blockchain concepts worth knowing

After the last post ("Deep Visiting Currency Circle: Enjoy a Rich Night, You Can Never Forget the Shortcut"), many readers leave a message to tell "Zizi Guangnian", "Distributed System", "Decentralization" Blockchains and encrypted digital currency concepts such as “mining” and “mines” are still unclear.

Today, we invite members of the “Districts” to clarify the concept of blockchain.

"District Small Things" is a blockchain learning group composed of Peking University alumni. Members graduated from the Department of Computer Science and Technology.

The next decade of blockchain: chaos, path and prospects

Since the 2008 Bitcoin white paper published by Nakamoto, the blockchain has been in development for nearly a decade. But in the recent craze of encrypted digital currencies, many people only know Bitcoin and Ethereum, but they don't understand the blockchain.

In fact, various encrypted digital currencies represented by bitcoin are an application of blockchain technology.

Buying coins only for the sake of finding a shortcut to wealth, it is inevitable to become a leek. In group madness, the level of thinking and understanding is always more critical than the number in the account.

The purpose of this paper is not to point to the appreciation of wealth, but to guide cognitive upgrading: to help the blockchain zero-based Xiaobai quickly familiarize with some basic concepts of blockchain technology in the past decade, in order to explore entrepreneurial opportunities in the blockchain field in the next decade. .

Four judgments about blockchain

I believe that everyone has already understood the basic concepts of blockchain technology. For those who feel strange, please refer to the nouns at the end of the article. Starting from these concepts, we have four basic judgments:

First, the subversion of the blockchain is that it solves the problem of humanity of "trust". From a technical point of view, it cannot understand its power.

Some people or groups that don't trust each other have a server, and they can maintain a recognized record when everyone supervises each other and most people follow a consensus agreement—this is enough to open up an infinite imagination.

[blockchain]

A chain of data blocks (ie, blocks) connected by a method in which: in the N+1th block, the hash value of the Nth block is included. Moreover, the chain of such data blocks is stored and maintained by a widely distributed and large number of server nodes. Each server node has a complete copy of the blockchain (ie, the storage of blockchain data is highly redundant). ).

[hash value]

The hash value is also called "digital fingerprint". No matter how much data, after some calculation, you can get a fixed length (for example, 256 bits) hash value; the content of the data is different, the hash value must be different, just like People and people don't have the same fingerprint.

Second, the blockchain's transformation of productivity has a tendency to be overestimated. Putting aside the “coin” that can realize the flow of value, it only considers the transformation of the blockchain to productivity, and its innovation level is far less than artificial intelligence.

The blockchain is actually a distributed database. The content stored in each block is equivalent to the table in the database. The difference between it and the traditional distributed database is:

(1) Participants can join arbitrarily, without permission; leave arbitrarily without affecting system operation

(2) The content of the database is open to all participants

(3) All past transaction data - the database log - never deleted

(4) Highly redundant and highly reliable

(5) Inefficient, requires multiple confirmations to be considered a transaction is really completed

Digital currency is just one of the applications of blockchain technology. From the perspective of database technology, the way of digital currency bookkeeping is not fundamentally different from the way Alipay and WeChat pay for bookkeeping. Bitcoin transactions are still very slow, and large transactions generally have to wait for six confirmations. About 1 hour.

So what are the advantages of digital and digital currency? It is that they achieve a low friction flow of value in the bit world. The legal currency flows in the bit world with great friction. Both the sender and the receiver are bound to the identity of the citizen. There are various limits, and cross-border movement is very difficult. In comparison, the time to wait for a few more confirmations is really a trivial matter. As Dr. Liang Bin said: “The free flow of wealth and unrestricted free flow are the ultimate needs of many rich people. I think this is the core value of digital currency including Bitcoin.”

However, in addition to the application of digital currency, as a blockchain technology of purely trusted database, it seems that the first application is likely to be “trace source”.

For example, Tmall International's global traceability plan mainly uses big data to track the entire link of imported goods through blockchain and drug monitoring code, and achieves the purpose of integrating production, customs clearance, transportation and other aspects. Add "ID card" to each cross-border product.

This type of application can be handled in the same way as a traditional, centralized, and highly reliable database. Therefore, from a productivity perspective, the blockchain only provides incremental progress, and the imagination is not large.

Third, the real imagination of the blockchain is the “decentralization” of the production relationship.

The “decentralization” of production relations has two routes, one is “anarchism” and the other is “de-intermediation”. The discussion will be discussed later from the specific application of the blockchain.