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No experimental technology in human history has ever received such a large amount of money and attention at the beginning of its existence. Bitcoin is so hot because it is so close to money. From another point of view, the emergence of block-chain technology is not only accidental, but also inevitable. In fact, it is the product of the development of the Internet to a specific stage.
Technically, the theory and technology used by Bitcoin were all the product of the last century. The technical conception of digital cryptographic currency can be traced back to the ECash paper published by David Chaum in 1983.
It was later the basis of Bitcoin book technology, and the Bit Gold, published by Nick Szabo in 1998 gave almost all the technical elements of Bitcoin. However, all the choices continue to remain silent, the Bitcoin network began to run in 2009. Apart from the subprime turmoil intensified, that year is not special, but the world than Ten years ago there was a big difference, the dotcom bubble was over, the mobile internet boom was high, and the top headlines were not newspapers and PC, but screens in our hands.
The devices in our palms are faster than the PC, of 10 years ago, the network bandwidth of our palms is a hundred times that of PC, ten years ago, and our PC is almost always connected to the Internet. It is the number of nodes and network connections of this size that enables Bitcoin to operate on P2P networks. It can be said that the seeds of digital money have been germinating for a long time, but what really gave birth to its rooting and sprouting is nowhere to be found. Out of the network and computing.
It is the miracle of Bitcoin that has brought attention to the blockchain, a technology that has grown up with bitcoin, in the form of a complete self-organization that carries tens of billions of dollars of value and trust among strangers! Excited by this new internet miracle, people ask questions that all curious children will ask: where is the boundary of its capabilities?
For nine years in a row, processing and protecting the underlying record of Bitcoin, which has climbed to a market capitalisation of hundreds of billions of dollars, the blockchain has shown extreme reliability; in the faith of countless anonymous participants in the transaction, The blockchain has demonstrated unmatched credit endorsement; it has shown unparalleled natural fairness in the increasingly fierce game of global miners. A completely digital network means, a fully autonomous system, embodies the extremely reliable, extremely credible, extremely impartial characteristic.
Technically, these extraordinary features of block chains are not unimaginable. Their reliability comes from distributed peer-to-peer network technology, the so-called decentralization. Another more typical example of de-centralization is the Internet itself, a network communication system set up during the Cold War to combat the destruction of nuclear war, which has clearly become the infrastructure of human civilization.
Credibility comes from a distributed chained data structure stored on global nodes, which is extremely robust, and tampering with it not only faces an insurmountable computational difficulty, At the same time, it faces the sociological difficulty and cost of buying off a large number of other nodes.
The fairness of block chain comes from the difficulty of no shortcut and the rule of nondiscrimination in consensus algorithm. The latter two properties have the theoretical guarantee of cryptography and mathematics, as well as the practical verification of the effect of bitcoin over the years.
Based on the success of Bitcoin, another kind of digital currency, the Etaifang project, made a bolder attempt to implement intelligent contracts in the block chain. This is a special script that allows us to digitize the value of these digital values if Bitcoin uses block chain technology to achieve digital casting and exchange.
Programming allows you to write any additional rules about the flow of value, so that the operation of digital value is no longer a simple revenue expenditure, but can transform into more complex forms of business.
Or from a technical point of view to re-emphasize the “chain” and “coin” difference. Technically, the “coin” and “chain” are in fact quite distinct, but when it comes to the realization of Bitcoin, these two parts are closely intermingled and coupled like rice and beans in eight-treasure porridge.
Nakamoto did not deliberately separate them. In other words, Nakamoto does not consider the block chain as a separate part. Although the important theoretical framework for the block chain has been published in the timestamp (Time-stamp, 1991) and hash cash (Hashcash, 2002), Nakamoto cited in the white paper But apparently Nakamoto only uses it as a supporting actor in bitcoin technology.
For this historical reason, many insiders grasp the problem by eyebrow and beard, so they often get confused thinking or vague conclusion in judging the problem. Digital currency is a decade of cold window, and block-chain technology is inadvertently inserted willow. Block chain technology can be used as a container or carrier of digital value and credit, something people realized after Bitcoin’s success.
