Craig Wright keynote at Global IoT Summit in Dublin: Bitcoin micropayments can incentivize and foster competition again

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Dr. Craig Wright joined the Global IoT Summit in Dublin, where he spoke about how Bitcoin SV works symbiotically with IPv6 to empower the Internet of Things (IoT).

An introduction from Latif Ladid

Dr. Wright is introduced by Latif Ladid, founder of the IPv6 Forum. Ladid is passionate about unshackling the internet from the chains of IPv4 and making true peer-to-peer communication possible.

Ladid begins by speaking about how the big telecom corporations have essentially hijacked the internet, making vast fortunes from the current model while attempting to slow down innovation and change. He tells us how IPv4 makes it difficult for devices to communicate because there aren’t enough IP addresses, but that adoption of IPv6 is finally speeding up. Currently, 2.5 billion people use it without knowing it in countries like the Unite Arab Emirates and China.

Ladid tells us that IPv6 enables a fundamental shift, and that Bitcoin as digital cash can play a role.

Dr. Wright explains Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer network

Those familiar with Dr. Wright’s teachings will already know he is passionate about Bitcoin as a network. He begins his keynote speech by explaining that Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer system; it makes it possible for Alice to interact with Bob, e.g., by sending him a micropayment with no middleman involved.

He then explains how the internet today is controlled by a handful of Silicon Valley monopolies such as Google. “They’ll crush you if you try to compete,” he tells us. However, Dr. Wright says that Bitcoin micropayments can incentivize and foster competition again, unleashing a new era of innovation and breaking the stranglehold these companies have over every element of the web.

Scaling Bitcoin with SPV

Dr. Wright then explains how Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) is what enables Bitcoin to scale to be a truly global system. With SPV, IPs, which could be either people or machines, can communicate directly with each other. He outlines how this direct communication enables both competition and distributed storage with no centralized servers.

Furthermore, using SPV means that users can send transactions directly to and from each other without searching through billions of transactions stored on the blockchain. According to Dr. Wright, the failure to realize and accept this has caused every other blockchain to run into scaling issues.

What are the benefits of peer-to-peer transactions? As well as eliminating the need for centralized third parties to verify payments, information, etc., they can eliminate security issues like ‘Man in the Middle’ attacks. With the ability to encrypt information, enhanced privacy is also possible as users send the information directly between themselves with no possibility of a data leak from a centralized server.

The analogy of the check

Explaining how Bitcoin works on a fundamental level, Dr. Wright gives the example of Alice sending Bob a check as payment. Naturally, Bob, being the receiver, is incentivized to make sure it hasn’t been double-spent. So, he logs his payment to the blockchain and can instantly verify it and check for double-spending.

There’s something fundamentally important here, and it’s a point missed by many in the Bitcoin space; nodes are paid to index everything but not to verify everything. Dr. Wright tells us that this insistence that nodes save, index, and disseminate all transactions causes BTC to fail at scaling.

IoT in a World of Bitcoin and IPv6

In the final section of his speech, Dr. Wright explains how Bitcoin and IPv6 complement each other and make the Internet of Things (finally) possible.

What role will BSV play in this? It makes it possible for devices to communicate constantly at minimal cost, enables communication across the network without going through an intermediary, and can scale to billions of transactions per second, making a truly peer-to-peer internet possible for the first time.

Dr. Wright reminds us that this was the original dream of the early internet pioneers, but that a scalable micropayments technology didn’t exist back then. Likewise, he reminds us that many networks were competing in the early days of the internet and that they all ended up folding into the one protocol we use today. He tells us the same will happen with blockchains as BSV proves itself technically superior.

For all of this to happen, we need a blockchain that can scale to global dimensions, handling billions and even trillions of transactions per second, and we need fees of 1/1,000 of a cent or less. There’s only one that can deliver on those two needs: Satoshi’s original Bitcoin, now known as Bitcoin SV.