Vite CEO Charles Liu: Blockchain “Balanced” Philosophy | Jinse Finance Interview (Part 1)
How is a public blockchain used? Why should pacticality and balance be taken into consideration in the design of such a chain? What lessons can blockchain learn from the Internet use cases that require high-performance concurrent computing? In this article, Charles (Chunming) Liu, the CEO of Vite Labs, explains his philosophy of “balance.”
Prologue
“The problem is that Blockchain and Internet Technologies are trying to solve the same thing, there is basically no difference.” Charles (Chunming) Liu, founder and CEO of Vite, said in an interview with Jinse Finance.
As a seasoned Blockchain entrepreneur and technical expert, he has served as a senior architect of JD, co-founder of Coinport, and technical director at Merituan. From his previous experience, he has gained rich and practical knowledge in the fields of distributed systems and high concurrency. Talking about Blockchain Technology and large-scale applications, he elaborated on his own pragmatic theories.
At JD, Charles led a busy team during 2013’s Singles’ Day (aka Double 11 Festival — China’s largest shopping day). It was during this time that he was introduced to Bitcoin from some friends and realized that Bitcoin and Blockchain Technology could bring new entrepreneurial opportunities.
After Singles’ Day, Charles, along with Daniel Wang and Ma Chao, began their entrepreneurial endeavors into the Blockchain space. They received an angel round investment from IDG for their first venture, Coinport — a Bitcoin exchange.
Unfortunately, the timing of this venture coincided with the long bear market (in conjunction with the stolen Bitcoin from Mt. Gox) and they were unable to secure funding to continue. Although the venture was not a success, Charles and his team gained valuable experience and an insight into understanding the Blockchain space, and this laid the foundation for Vite.
The “Balanced” Philosophy of Blockchain Technology
“Most of my career has been involved with doing high-level concurrent work, facing specific business scenarios and solving practical problems. In the mind of a seasoned technical expert or architect, the choice of technical solutions usually needs to be based on reality and making many decisions regarding trade-offs.”
“However, in the Blockchain industry, I have found that many projects are keen to achieve only a narrow set of success indicators. Such technical solutions tend to be biased and ignore specific application scenarios. It is important to understand that the gap between theory and reality can be very large. When achieving high performance indicators in a test environment, it does not necessarily mean that the system can perform as expected in practical applications.”
From e-commerce advertising, high-frequency trading, to ride-sharing, Charles has constantly been tackling issues in the high concurrency field. The “struggle experience” accumulated in traditional Internet business and an in-depth understanding of “centralized” technology are ultimately reflected in Vite’s design philosophy.
In response to the current popular sharding technology, Charles said, “Sharding and layering are relatively common solutions to system performance problems. These are not new technologies and have mature applications in the traditional Internet field. However, when utilized onto the Blockchain, it is yet to be determined if it is a viable solution, as it will face many challenges.”
“Take the sharding technology as an example, it seems simple and effective, and the TPS from simulations can also be very high, but the difficulty lies in how to solve the cross-sharding problem. In reality, data or transactions often fail to meet localized assumptions, and there are a large number of cross-sharding scenarios. The performance of the entire system is likely to be far from its theoretical targets.”
“Extensibility, security, decentralization, this is an impossible triangle that requires a balanced approach” Charles said. Vite’s core philosophy is “balance”.
There are many balance points in technical solutions that need to be carefully scrutinized, such as “efficiency” and “safety”, “performance” and “economy”, “high throughput” and “development-friendliness”. Each solution needs to address the pain points in the actual application scenario, and take into consideration all of the trade-offs. How to choose these balance points is the most important job of Vite.
“A car is good not only because of its speed; a mobile phone is powerful not only due to its number of CPU cores. To judge the value of these products, one should review the actual user experience rather than pure performance indicators.”
Charles said, “Words like millions of TPS often have more to do with marketing. Vite, on the other hand, is designed to solve practical problems. Whether it is the ledger structure, consensus algorithm or smart contract virtual machine, it is thoughtful in design and will address the actual needs of decentralized applications in the future.”
(To be continued)
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