Bitcoin is the first digital value medium on this carrier. Therefore, the blockchain technology does not have a preset target and lacks a very thorough description. But. It is clear that this fully autonomous credit container is currently the only technology that can hold such digital value.
In retrospect, our usual troubles are more or less related to reliability, credibility, and fairness. The nice properties of block chains make it impossible not to imagine its application possible. In particular, the popularity of digital money directly opens up the dream of an idealized digital financial system: value can be transferred between any two people without hindrance, and contracts can be automatically executed in accordance with the agreed rules.
People’s opinions can be expressed, exchange, payment, futures, guarantee, mortgage and other financial business directly between the parties, without any intermediary and endorsement. The sphere is instantly accessible, and more just and credible. Even beyond finance, areas such as copyright, logistics, supplier collaboration, philanthropy, elections, autonomous organizations, and so on, are full of blockchain ideas.
And this is only a fraction of the vision we’ve had in previous articles, if credit can be quantified by computer algorithms, if value can be transferred in a fully digital way. An era of computing civilization comparable to human civilization may begin here.
But when we look back at the block-chain technology that carries all our imaginations with a dream smile on our lips, we need a giant ship that can carry all the human dream of value, and all is just a sampan.
In fact, because the block chain is born with digital money, its architecture and algorithm are firmly stamped with digital currency. Nakamoto’s interest is to create a Non-Trust-Based digital currency. Such positioning makes the design of block chain completely oriented to coins and transactions.
In addition, Nakamoto positions Bitcoin as an experimental project, and the pursuit of algorithm effectiveness is stronger than efficiency pursuit. So when we try to use the block chain to do more, we encounter constraints.
The first thing to do is performance: the Bitcoin block chain now typically trades at 7 per second, compared with 14 per second (compared with an average of 2000 per second for international VISA credit card transactions, with a peak of several times higher). From any point of view, this does not meet the basic requirements of business-level business.
The problem is not obvious at the moment, because much of the digital currency trading in the market is taking place in a private database inside the exchange-trading is not really happening in the chain. If you just treat the block chain as currency, this may be tolerable, after all, under the chain Trading can also achieve the purpose of exchange. But when it comes to smart contracts, the advanced features of block chains, performance on-chain is crucial. Because smart contracts can only be done in chains, this means there is only a single bridge in front of thousands of troops.
A few months ago, the bridge was first overrun by a cat. The fact that a Mini Game intelligent contract called (CryptoKitties), the encrypted Cat, has caused massive congestion in the global ethernet trade, is a grim reality. Although there are now some off-chain technologies that claim to be trading at speeds of hundreds of thousands or even millions of times per second, these technologies have been applied to the chain of block chains. Performance does not help. In order to improve the efficiency and reduce the computational power consumption, some block chain communities degrade the consensus algorithm of block chain to distributed fault-tolerant algorithm, which has achieved good efficiency improvement, but also greatly lost the key characteristics of the block chain. They can only be used locally, so they are called “alliance chains” or “license chains”, “private chains,” or even some people simply refuse to agree that such technologies are block-chains.
We can simply say that DApp, a decentralized App form, is indeed a very important fulcrum in the ideal block chain. This is a further technical assumption than the smart contract, which is essentially a set of program codes used to manipulate asset records on the chain. DApp expects to further manipulate all the resources on and off the chain. The reason for “expectation” is that DApp is really a technology vision right now, and the current implementation is still an attempt at a prototype verification level. One of the most beautiful fantasies about DApp is the expectation that the technology will dominate in a decentralized way Everything in our future. Why? Because we’ve seen the incontrovertible credit effect of digital money on the block chain, and if that effect can be applied in every aspect of our lives, then there is no fraud. The global value system of instant response will carry our lives, from going into supermarkets, traveling in other countries, buying real estate and providing for the aged, we can choose to give everything we have to an open rule. Beyond human credit, completely trustworthy DApp to guard.
