IANA Decentralizes IP Addresses With Bitcoin – Bitcoin Magazine
This is an opinion editorial by Moustafa Amin, a technology leader with more than 20 years of professional experience across large organizations, service providers and telecom companies.
“Bitcoin Not Blockchain”
If you are a frequent reader of Bitcoin Magazine or if you are a Bitcoin enthusiast in general, you may have seen this motto. I came across it several times and agree 100% with it.
Sometimes there may be a minor exception, for example when the scope is limited, the context is private and there is no need for tokenization, but in most cases it is always wise to stick with bitcoin.
Let’s analyze a hypothetical case study around IP addresses using a “traffic light” analogy – yellow, red and green.
IP addresses
I assume that the readers are or at least familiar with how data communication takes place over the internet based on the IP protocol (TCP/IP if we want to be technically accurate). The more technological readers may be aware of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, such as IPv4 and IPv6.
Try Googling “Who controls IP addresses?” You will immediately get “IANA: Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.” IANA is the supreme authority behind the allocation and assignment of IP addresses. There are five different Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) with jurisdiction under IANA.
As an individual or a regular Internet user, you cannot actually request IP addresses directly from IANA or one of the five RIRs, but only from Internet service providers, such as the services provided by mobile or telecom operators.
RIRs and their respective regions
From this architecture, you can imagine a central database of IP addresses held and maintained by IANA.
An imaginary selection of IP address database
Let’s suppose that one day the IANA decides to launch a blockchain version of its IP address database, wouldn’t that be a legitimate project? The answer depends on their approach and their intention to do so.
Before we continue, let’s agree on a couple of points:
- The term blockchain does not always refer to the underlying technology of Bitcoin as invented (or discovered) by Satoshi Nakamoto. Instead, it has become a marketing term widely used by vendors as a buzzword to describe their products in either private or public contexts.
- Even with a decentralized version of the IP address database, the IP addresses will always remain in IANA’s custody. These resources will never be handed over to public society.
The yellow path
If the IANA cares about the integrity, safety and security of their current centralized IP address database and wants to make it decentralized over a blockchain by having separate identical copies of the database held in geographically dispersed regions for decentralization and redundancy, they would look for a solution which will be a mix of decentralized storage (IPFS for example) and private blockchain (cloud-based or open source). This can be compared to AWS blockchain, Hyperledger, Multichain, etc.
In this case, each regional RIR will be responsible for some nodes running this private blockchain. Each node will send and receive updates over the blockchain while storing an identical always-updated copy of the IP address database.
No token will be required in this solution, and the entire solution will be maintained by nodes that fall under either the jurisdiction of the IANA or the RIR. In fact, IANA can pause, stop, restart, truncate, or even delete parts of this private blockchain at will.
Basically, this case is no different from the current situation where the IANA can change or even delete parts of the IP address database of their centralized database (if they want). I’m not saying they would, but they could.
This path is marked “yellow” because it can be acceptable since it does not represent any risk to outsiders, i.e. there are no investors putting up money for tokens.
The red path
What if the IANA decides to launch its blockchain version of IP addresses as a smart contract dApp – using a platform like Ethereum, or even as a separate public blockchain – and tokenizes it all and maybe runs crowdfunding events to distribute these tokens? I won’t waste your valuable time discussing this scenario anymore: This will make it no different than the other 20,000 useless altcoins out there!
The green path
What if the IANA is intelligent enough to keep their IP address database truly decentralized over the only truly decentralized blockchain – Bitcoin – and allows payment in installments? A possible alternative could be an application built on top of the Bitcoin or Lightning Network and integrated with an off-chain distributed storage.
The distributed storage will store the actual IP addresses along with their respective owners. This would happen off-chain to avoid overwhelming the Bitcoin network, but the indexes of the database entries could be stored on-chain.
To counter Bitcoin’s pseudonymity, customers (providers or operators) will still be required to provide identification information for full ownership of their IP addresses. Unfortunately, this would be in full compliance with know-your-customer (KYC) laws for online monitoring, as you might guess.
Regardless of the abundance of IP addresses, they are finite in nature, meaning the IANA cannot create or create new addresses out of thin air.
Fast fact: there are slightly less than 4.3 billion IPv4 addresses that were all sold (IPv4 address depletion started back in 2011), while there are 340 trillion, trillion, trillion IPv6 addresses – an insanely large number such that the minimum IPv6 address allocation is divided by 32 to equal the number of all IPv4 addresses out there.
Since all transactions will be permanently stored above the ledger, IANA cannot mess around and sell the same batch of IP addresses to another owner. This is called an “IP address block”, not to be confused with Bitcoin blocks.
The ideal path
What if we replace the controlled and monitored IP addresses with new Internet addresses that are based on Bitcoin? These addresses will inherit all the features of Bitcoin ie they will be purely decentralized, secure, future proof, robust, anonymous, unhackable, controlled by no single authority and many more.
Is it just a dream? For now. If this could be true, we would change the internet as we know it.
This is a guest post by Moustafa Amin. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.
