Monday, March 2, 2020

BSV's Vision of Star Ocean Metanet

BSV's sea of ​​stars, Metanet's vision

Metanet is a value network based on the Bitcoin (SV) blockchain system, on which data can be transmitted and stored, decentralized and cannot be tampered with. Metanet will implement a new way to distribute network content and promote a new e-commerce model brought by the Bitcoin micro exchange. Utilizing the economic security and stability of the blockchain, Metanet can provide higher data quality and integrity through the data storage supported by the blockchain to reduce the possibility of fraud. Under the concept of Metanet, various transactions on BSV will constitute a global public ledger that supports all Internet activities, which is an exciting new concept with unlimited possibilities.

From the time of the fork in November last year, Dr. CSW formally proposed this ambitious vision called "metanet", and to the recent Toronto conference officially established Metanet's technical implementation and specification definition. We have a future-oriented subversive Network technology can also be regarded as a glimpse of leopards.

Metanet Overview and Reviews

BSVer's evaluation of Metanet can be described as unprecedented. This evaluation even made Xiaobai, who did not understand, think it was pushing, as if those public chain projects known as millions of tps, subvert the industry and dominate the smart finance. Like the banner of IXO, is it another copycat project that is ready to make money? Many newcomers' first impression of BSV is that they can't understand it, and they have come up with so many new concepts and new terms, all of which are so obscure and incomprehensible. They are quite characteristic of the currency circle. Everyone put the concept of the metanet together with the concepts of "cross-chain resonance", "transaction mining", "sharding" and so on in the currency circle. It is easy to cause this general brainwashing discomfort.

Let's first take a look at what is popular with Metanet. First of all, the most famous definition is given by the doctor, and the Internet (modern Internet) should be used as the sidechain of Metanet. Many people heard this theory and immediately came back to argue with red ears and red ears. It is clear that Bitcoin runs on the Internet. Why do you say that the Internet can run on Bitcoin and can be used as a sidechain or subnet of Metanet? This question is nothing more than how do you define the network and how to define the link. Another very important idea is that Bitcoin is only a by-product, just a tool invented to implement Metanet, and the ultimate vision is Metanet. This metanet will carry huge human data, greatly reduce the cost of information, and increase business Efficiency is a great innovation that subverts the existing business model and changes the rules of business games.

After so much, you can find that there is still no explanation for why Metanet is so great, and how Bitcoin has changed the world, yes, this is the meaning of the new concept. For example, when talking about the mobile Internet, we all affectionately call it the next-generation Internet revolution, which has unprecedentedly transformed the lifestyle of modern people and completely subverted our perception. But let ’s get rid of these tall coats and take a look at what is the mobile Internet in essence. It simply originates from two simple and irreplaceable advances. There is no technical innovation. One of them is the portability of computers. Is to miniaturize the computer, mobile phone, you can carry it. The second is the gradual increase of wireless network bandwidth. The speed and capacity of data transmission from GPRS to 3G 4G 5G have increased greatly. But just looking at these two simple advances, you can hardly imagine how much change they have brought, and even push back a few years. From the perspective of people at the time, you can imagine that even small business vendors and hawkers have access to today Mobile Internet payment scenario. This is the value of the concept. The concept helps us to look into the future through the development of existing technology, to guide the current capital and resources to these areas, and to create the world we want in a down-to-earth manner.

However, the new concept is also two-sided. The currency circle has a large number of scams wrapped in a new concept shell, coupled with the help of mainstream media, and various unreliable business models brought by Wanzhong Ventures, allowing people to innovate on the currency circle and the Internet. I was born with colored glasses. The first reaction was a scam, in order to set up investors' money, and then cash out. But if you reject some new concepts, you may miss a blast and an era. Therefore, it is not advisable to blindly accept new concepts and blindly reject them. What we can do is set aside the heavy fog, look at the essence of the fresh concept, find the theoretical cornerstones of the new concept, and use our knowledge reserve and rational thinking to judge whether the new concept is feasible, how to realize it, what obstacles it should overcome, and how to overcome it .

Metanet explanation

As mentioned above, all new high-level concepts can be stripped into one or more seemingly small or simple technological advances. These advances are either creative or large-scale. Creative like Bitcoin The introduction of PoW itself, and the large-scale, mainly other aspects of the infrastructure have been completed, providing the soil for the growth of this new concept.

