The IEEE Exeter Blockchain Event focuses on the marriage of IPv6 and BSV

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The University of Exeter has become a hub for blockchain technology education, all thanks to the forward-thinking initiatives of Professor Jack Rogers, the university’s MSc FinTech Program Director.

When asked why he’s so excited about blockchain technology — especially the BSV blockchain — Rogers told me it’s about “thinking about continuing the original vision for Bitcoin as envisioned by Satoshi and getting so many people together globally to get in a way that is easier for more people to understand.”

And this is exactly what Rogers had in mind when he organized the IEEE Exeter Blockchain Event on November 3rd and 4th in collaboration with Latif Ladid, IPv6 Forum President.

The event took place at the university’s Peter Chalk Center in the middle of campus, and consisted of a day and a half of both virtual and in-person sessions and half a day dedicated to a line-by-line Bitcoin white paper.

“We’ve had a whole series of different conversations from different people. We are talking about people building applications on Bitcoin SV who have shared their experiences along with educational initiatives like Kashif from Nigeria. We’ve also had a cyber security expert here in Exeter, Rogers said.

“The idea of ​​all this is really just to get people talking from different environments, perspectives and research environments. I like to think it’s been a pretty unique event and we want to continue to do this,” he added.

nChain, a leader in the BSV blockchain research and product development space, unsurprisingly had a large presence at the event, with their Research Director Owen Vaughan there as a speaker and resource for students in attendance.

“It is a very interesting event that has drawn people from all over the world. We’ve had people from Africa, from Australia, all over Europe and we really wanted to have a diversity of subjects,” he said.

“We’ve ranged from finance to central bank digital currencies to security, zero-knowledge proofs and IPv6. So it’s really exciting to have all this range of topics in one place and share ideas,” Vaughan added.

While the sessions covered a wide range of topics, one of the main objectives of the event was to educate students on IPv6. Dr. Craig Wright, Chief Scientist at nChain, also a keynote speaker at the event, explained exactly what IPv6 is from his point of view.

“It’s part of the overall structure of what Bitcoin will be involved in that pushes everything to the edge,” Dr. Wright explained.

“Edge computing changes things from the cloud to more of a fog where we have many small endpoints and individuals that can communicate directly with each other,” he added.

Stefan Nilsson, Founder and CEO of UNISOT, was also a speaker at the event and elaborated on the relationship between IPv6 and blockchain, particularly how the marriage will benefit the food supply chain.

“We have too few IP addresses in the world, so we have to jump through hoops and do different magic tricks to try to make the Internet work properly. It creates a lot of security issues and scalability issues,” he explained.

“However, by implementing IPv6 together with blockchain, we solve many of these problems, which means that companies can communicate very securely with each other,” he said.

“That’s what we’re looking at now to implement in our food supply chain systems, to make them more fun and more efficient and safer,” Nilsson added.

In fact, the marriage of IPv6 and blockchain is a major research program for nChain, and according to Vaughan, he and the research team are looking at how both technologies can benefit from each other.

One area they are looking at is how IPv6 can help make Bitcoin payments secure, private, scalable and on a more local basis. They also take inspiration from IPv6 for Bitcoin address management when it comes to wallet design.

Vaughan also emphasized how the protocols of IPv6 and Bitcoin (BSV) are set in stone. IPv6’s protocol was proposed in 1998 and still uses the same protocol today, while Bitcoins was set in 2009 and is still used today (in the form of BSV).

“[BSV’s] stream is in the fixed protocol and will hopefully come to the kind of adoption that IPv6 has also received, Vaughan said.

“The link between the two is cryptographically generated addresses. This is something else we’re currently touching on in the nChain research, which concretely links the internet protocol with the blockchain protocol. And that’s particularly exciting,” he said.

The event’s program also included a line-by-line review of the Bitcoin white paper with Brendan Lee, founder of Elas, to help students understand exactly how IPv6 fits in with Bitcoin as it was created.

“We really do [the line-by-line] because I think the Bitcoin white paper is probably one of the most misunderstood documents of the last couple of decades,” Lee pointed out.

“The goal this afternoon will be to give the students here at Exeter a much clearer understanding of how the system works and why it’s designed the way it’s designed,” Lee said.

“What we’re trying to do is help them understand it in a way that allows them to build things that empower people who can really improve the systems or create all new systems that are ten times better than the ones we use today,” he added .

Looking back on our experience in Exeter, it was an enjoyable and informative experience due to the collaboration of Rogers and Ladid. The pair succeeded in bringing together the best speakers in a room full of engaged students, leaving the door open for more events like this.

“In every university you always have a guy who is completely different and he engages in new research and so on. So [Professor Rogers]I think, one of the first professors to do this, and it was very charming for me to get to know him six months ago,” Ladid shared.

“So we decided to do this event and then mix some IPv6 and some blockchain people to create that amalgamation, to make these things happen. It’s very successful. I think the University of Exeter will be a center for blockchain in the future,” Ladid added.

See: Highlights from the IEEE Future Networks World Forum

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