But first, let’s take a look at what Metanet is.

It’s not what most people think.

Table of Contents

Intro to Metanet Building Metanet Apps Conclusion

1. Intro to Metanet

Since last winter, many people have been raving about how great the “Metanet” is. But the fact of the matter is, none of those were Metanet. Metanet never existed.

This changed last weekend. It exists now.

Before you panic, let me clarify that Metanet doesn’t invalidate anything you’ve been building on top of Bitcoin. It’s like an extension to existing protocols, which means you don’t have to use it, but it will be much more powerful if you do. Read on to learn more.

The Genesis Metanet Graph was made last weekend:

Most people don’t understand: Metanet is not some philosophical concept. Nor is it a meme. Metanet is a very specific protocol that is also very generic at the same time, so generic that it becomes philosophical.

Sound like contradiction? The best things in life are contradiction.

So what IS Metanet?

Here’s a great presentation:

Let me just break it down to one line:

Metanet is data structure over Bitcoin.

Metanet: Data Structure over Bitcoin

Metanet is a simple protocol that lets you create virtual data structures on Bitcoin. By taking the form of a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) it lets you build any typical data structure used in computer science.

An array is a tree with a parent + its children represented in chronological/topological order. A map is a tree with a parent + its children, each of which is identified by a unique key. You can even invent your own data structure.

And it’s not just any data structure. It’s a data structure for storing, transferring, and authorizing real value. All this is natively powered by Bitcoin and can be programmatically operated with Bitcoin, in any way you can imagine.

Bitcoin + Metanet: The Most Efficient Programmable Data Ledger

Bitcoin is the most efficient data storage protocol, and Metanet is the most efficient data structure protocol which sits on top of it.

Read below tweet thread first to understand what an efficient data storage protocol means.

Unlike other bloated “blockchain” projects that ripped off Bitcoin but in a completely naive and amateur way and stored their entire state history on chain, making them fundamentally unscalable, Bitcoin is based on UTXO (Unspent Transaction Output).

The minimal UTXO structure allows for a powerful interplay between on-chain and off-chain computation, and is infinitely scalable.

Why build cats on the blockchain when you can build Schrödinger’s cats on the blockchain?

The difference between the functional vs. object oriented paradigm here is huge. For starters, functional programming can do anything OOP can do, but in much more minimal, scalable, and robust manner. As my tweet thread mentions above, there’s a reason why all large enterprise companies are moving their mission critical systems from object oriented to functional paradigm.

But more importantly, this functional programming paradigm is how Metanet adds an additional dimension which no other system can achieve because of their primitive rigid structure based on object oriented programming paradigm.

You take the most minimal data storage protocol (Bitcoin), and build the most minimal data structure protocol on top (Metanet), and when these two create a chemical reaction, you end up with the simplest yet most powerful programmable ledger.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Metanet is up there on its own dimension. When you see it, everything else will look like a toy. If you don’t believe me or don’t get it, just ignore and keep playing with your amateur calculator. We will obliterate with a supercomputer.

Metanet: a Fungible Supercomputer

People talk about “fungibility” in Bitcoin all the time, but most of these people have a complete misunderstanding of how fungibility works. This is why you see unfortunate, inferior, and illegal solutions such as Mixing services which mix multiple people’s transactions in order to obfuscate the flow of money.

At the same time while they rave about the “transparency of the blockchain”, they talk about obfuscating transactions.

At the same time while they praise Bitcoin as being the “truth machine”, they work on moving transactions off the blockchain so they can hide the truth.

They don’t understand the power of Bitcoin blockchain lies in the “chain”. And they don’t understand that there may be a better way to preserve the transparent flow of money yet achieve privacy. Just because you are not imaginative enough to think of a solution, doesn’t mean the solution doesn’t exist. It just means you’re not imaginative enough.

Also, the inventor himself explicitly mentioned all of this in the whitepaper as a whole section (Read the whole thing):

The key to Bitcoin’s fungibility is not to illegally mix coins. The key to fungibility is to never reuse keys, you generate a new key every time you make a transaction. Of course, there are times when reusing keys is convenient or unavoidable, but for most cases, you can achieve fungibility by deriving a new key every time.

But Metanet goes further.

If you thought fungible transactions were cool, wait till you learn about Fungible computation.

There have been various silly “blockchain as a computer” attempts in the past, but ALL of them fail at fungibility.

All blockchain systems that call themselves a “DApp platform” fall under this category. All these so-called “blockchain as a computer” are simplistic systems that are inherently limited in their architecture due to their abandonment of the UTXO system, which results in a lack of fungibility and limited computational capacity.

if you look deep into these “DApp blockchain platforms”, they are nothing more than very primitive key/value database systems. In fact if you compare them to any typical application that powers the enterprise and consumer apps we use today, they look like toys.

We can see them as “2D” computing. Primitive and Finite.