BSN, Embrace All the Challenges

Never has the potential for creative business collaboration between Chinese and Western entrepreneurs been greater. Dramatic advances in blockchain and cloud-computing technology mean an increasingly diverse range of real business problems can now be solved through the use of cost-effective decentralized applications. In this new and growing market, companies from around the world compete to provide the best quality service at affordable prices, and this dynamism is driving rapid innovation in the use of blockchain technology and creating myriad opportunities for users and suppliers alike. Chinese firms have a substantial role to play in this global market alongside US and European companies, and it is ultimately in consumers’ best interests that the level of competition remains high.

On the other hand, as the recent controversy over Huawei’s involvement in the UK’s 5G network has shown, seldom has the danger of misunderstanding and misinterpretation been as prevalent as it is now. The purpose of this article is to explore the causes of this miscommunication and to outline what Red Date Technology and the Blockchain-based Service Network (BSN) are and can offer to an international audience.

What exactly is the BSN?

Put simply, the BSN aspires to become a sort of ‘Internet of Blockchains’. This ambitious but achievable objective has guided every stage of how the BSN was designed and constructed and has the potential to make engaging with blockchain technology much simpler than it currently is. BSN is a public network that can run across any and all different cloud platforms, frameworks, and portals. In this way, it allows for cross-chain and cross-framework data exchange, and this universal interoperability can unlock enormous gains for all users of blockchain applications. Fundamentally, the BSN is an attempt to bring the benefits of cutting-edge technology to as many users as quickly and as cheaply as possible.

What is the key benefit?

First and most importantly, by building a universal framework both the ease and the cost of access to blockchain environments are greatly improved. Currently, the development, use, and subsequent management of blockchain applications involve high fixed costs which comparatively few businesses can comfortably meet. The BSN ecosystem can significantly lower these costs, thus removing a major barrier to entry, attracting more developers to develop blockchain applications, and raising the healthy competition between application developers. This means lower prices for end-users, as well as better quality applications and higher levels of customer satisfaction.

How is the network organized?

The unique architecture of the BSN is key to enabling low costs of entry for developers. BSN is a public infrastructure built around “public city nodes” located in each geographic region where the network is accessed, and a consensus order cluster service that is uniform across all the city nodes that make up the network. All the applications deployed on each city node share server resources, and this pooling of server resources allows a more optimal allocation of processing capability in real-time.

As such, once developers have attained access to the network, they don’t face any further costs related to the purchase of either physical servers or cloud services when they want to scale up their applications. The technical complexity of this task and the collaborative vision that inspired the BSN requires the involvement of several business partners to make this happen. Besides Red Date, who is responsible for the development and daily operations, China Union pay is in charge of maintenance of the consensus node cluster service, and cloud providers such as Google Cloud, AWS, and China Mobile provide cloud services to the whole network.

Is BSN a Chinese government project?

The involvement of China Mobile and China UnionPay as partners alongside Red Date Technology has raised some concerns among Western audiences about the relationship between BSN and the Chinese government. China’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are viewed with some suspicion outside China, partly due to economists’ skepticism that such companies can be efficiently run, and partly due to doubts over how independent and free from political interference the boards of SOEs are.

It is important to point out that all of the intellectual property and patents relating to the BSN system are fully owned by Red Date Technology, and that the development of these software programs was made with no contributions from any SOEs.

Whilst portals or individual applications running on the BSN will of course be owned by the companies who built and operate these, the public infrastructure itself which Red Date’s software facilitates was not developed with funding from any SOE.

The BSN is being promoted by the Chinese government as part of an effort to boost digital innovation among Chinese citizens, but it is certainly not owned, controlled by, or answerable to political masters. This style of industrial strategy is far from unique to China and is not dissimilar to the UK, South Korea, Denmark, and many other governments’ approaches to the digital economy.

Where is blockchain on the diffusion of innovation curve?

For technologies still at an early stage of adoption, government-promoted industry strategies are often a key part of fostering future success, as the unprecedentedly fast development of Covid vaccines has shown.

New technologies tend to be adopted over time in a similar pattern. This is called the adoption curve (blue line above). The first users ready to try something new always represent a small section of the population called ‘Innovators’, but as time moves on, if the technology is successful, more and more people adopt it. Blockchain has now moved beyond the ‘Innovators’ and is into the ‘Early Adopters’ phase, but this means governments around the world will in all likelihood continue to foster and encourage this adoption for the foreseeable future.

What motivated the launch of BSN?

With the above facts in mind, it is important to communicate that the source code underlying the BSN will be open source within 2 to 3 years. At present, potential users of the network still require permission to access and built within BSN, but as the system expands and reaches more and more users the plan is to open up the network to anyone and everyone.

Before offering the code in an open-source format as Linux has been since the early 1990s, the main task facing the architects of the BSN is how to simplify the growing complexity of the network without compromising its sophistication and functionality. This is often the hardest step for new technologies to take, and in the language of business theory can be thought of as akin to the difference between ‘invention’ (a scientific break-though), and ‘innovation’ (turning a scientific break-through into a profitable product).

In the case of the internet, the development of HTML programming language was undoubtedly a huge part of this transition. Although still at an early stage, BSN represents one of the most ambitious projects taking place anywhere in the world right now, and as such could be the key to bringing the benefits of blockchain technology to citizens and consumers around the world. As we are seeing some early blockchain applications are emerging in food and drug traceability for health and safety, sustainability and climate change, trade finance and etc., real positive changes are happening. The more accessible and affordable the technology is, the more likely we will see more profound innovations that can positively impact society.

Final Thoughts

Eventually, BSN, or blockchain technology in general, will become a set of protocols just like HTTP, which is used to handle communications between two IT systems. The new blockchain protocols will be able to facilitate synched communications among multiple or unlimited IT systems via broadcasting.

When the technology becomes a set of standard protocols, everybody can build their own systems with them, and all systems in different parts of the world can communicate with each other seamlessly. This is exactly how Internet has evolved over the years. This is also what we vision BSN to be. There would be many self-built BSNs worldwide with the same communication protocols to form the next generation of the Internet. Geopolitical conflict is always a challenge to overcome, but it will never stop the evolution of technologies.