Before explaining Metanet, I will explain several other developments. The first is Bitcoin (BSV), a PoW distributed ledger that has been running for more than ten years based on a stable consensus system, a rock-solid trust-removal tool, and a network that provides peer-to-peer value circulation. Secondly, the storage cost is decreasing, and now a mobile phone can reach a capacity of hundreds of G or even T. Large-scale data center storage data capacity is said to be calculated in PB units. Once again, the speed of network transmission is also increasing rapidly. Mobile Internet has begun to commercialize 5G, and wired Internet has also universally popularized optical fiber. The backbone network between continents is also widening. The development of these infrastructures has laid the cornerstone of Metanet and made the development of Metanet possible.

What is Metanet, I interpret it here in a vernacular way.

  1. The entire network is license-free. No one can dominate the entire network. No one has the right to occupy and allocate domain names. These resources, such as IP, everyone can own their own website and own their own domain names. No one needs permission.
  2. The content and usage records on the network are permanently saved. All the history of the entire network is backed up. There is no situation in which a business or a company fails and data is lost. On this network, evil records also Will be saved permanently.
  3. The network is cross-continental, cross-border and cross-platform, no matter what kind of terminal equipment you use, no matter what kind of network protocol (IPv4 or IPv6 or custom protocol), no matter which company's application app, No matter which business user you are, everyone runs in the same ecological environment. It is very easy for major business entities to share data and collaborate across platforms
  4. The network comes with top security attributes in the password security industry. The network natively supports identity authentication and rights management, without the need to implement a separate secure communication protocol.
  5. The network natively supports value transfer. You can transfer the value (money or equivalent asset token) directly to any individual in the network without restriction. There is no intermediary, and there is no need to create a separate payment system. The friction of this value transfer is so small that extremely small value transfers are possible. You can provide services to 1 million people, but only charge 1 cent per person.
  6. The network is an open global cloud operating system. Everyone can log in and operate on this operating system, and even execute code. Everyone is free to interact with other people in the network in various ways. Every operation is public, trusted and with permanent log backups.

The above points are based on my understanding of the characteristics of Metanet. Of course, my understanding must be one-sided, and there must be features that I have not thought of in the future. It's like no one can think of how the speed of mobile phone network is a little bit faster, so how to give birth to such a large industry as short video.

Those descriptions just mentioned did not mention bitcoin, because bitcoin is only a basic layer or a tool used by Metanet. If there is no concept of bitcoin or it has never been recognized, then look at my description just now. It's simply heaven and earth. This is a huge difference from the Internet that we routinely contact and use today. None of the above functions are attributes of the modern Internet. They all need to be implemented with the help of upper-level Internet applications. For the realization of the business, the current Internet has been degraded into information islands. The major Internet manufacturers have divided resources and standards into almost the same, and it is difficult for the major factories to communicate with each other. Take a payment as an example, the Internet does not have the payment properties of the Metanet, so the payments developed on the Internet must be diverse, each in charge of its own ecology, and the obstacles between the ecology are extremely high. Typical examples are domestic WeChat Alipay, US Paypal, Japan's line and Paypay, each occupying its own leading market, while the payment market is a market with Matthew effect and the strongest Hengqiang dominates the world. Unification of the market is only possible in the native payment network.

Combining the previous analysis, here are four words to summarize the essence of the metanet and the data is on-chain.

What is the use of data on the chain? Many people start to feel puzzled. The characteristic of innovation is this. The nature or essence of the manifestation is very simple, but the amount of internal information is huge, and the possibilities and scenarios derived from it have greater information. the amount. First on the chain, on what chain, what is the cost, how is the performance, how is the security, how to have scalability, how to index and find the data, how to avoid spam and DDOS, how to interact with the data, how to face legal system and supervision, etc. And so on, a series of information, each of which is worth a dedicated article to discuss. I will directly conclude here that using BSV as an on-chain storage medium can effectively solve all the above problems. As for why, you can refer to my previous article or learn from a large number of comprehensive materials shared in the group.

