Bitcoin is primarily a payment system which supports peer to peer connection and Instant Transactions. Early in the History of Bitcoin payments required users to understand complicated technical details of Bitcoin's technological underpinnings to make transactions. But developments such as Paymail and Simplified Payment Verification are changing the landscape and making it much easier for users to connect. Bitcoin also supports the development of application layer protocols which make use of Bitcoin Transactions as a transport layer for information exchange. Several Application layer protocols already exist for BitcoinSV - for more detail see Building on Bitcoin. The Metanet fuses Bitcoin's highly secure and instant sub-cent transactions with onchain data storage and transferability enabling efficient and secure web usage. This will bring forth an Internet of Value where Micropayments become a means to both access and monetize data. Applications which make use of the immutable nature of the Bitcoin Ledger to store and retrieve data are emerging at an increasing rate. False Return scripts and other scripts that use Pushdata Opcodes to push data into Bitcoin transactions are creating new ways of recording data for public consumption. Bitcoin acts as a timestamp server allowing data to be validated and referenced using transactions. Network The Bitcoin Network is the network that all peers use to access the ledger. The network forms spontaneously over time as more peers access and use the system. There is no central governance that determines how peers on the network must connect, but the incentive structure that Bitcoin employs to bring enterprise miners into the system results in a spontaneously formed system which is simple and resilient. Once the final restrictions on the protocol are removed in the Chronicle Update (expected early-mid 2021) network users will be able to create partitioned zones which employ specific rulesets particular to their requirements. This will be enabled by creating transactions that use OP_VER to give particular subsets of nodes specialised instructions, and will create the effect of layered network partitions over the core system which are referred to as Bitcoin Layered Networks. The Ledger The Bitcoin ledger is a record of all valid transactions that have ever been transmitted to the network. The ledger is formed as a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) where each transaction is a node. The graph starts at the Coinbase transaction of the first block ever found and via chains of digital signatures maps out the entire history of valid exchange actions, allowing the tracing of all bitcoins back to their creation.
