There are lots of exciting things happening right now in the Internet development space. The research team at nChain recently presented a demo of an End-to-End (E2E) or Person-to-Person (P2P) Bitcoin SV transaction using IPv6. This included creating an IPv6 unicast address from a Bitcoin address and sending a Bitcoin payment using the address, says Jake Jones, Head of Network Infrastructure at Bitcoin Association.
A unicast address uniquely identifies an interface on an IPv6 device. A packet sent to a unicast address is received by the interface that is assigned to that address. Speaking during a recent Bitcoin Association progress call, Jones noted that nChain was able to demonstrate this process at both the IEEE World Forum on Internet of Things in Yokohama, Japan, and the IEEE Blockchain Summit in Istanbul, Turkey.
‘That process uses what is called cryptographically-generated addresses (CGA). They are looking at ways of leveraging the blockchain to improve the technique, and once they have finished that research, they are going to bring that part of the research to a close and continue working on some other avenues such as IPv6 multicast.’
Jones added there are multiple related patents and papers which are currently being worked on, with some of these expected to be published in the near future.
You can read more about nChain’s recent work with IPv6 here.
Development work on IPv6 multicast
Jones said that the Bitcoin Association’s Technical Team is also in the process of researching and prototyping IPv6 multicast work.
‘We are in the midst of putting a project scope together and will hopefully get that together soon. Multicast is the way to reduce network load and get to the scale that is needed to accommodate unbounded scaling of the Bitcoin SV blockchain.
‘So in addition to the larger address space which allows us to utilise P2P or machine-to-machine communication, it also enables a publication subscription (pub-sub) communication model that eliminates a lot of the unnecessary network traffic.
‘The way we are going to approach this is to focus on the node-side first, as the technology is available for us to start doing that, and then work our way outwards to the edges of the greater network. So we will start with the nodes, then the link layer, the network layer, and then we will push out to the global scope and enable SPV and Merkle-path distribution and things like that.’
Why is the world moving to IPv6?
IPv6 is an Internet Protocol version that defines 128-bit IP addresses – about 7.9×1028 in total – and can account for an almost limitless number of unique devices, making them directly addressable over the Internet.
At the inception of the Internet as we know it today, the IPv4 standard was used to assign addresses to connected devices. IPv4 only allows for 32-bit addresses – roughly 4.3 billion in total. As the Internet rapidly grew in the 1990s, it became apparent that far more possible addresses would be needed – hence the standardisation and adoption of IPv6.
The ability to deliver end-to-end or machine-to-machine networking using IPv6 address space is crucial to unlocking the efficiencies and capabilities of an unbounded blockchain protocol like Bitcoin SV.
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