So, today I am at Starbucks and working on my cryptocurrency social network (Look for another post coming about how the value is added to conversations that ride on currency!) moving coins buying SBD, I started to thing about Multicast the little used portion of the TCPIP standard. Is IP multicast underutilized? Can it be used as the internet is configured or is it not fully implemented? Seems to me to be mostly wasted as an efficient means of transporting large amounts of data to many nodes.
Could multicast drive a new type of blockchain?
Multicast addresses.
As you probably know, the range of IP addresses is divided into "classes" based on the high order bits of a 32 bits IP address:
Bit --> 0 31 Address Range:
+-+----------------------------+
|0| Class A Address | 0.0.0.0 - 127.255.255.255
+-+----------------------------+
+-+-+--------------------------+
|1 0| Class B Address | 128.0.0.0 - 191.255.255.255
+-+-+--------------------------+
+-+-+-+------------------------+
|1 1 0| Class C Address | 192.0.0.0 - 223.255.255.255
+-+-+-+------------------------+
+-+-+-+-+----------------------+
|1 1 1 0| MULTICAST Address | 224.0.0.0 - 239.255.255.255
+-+-+-+-+----------------------+
+-+-+-+-+-+--------------------+
|1 1 1 1 0| Reserved | 240.0.0.0 - 247.255.255.255