Metanet White Paper Interpretation

According to the previous analysis, we conclude that the essence of Metanet is data on-chain. Putting aside all the concepts of tallness, it is simple data on-chain. But since the fork, various data on-chain tools have emerged, such as Planaria, B protocol, C protocol, memo protocol, tokenized protocol and so on. How are these protocols and the data they store related to Metanet? Why is Metanet so special? In fact, before this Toronto conference, my understanding is that the above protocols belong to Metanet. Metanet is just a macro concept, and the micro implementation is the above protocols. After the release of this white paper, I carefully read the white paper, cooperated with the conference video and ppt, and found that there were some deviations in my previous understanding. Here I will read the Metanet white paper.

Before learning Metanet, I studied and researched various unwriting tools and query tools of the Unwriter God, including the general paradigm such as the bit protocol. In the process of actual use, we will gradually find some problems, that is, the use of amoeba framework and on-chain storage under the B protocol and C protocol, the relationship between data is difficult to establish. For example, my articles will be chained on bitpaste, and after the payment structure transaction, bitpaste will return me a transaction hash. I use this transaction hash to find this article and share it. The next time I share, I will create a new transaction and a new irrelevant transaction hash to store the article. Then I must maintain a mapping table, the relationship between the article title and the hash on the chain. Once this mapping table is lost, I may never find my own articles again, or find it very troublesome (such as Some friends will remind you to use the transaction history of moneyButton to find the corresponding transaction. Although this is feasible, it is not friendly, elegant or direct from the implementation logic. It relies heavily on moneyButton and also depends on bitpaste. Do not change the protocol. . Similarly, friends who pay to read my articles may need to maintain a list of purchased articles, otherwise they will lose their hash, and even if they have paid, they may not be able to find it in the ocean of data.

Introduced the bit protocol before, which is a universal protocol introduced by Unwriter. It is undeniable that the design of this protocol is very flexible and universal. Through the bit protocol, you can customize the data association format just mentioned, but there is a problem is the degree of coupling. Because the bit protocol is too flexible, the association between data is different under different bit protocols, that is, how to associate data and how the bit protocol is defined is strongly coupled. The bit protocols designed by different teams and products may be different. They are very different, so there is a big problem when sharing data across teams or products. Why not fundamentally design an association agreement, everyone follows this agreement, on top of that, then use their imagination to define the data. For example, the Internet has a hierarchical structure such as domain name url, which can associate and group data. Can you design such a protocol based on Bitcoin's transaction structure, connecting data points into a graph structure. This is the main content of the Metanet white paper, data correlation.

https://preview.redd.it/6faqp53ig8k41.jpg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3a9a3f1f1efaf1a19d07dd5f3265b14bb42dac52

When using on-chain storage, the storage medium is a transaction, so when explaining Metanet, we call a transaction a node (the original translation is a node, and this node has nothing to do with our full mining node or spv node) The node here is just a node named to describe the topology, so in order not to cause confusion, some translations will also replace the node with a vertex) The data structure that represents the relationship between two transactions is called an "edge". A graph can be composed of "vertices" and "edges". For example, a triangle is a figure consisting of three vertices and three edges. In Metanet, a Metanet transaction itself is a vertex, and it also specifies its own edge.

Each vertex has its own Bitcoin public key (or Bitcoin address). This public key is used to mark the data resources of a specific metanet. Some friends will ask here, isn't a transaction representing a data resource, yes, a transaction represents a resource of "a certain version", and the public key represents the resource itself. In other words, on the metanet, a resource is represented, a picture is a public key (or address), and a transaction represents a version of this resource. Although this public key can be specified at will, it should be noted that this public key also represents the permissions owned by this resource, which will be described later.

https://preview.redd.it/xbrrvkukg8k41.jpg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f33a85cff1e19cbee9f99cd50038ea8af89da04a

Then look at the transaction format: Metanet transaction is an OP_RETURN transaction. The first data in OP_RETURN is a four-byte fixed character "meta", which is used to mark this as a Metanet transaction. The second data is the public key (Pnode in the figure) representing the data resource, which is used to represent the resource itself. The role of the public key is to control permissions. Then it is the TXhash of the parent vertex (TXIDparent in the figure), which is used to identify the parent-child relationship. If this field is empty, the point is the root node. After that is a data body that can be freely defined. This data body can start with a custom address of the bit protocol, so that this data becomes the data under the bit protocol. A shell, which enables the data to carry the hierarchical relationship and permission relationship of Metanet, and can continue to implement the bit protocol internally.

