internet. A good example to showcase this problem is the situation with big tech companies like e.g. Meta, Alphabet and Amazon.
By offering services that others are simply barred from, they have grown into global organisations, whose influence on politics and our everyday lives cannot always be kept in check. While they offer value for users through their services, this comes with several downsides linked to the master-slave relationship Ladid touched on in the interview.
Tech platforms often dictate the terms under which their products can be used. For a long time, this was even done without getting the consent of their users/customers e.g. when using or even selling user data for profit. Another common issue of this centralised web on IPv4 is locking in users to their platforms, allowing for as little interoperability or switching to other services as possible.
While these issues all have their own dynamics, they are all linked to the root problem of a hierarchically organised internet. Therefore, Ladid describes IPv6 and the BSV blockchain as liberating technologies, that allow us to communicate on more equal terms.
Liberating the Internet – IPv6 & blockchain
Ladid uses the word ‘revolution’ to describe the implementation of IPv6 and blockchain. Both technologies are set up to improve the issues linked to the master and slave relationship he describes. A substantial element of IPv6 in that regard is its capability to facilitate true peer-to-peer communication.
ISPs and big tech platforms – while still having their place – no longer need to sit upon communication as some kind of string pullers that dictate terms and conditions. Instead, people and devices can directly communicate with each other – peer-to-peer, end-to-end or thing-to-thing.
Without any entity sitting in the middle, connectivity, interoperability and security can be improved in many ways. This is due to how data can be handled in peer-to-peer connections. This is where IPv6 and a scalable blockchain have synergies that Ladid often talks about in his presentations.
The role of blockchain in IPv6
With the uprising of IPv6 user data no longer needs to be stored in centralised silos, owned by private enterprises. This is good for privacy, as it deprives companies of the ability to farm user data. However, a question is how these companies can create new revenue streams.
Here is where the BSV blockchain comes in as a public source of truth, that can handle massive amounts of transactions by scaling unbounded. As an electronic cash system that facilitates micropayments, it gives enterprises a tool to charge micro-amounts for their services, making data farming as a revenue stream obsolete.
While this is good for privacy, this creates a need to make data available in some way for various services and applications. At the moment, the BSV blockchain regularly surpasses 50,000 transactions per second.
In the future, the throughput will grow to millions and billions of transactions per second. This enables the BSV blockchain to serve as a global source of truth. While not everything needs to be stored on the blockchain, it is desirable to have a globally scalable infrastructure that everyone can access, to create and read public records.
There are many more use cases for a scalable blockchain that scales and thus works cost-efficiently and conserves resources. We invite you to read more about them on our website or keep track of our latest news and announcements on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.
