BitSov: A Composable Bitcoin-Native Architecture for Sovereign Internet Infrastructure
This addresses the issue of corporate control and censorship in internet infrastructure for users seeking decentralized alternatives, though it is a conceptual position paper without empirical validation, making it incremental in proposing a new architectural framework.
The paper tackles the problem of centralized internet infrastructure by proposing BitSov, a composable architecture that integrates decentralized technologies like Bitcoin and Lightning Network to enable sovereign internet services, resulting in a framework with payment-gated messaging and timechain-locked contracts to deter spam and support economic sustainability.
Today's internet concentrates identity, payments, communication, and content hosting under a small number of corporate intermediaries, creating single points of failure, enabling censorship, and extracting economic rent from participants. We present BitSov, an architectural framework for sovereign internet infrastructure that composes existing decentralized technologies (Bitcoin, Lightning Network, decentralized storage, federated messaging, and mesh connectivity) into a unified, eight-layer protocol stack anchored to Bitcoin's base layer. The framework introduces three architectural patterns: (1) payment-gated messaging, where every transmitted message requires cryptographic proof of a Bitcoin payment, deterring spam through economic incentives rather than moderation; (2) timechain-locked contracts, which anchor subscriptions and licenses to Bitcoin block height (the timechain) rather than calendar dates; and (3) a self-sustaining economic flywheel that converts service revenue into infrastructure growth. A dual settlement model supports both on-chain transactions for permanence and auditability and Lightning micropayments for high-frequency messaging. As a position paper, we analyze the quality attributes, discuss open challenges, and propose a research agenda for empirical validation.