TAS On Campus: Tech Breakthroughs in the Blockchain Winter

Hangzhou, Zhejiang — On Nov. 18th, the first TAS Campus Meet-Up was successfully held in the Yongqian Activity Center of Zhejiang University (Yuquan Campus).

The Meet-Up consisted of two parts — the lecture session and the round-table session, both of which focused on “How to Make It Through the Blockchain Winter with Technological Breakthroughs After the Craze”.

Despite the cold weather and winter rain, our enthusiastic audience still made it from all over the city to witness our very first offline community meet-up, to find their own answer for the question: how to survive this blockchain winter?

Rooted in Proof and Chained to the Future

Larry, Silicon Valley Veteran and TAS Chief Scientist, illustrated his point of view with a formula:

Blockchain = 1 Chain + 2 Mechanisms + 1 Thinking Pattern

1 Chain:
Blockchain;

2 Mechanisms:
Namely, incentive mechanism and administrative mechanism. Token is the medium for economic incentives in the blockchain space, while DAO is the administrative mechanism that over-watches the community.

1 Thinking Pattern:
The thinking pattern of co-construction, co-owning, co-administration, co-benefiting, and co-winning.

Larry believes the future of blockchain lies in the combination of the blockchain-level credibility and the traditional centralized efficiency, and blockchain must be brought back to its nature of creating value and boosting productivity. Blockchain is not a panacea, but it shouldn’t be neglected either.

Five Popular Lies Among Public Chains

DAI Jia, architect of TASchain and former tech lead of cryptography and security of the Security Department of Alibaba, dug into the five popular lies among public chains.

1. The threshold for a truly usable public chain is 1 million TPS? False. The capability of processing thousands of transactions per second means almost 100 million transactions a day — enough for most applicational scenarios.

2. Support for multiple programming languages in the smart contract is an omnipotent cure? False. Currently, dApps are faced with problems including the low performance of algorithm, high energy consumption, too many redundant smart contracts and a limited audience. The programming language only account for a limited part of the problem.

3. Being open-source means security? False. Being open-source doesn’t guarantee zero security risks. For instance, the phenomenon dApp FOMO 3D had experienced attacked and tampered with recently.

4. Source-tracing with blockchain, is that truly reliable? False. The blockchain technology can only guarantee the integrity of information, however, it does not offer the capability of distinguishing counterfeits from authentic ones.

5. Blockchain will overthrow current Internet ecosystem? Well, the whole industry is still in the phase of exploration, and far from maturity.

The Blockchain Industry and the Industrial Transformation — Outlooks and Practices

MA Qianli, VP of 8BTC and Operations Director of BYTOM, also shared his viewpoint from an industrial perspective. Mr. Ma’s speech is guided by three major questions:

Is blockchain a new technology?
MA: No, blockchain itself isn’t new, but we’ve found new applications for it.

What it is that blockchain aims to overthrow? to revolutionize?
MA: Blockchain is not about overthrowing the status quo, it’s more like an alternative to existing ways.

How to define TOKEN in the blockchain space?
MA: Token is a utility for practical purposes rather than a tool for making money.

The Roundtable

The roundtable session was moderated by Liu Feng, Chief Editor of ChainNews, with Larry, Zhang Hongxin, Wang Lei, Lin Mengxiang as participants.

All participants expressed their point of view on topics including “what is holding back the development of dApps” and so on.

When reflecting on the craze for blockchain, we realize that it has brought inspirations and enlightenments for people of all industries, and the current obstacles are just a stage that it must go through.

In this winter of blockchain, the false will be inevitably be eliminated while the true retained, and the good will eventually drive out the bad.