Talking about blockchain

Globally, some changes are earth-shattering, and some are still waters.

Internet of Value: Everything is on the chain

The Internet of Value is my biggest trend expectation for the establishment of the blockchain ecosystem. It does not only refer to the phenomenon of a certain industry, but the value chain of all industries, which means all valuable things, including currency and bills. , stocks, technology patents, digital copyrights, real estate certificates, etc. can realize the value transfer without intermediary and fragmentation on the blockchain.

Before discussing the Internet of Value, let's talk about value.

The so-called value has several elements: ownership of rights, value exchange, and value consensus

The first thing to establish in the establishment of the value system is the ownership of rights, that is, the proof of assets. The blockchain uses public and private key cryptography to ensure the privacy and unique ownership of assets, and the algorithm can prove rights. Secondly, the blockchain is stored on the distributed ledger chain, and asset ownership can exist for a long time, and the witness of the owner of the nodes on the chain also proves the long-term existence of asset ownership.

In terms of value exchange, the distributed ledger cryptographic signature authentication method is basically applied. The owner can release his assets by providing signature verification and transfer them to another person. And the confirmation of a transaction also requires the majority of confirmation and consensus, and it is recorded and cannot be changed. All historical transaction owners can check at any time.

The ownership of rights establishes the confirmation of assets, value exchange establishes asset liquidity, and the most important thing is how to establish a consensus on value. Consensus is the unanimous opinion of a group of people on a specific issue or a specific issue in a specific historical period. A consensus on value enables a group of people to identify with the value nature, growth, and unit quantity of an asset. At present, there are many blockchain heroes, and there are many coins. There are only a few encrypted assets that can really get the value consensus of the insiders, not to mention the vast number of investors and consumers outside the circle. Therefore, we believe that the biggest pain point in upgrading the blockchain ecosystem to a true value Internet is how to expand the value consensus, that is, the issue of trust.

Value consensus has also driven the pace of regulation. One of the biggest problems in regulation at present is that we have no consensus on the blockchain, and we have been unable to define whether the value of the blockchain we recognize is a medium of exchange, a store of value, a speculative tool, or an intrinsic value. Rights and interests? In fact, they are all, and they are not. The legal point of view is to classify the blockchain into an existing system to facilitate supervision, but maybe the blockchain should have its own classification. We believe that once the blockchain circle starts After steadily advancing in the direction of technological progress and application, supervision will also begin to take root from the root, creating a clear definition and specification of the blockchain value consensus.

Importance of data

The biggest difference between the value Internet and the previous generation of information Internet lies in the confirmation and price of data, which is the biggest key to turning data, information, patents, and warrants into assets. Although the blockchain will be infiltrated into various industries in the future, the upgrading of industrial technology requires massive data as support, and the reason why the traditional Internet is not suitable for the carrier of the Internet of Value is mainly due to several major problems, which are easy to generate The maintenance cost of data islands and centralized databases is relatively high, resulting in data monopoly and vulnerability to decentralized denial of service attacks. More importantly, the core of the Internet of Value is the trinity of creators, consumers and investors. Traditional Internet Providers of data have lost a part of their interests, and blockchain can solve this problem.

Back to the industry, whether it is cloud computing, Internet of Things or artificial intelligence, or even digital identity and DeFi, every industry needs observable real data. The blockchain distributed ledger can record the ownership of data rights, and further use the side chain or state channel to increase the transaction speed of data and assets. Using the massive database storage, computing and even the security and privacy brought by the blockchain, the industrial blockchain can truly establish an ecology.

trust issues

The word "trust" can be said to be the most difficult but also the most valuable thing. For example, a bank's credit loan is a way to give credit to you in a measurable way for you to use; everyone uses Alipay and WeChat. , but also because they trust the intermediary, are willing to pay with them, and are willing to recognize their value. But Bruce Schneider published an article "There's No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology" in Wired, questioning whether the node verification of the blockchain does not represent trust, and whether the trust issue really needs to be solved.

Not to mention whether node verification represents trust or not, it has existed from ancient times to the present in terms of whether the problem of trust should be solved. The reason why trust is important is because I and you "intend to generate transaction behavior", so there is a problem of "need to establish trust". At this time, both parties who intend to transaction must find appropriate tools or methods to establish mutual trust, and must also maintain This trust. In today's transaction scenarios, in addition to the third-party intermediaries or the government to confirm the transaction results, condition triggers, etc., we also need to confirm the trustworthiness of the third-party intermediaries or the government, and then through more verification and auditing to determine the process can be reliability, not to mention the rent-seeking behavior that often occurs.

Monopoly and rigidity

The world's largest intermediary agency, which is the financial institution, we found that gradually began to move. As an institution with the highest trust cost, it is found that blockchain technology has the potential to simplify their processes, reduce costs, and increase efficiency, but that's all. Integrating blockchain into existing processes is indeed the mainstream industry trend in the past and present. But what blockchain is building in the near future is not just improved processes, but the elimination of entire intermediaries. We imagine that the blockchain can subvert the old world one day. What will be transformed first? Identity credit, transmission (remittance), storage (deposit), lending, transaction, risk management, auditing of finance and taxation, that is to say the entire Almost all banking functions will be transformed. Is this the end of the existing banking business that we are familiar with? We often say that companies that monopolize one era will be eliminated in the next era. Why did banks not launch Alipay? Or, why didn't Visa create PayPal? Why didn’t the media giants launch Twitter? Car rental companies should have been able to launch Uber. The existing framework restricts most people, and the unstoppable force of blockchain technology has quickly come to the infrastructure of traditional finance, which is a common prosperity. Long or jade all burnt. Just like the ebb and flow of companies in the previous Internet era, the blockchain will also eliminate and create winners and losers.

Epilogue

Quoting George Gilder, a famous American economist: "The new architecture of blockchain and its derivatives is the future of mankind. The Internet of Value iterates the Internet of Information, which will trigger a huge transformation of the economy and the world system."

Looking at history, the industrial revolution has been silent for a hundred years, the Internet revolution has taken 40 years, and the blockchain has only been born for 13 years. In fact, it is too early. Whether it is technology, application or adaptation, it will take a long time. How to find an ecological application method to fill this gap is definitely the biggest issue of the blockchain industry. Start from the bottom-level user promotion, and slowly let consumers contact. Although each of us is anxious to hope that the real outbreak of the blockchain will come soon, from the perspective of historical torrent, we just need to calm down and accumulate technology, popularity and the most important macro ideas over time, we believe that this day is definitely not far away .