https://preview.redd.it/3lxvlc0pg8k41.jpg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9205d121aa181cee3769ef2696abde0d52851439

As mentioned earlier, the third data of OP_RETURN is the TXhash of its parent node, that is, who can find this data by this data. Although this data is written in child nodes, it must not be written arbitrarily. If the child nodes are generated without the permission of the parent node, how to determine whether the child nodes are actually generated by a legitimate parent node, this requires Bitcoin's own public key system is used. The child node is marked with the hash of the parent node. Through the hash, the Metanet transaction of the parent node can be found. The parent node transaction must carry the public key used by the parent node to prove the identity. With the public key and signature of the parent node, then the child node is considered to be generated by the parent node. In other words, only the parent node has the right to produce child nodes, and this permission is guaranteed by Bitcoin's signature system. This is the input in the picture above.

Summarize the transaction format of Metanet. A Metanet transaction represents a data body node, while recording the parent node of the node, and using the transaction input signature to prove that the parent-child relationship between the parent node and the child node is legal. Therefore, there are several necessary elements for Metanet transactions. The five elements in the input, the "meta" flag in OP_RETURN, Pnode and TXIDparent constitute the Metanet transaction.

The format of this transaction can be said to be very simple, but this is the power of Metanet. It is simple and elegant. It combines the flexibility of OPRETURN to store data and Bitcoin's own permission verification function, which fully combines these two mechanisms. And uses the Bitcoin network as an endorsement of security and credit. I thought about using the bit protocol to manage permissions before, but none of them was as elegant and simple as Metanet thought.

In this transaction format, we can abstract the following characteristics:

  1. A child node can only have a maximum of one parent node (if there are multiple parent nodes, the topology will become a ring and the complexity will increase)
  2. A parent node can generate an unlimited number of child nodes, and only has the private key of the parent node Pnode, which can correctly generate child nodes
  3. The Pnode public key represents a resource on the chain, and the transaction hash (TXID) represents its version. A Pnode plus TXID can uniquely identify a resource
  4. If the Pnodes of the two transactions are the same, it means that the two transactions are different versions of the same resource, whichever is the latest. The definition of the latest version is the maximum workload (simple understanding is the higher the height) or the topological ordering in the same block (memory pool) (TTOR, BCH cannot do this)
  5. The permission control is to specify the characteristics of the child node through the parent node, and the child node can also specify the characteristics of the grandchild node. The method to prove the permission is the signature in the input
  6. When constructing a chained permission structure, no specific UTXO is required, as long as the input has the signature of the parent node. For example, other inputs can be added for payment. The payment address is not necessarily the UTXO of the parent node. There is no relationship between the two. The input for payment is only used for payment, and the address of the parent node is used for authentication.

Now that we understand the data structure and morphology of Metanet on the chain, as well as the basic characteristics, we will discuss how domain names, URLs, and search functions provided by the traditional Internet are implemented on Metanet. Without these features, it would be difficult for us to find data on the Internet using the Internet, because IP addresses are unreadable to humans, so the domain name system was created, which also caused prices for domain names with different meanings. In reality, the right of the Internet to assign domain names is in the hands of ICANN and the various domain name companies under it.

For Metanet to enter daily use, it must also design this human-friendly domain name system. However, unlike the Internet, Metanet does not have the concept of IP addresses. Metanets are cross-platform, only the concepts of addresses and transactions. A digression here is the problem mentioned at the beginning. Metanet does not run on the Internet. Metanet and the Internet are conceptually two different forms of composition. There is no IP (in fact, IP is also a type of address, just because the number is too limited or because it is controlled by the telecommunications provider, and IP is not exclusive and is multiplexed. From this perspective, IP is a subset of addresses) concept. Therefore, the domain name of Metanet can only start from the address itself, because there will not be a centralized single-point domain name distribution agency to assign domain names (there may be some spontaneously implemented bit protocols to try to assign domain name mappings, but they want to achieve monopoly and generality Difficult).

