How to use IPv6 and Bitcoin: Bitcoin Masterclasses in Slovenia
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In the second session of the second The Bitcoin Masterclasses in Slovenia, Dr. Craig Wright asked groups to share what they had come up with regarding use cases for Bitcoin, IPv6 and related technology. He had given them this task after the first session, in which the groups shared their ideas.
Bitcoin: An incredibly resilient network
“Nodes are the guys who get paid. They’re there to do a service,” says Dr. Wright, starting the second session of the day. They do every part of Part 5 of the Bitcoin White Paper to get paid. This is why they store transactions and broadcast them – it’s a capitalist, money-based system, and nodes are incentivized to do the work they’re tasked with.
“When I invented Bitcoin, I used network science — not Karl Marx,” says Dr. Wright. He explains that although the term has been twisted and misused, decentralization means that the network remains resilient if a node is randomly removed.
He delves briefly into the concept of packet switching and explains that it meant for the first time that packets of data could be split and sent to their destination via different methods. Whereas before the connections were one-to-one (he gives the example of a telephone line that went straight across the country between two callers), with packet switching data could travel in any direction, and nobody cared as long as it got there. This made things more resilient, and as Dr. Wright has explained many times, Bitcoin is about creating an “incredibly resilient network.”
“With short nuclear war, Bitcoin will continue for the next 140 years without a second of downtime,” says Dr. Wright. He then goes back to the groups he assigned to think about use cases for Bitcoin and IPv6.
Group one
Group one thought of using it as a peer-to-peer messaging service. By cutting out third parties, a new level of privacy is introduced to communications. Third parties can no longer listen to conversations and collect information.
Dr. Wright agrees with this. However, he points out that it is different from the likes of TOR. With Bitcoin, we leave a trail of evidence, and if we do something illegal, investigators can figure it out using good old-fashioned human intelligence. This is very different from the “catch-all” approach the NSA and other intelligence agencies use today.
The very nature of a system that has billions of transactions per second is private by virtue of the fact that there are so many transactions taking place, he says. Some transactions will be IoT devices updating their locations, others will be cash transactions, and others will be movie tickets, while others will be NFTs that are minted and moved, figuring out what is extremely difficult without sitting down and actively track a given one. .
It becomes impossible to monitor all the transactions in such a way that invades privacy. Nevertheless, it is possible to actively investigate those who are suspicious and then trace back and prove things provided someone has sufficient motivation to do so, such as investigators trying to determine a crime.
“That’s the difference between privacy and secrecy,” Dr. Wright tells us once again.
Group two
Group two said that IPv6 could be used to establish trust between two devices.
Dr. Wright says we’ve set all this up and he asks, “If I’m the owner of a unit, can I issue keys?” He gives the example of having access to his car from his phone. He wants to protect it and ensure that other unauthorized people do not have access to his car.
However, he may choose to issue keys to trusted individuals such as mechanics who work on his vehicle or valets who will park it. It is possible to give them limited access, for example the ability to open the car or drive it a specified distance.
We can issue keys with access policies for all kinds of devices, including mobile phones, he says. Even better, when we put all of this on the blockchain, we can exchange information via hashes so as not to bloat the blockchain with spam.
Group three
This group came up with the idea of using blockchain for mobile IP registration. This can be used to record IP addresses when mobile devices move between networks. This can be used to verify and identify users.
“How does that relate to proof of identity?” Dr. Wright asks, tying this back to concepts he learned in his first Bitcoin Masterclass. He explains that mobile IPs link to keys and that this does not always need to be linked back to a government-issued key ID. Instead, we can form hierarchies, so we can do things like prove where our phone is and access that information without anyone else knowing unless we let them.
Dr. Wright dives deeper and says that using these ideas we can even have privacy and prove that we were not in one place at the same time. For example, using our mobile IP data, we could prove to the authorities that we were not in a given location without necessarily saying where we were. Once again, privacy and secrecy are different things.
Group four
This group discussed AH and ESP.
AH stands for Authentication Headers – an embedded field in every IPv6 packet. For example, it authenticates the package, proving that it came from a specific device. There must be ways to ensure that malicious actors do not send back false data, and this group believes using IPv6 is one way to do that.
Dr. Wright says the information may be encrypted (or not). We can also use notification keys to send out information like there is an attack on the network and we can authenticate it. None of this needs to be particularly complex, as many seem to think. He then gives some examples of ways this can be done.
Group five
This group considered various questions about nodes and the efficiency of the network. For example, they wondered how many nodes are part of an IPv6 multicast group. They also considered where to place nodes geographically and how to organize them.
“In general, we wouldn’t have more than 1.2 million billion billion machines per group,” says Dr. Wright, joking about giving ants and grains of sand unique IP addresses.
Group six
This group discussed NDP (Neighbor Discovery Protocol) and IPsec. These are security-related and discovery protocols that allow clients to find other clients on the network.
“If we were doing some kind of overlay thing where we want to have certain types of machines anywhere on Earth together and doing things, we’d want to use something like that, wouldn’t we?” Dr. Wright asks rhetorically. We need protocols to enable machines to find each other globally, let them join multicast groups, etc., and we want to do it in a secure way, he says.
As Dr. Wright has repeatedly said during this masterclass, many of the lesser-known protocols become important again when we talk about a global peer-to-peer network.
See: Bitcoin Masterclasses Highlight Identity and Privacy
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