This requires a blockchain technology that can record and manipulate universal data, not just a few books and intelligent contracts for manipulating book data, but an ability to accommodate more data types and support more complete and universal interoperability. A more inclusive peer-to-peer computing system in a decentralized and consensual way. Otherwise, the above-mentioned ideal can only be a mirror flower water moon. What is more important is that DApp is extremely dependent on chain performance. Without destroying the decentralization feature, the breakthrough of chain performance is the key in the future. Note that the “decentralization feature”, which is the credibility foundation of a chain-up system, is emphasized here. Can we step back and run a block chain and DApp in a “centralized” or “polycentric” manner? This is a challenging topic. In fact, “can run” and “natural trust” with autonomy are two very different propositions, which are the unique features of blockchain technology. The recent DApp blockchain project to elect super nodes around the world is in fact a compromise to immature technology. In severe cases, this degenerates the system into a traditional distributed system. If a well-designed distributed system can be equated with a block chain, then The miracle of digital money should have happened in the last century, and not in less than a decade.
Because of the digital currency’s pedigree, all the existing block chains, from data structure to algorithm design, are optimized for transaction data, even customized. This makes the current block chain technology unable to adapt to most non-financial business scenarios, nor to deal with unstructured data-based Internet applications. Consensus algorithm and transaction data are too tightly coupled, making the existing block chain technology is very poor versatility and scalability, even a slight change in business logic, will lead to inconsistent data and bifurcation, which is unacceptable for rigorous business systems.
Interoperability of almost zero is another fatal flaw in the existing block chain, each of which is a completely closed-loop independent world running under many digital currencies. Each chain of value assets must be closed-loop to maintain self-consistency. This is just like a bank that does not accept requests for exchange from any other bank at all, a contradiction that has not been apparent for the time being because of two factors: the Internet has no territorial boundaries. Thus lighten the traders’ actual feeling of obstacles, second, the off-chain exchange temporarily undertakes the transaction demand of different assets on the chain. But the truth If our vision of block-chain is the future of ubiquitous value interconnection, then this parallel universe like the split way of value flow, must not be able to bear the expectations of the industry.
In addition, such problems as “computational power black hole” in computational power consumption and incomplete business logic on the chain are testing the positioning of block chain as the basis of future value interconnection. Although we’re seeing a lot of blockchain projects, there are actually very few original innovation projects, most of which are copies and spin-offs of bitcoin, ethernet, and super books. Ethernet Square is not known as Block chain 2.0, but in fact its revolutionary improvements are mostly digital money, and at the level of the Block chain, Ethernet still uses the bitcoin chain architecture. And the consensus principle that performance is still low, so more accurately, Ethernet Square should be referred to as digital currency 2.0 rather than block chain 2.0. Relatively speaking, the improvement of the super account book project in the chain structure and principle is more prominent, but unfortunately, the unequal status of its node makes it only be used as the “alliance chain”. Superbooks themselves are not immune to this problem, and it is futile to have as many nodes as possible in global data centres to hide the problem from the superbook-clone projects. According to statistics, the Github platform in 2016 The number of block chain projects started is 26000, and the mortality rate is as high as 92% after one year. Besides the poor positioning of the projects, the above three mainstream technologies are also important factors in supporting the project objectives. To sum up, limited by the lineage of digital currency and the positioning of experimental projects, block chains still face very serious performance problems, business compatibility issues, and interoperability issues. Although some improvements have been done in tinkering and even published some amazing technical indicators, these improvements have little improvement on the chain performance, and some seriously destroy the block chain characteristics, resulting in a serious limitation of the application scope.
All this shows that the block chain is still quite far from our ultimate dream. However, the immediate problems will not block the block chain potential of the future. As an experimental technology, the blockchain has blossomed in the short term with new Internet value tools, such as digital money, smart contracts, and (Token), each of which is upending conventional wisdom. We can’t really say how many surprises lie ahead for us. As it begins, the seeds of great change have been quietly buried, waiting for the rain and thunder. The block chain is waiting for the maturity of some of the necessary conditions to become the basis of the next generation of human civilization infrastructure Stone.