For example, a website, according to the tree structure of Metanet, should have a node as the root node, this root node needs a public key or address as its own mark. If we use the address of the root node as the entrance to the website, we need to enter the address of the root node as the domain name in the browser. But the address itself is not readable, and the introduction of the domain name system brings a single point of problem. Metanet's response to this is the vanity address, commonly known as the vanity address. The simplest and most efficient way to allocate resources that everyone wants is PoW, proof of workload. It is the fairest and ultimate solution to go to the exhaustion of private keys to find a good address, and obtain the domain name naturally through the amount of work you spend. For example, I have exhausted an address 1GoogleComXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX, and it is easiest to use the prefix 1GoogleCom as a domain name positioning website. Some friends here will ask, if two people have poorly listed the same address prefix, it doesn't matter, you can also identify the website by the suffix. For example, everyone knows that the suffix of the real Google address is XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX. Address, although both addresses can be searched through the domain name 1GoogleCom, but everyone trusts the Google address with the suffix XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.

The method of mining domain names in this way is in line with the license-free characteristics of Bitcoin. You pay for your own work and get pretty numbers through exhaustion. There is no need for a central registry to issue and manage domain names. At the same time, the Bitcoin address domain name itself comes with a certificate, which does not require the troublesome certificate exchange process of https (the content on the website is absolutely trusted, because there is no way to modify the website without the root node private key).

Once the domain name is set, it is the URL. How to locate a certain picture under a page of a website on the chain? The traditional Internet uses URLs called Uniform Resource Locators to locate resources. The URL is also a tree-level structure, such as my homepage: https://www.zhihu.com/people/hqm-84/activities , which can be viewed as a resource under a folder structure. https is the protocol, zhihu.com is the domain name, then the people folder under the root directory is used to represent users, the hqm-84 directory under it represents me as a user, and the activities folder represents my activities.

Through our analysis just now, in fact, everyone has discovered that the initial design of Metanet is a hierarchical structure, that is, a function of resource positioning is formed naturally between nodes. As long as you add an alias to each node, you can naturally build the same resource positioning architecture. This is called a Metanet URL, or MURL. It also has a prefix, similar to http, but called mnp (Metanet Protocol), mnp: // domainname / path / file.

It is also worth mentioning here that, unlike traditional URLs, the management of parent-child paths in the traditional Internet is completely left to the website for customization, while Metanet parent-child nodes have their own permission control relationship, and this permission can be removed Minute. Then I just knew the homepage example. The two nodes zhihu.com and people can be the nodes that the website belongs to, and the node hqm-84 can be specified as the address I control. Only I can modify the following Path, I know that I have no right to modify all the resources under my node, so that users can truly own their own data.

to sum up

Metanet said that complexity can be very complicated, and simple or very simple, that is, it defines how to store data on the chain so that the data are related to each other.

Combining the introduction of Metanet above and the pain points of the current data on-chain, we can imagine how to use the Metanet architecture to transform bitpaste to make it more useful to authors and readers. First, get a domain name of 1bitpasteXXXXXXXXX as the root node, and then create a child node of user, and then create multiple user account nodes under these nodes' addresses are each user's own address (you can derive an address through xpub) , And then only the user (with the private key) can modify the resources under this account node. Then there are two folders under a particular account node, one is called purchase and the other is called artifact, which is used to store purchase records and creation records, and then after the user purchases a new article each time, a new child is created under purchase Node, which is used to pay and store purchase records. Each time a user publishes a new article, a new child node is created in the artifact directory to store the user's article. Only users who have an account node (private key) can legally create articles. . Users can also modify their own articles or delete articles.

After the above transformation, bitpaste is very useful. After users log in locally with mnemonic words, they can access all their purchase records in the purchase directory, or they can access the entire artifact creation history in the artifact directory. Strong correlation solves the pain points of discrete data mentioned earlier. It also brings the advantages of rights management and user-controlled data.

Finally, explain why the doctor said that let the Internet be a Metanet sidechain, because the Metanet that the Internet can do, and the Internet that Metanet can do a lot, logically speaking, the Internet is a subset of Metanet. Since It's a subnet. It's not too much to call a sidechain.

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