From the payment of U.S. banks in the era of e-payment to the payment of mobile phones in the mobile Internet era, to encrypted payments, such as Alipay, and the emergence of WeChat's various innovations, we seem to have the illusion that all areas of payment are relevant. The innovation has been completed and there is no room for any improvement. Is that really the way it is? In the sharing activity held by Titanium Media, he was the senior engineer of Lucent Bell Labs, the current vice president and chief researcher of OK Inc., and Duan Xinxing, author of Blockchain: Reshaping the Economy and the World. .
Blockchain is the next breakthrough in financial paymentsWhen Bill Gates made a famous prediction in the 1990s, he said: "In my opinion, 64K memory is far enough for any computer." Obviously, this was a case in the Silicon Valley IT community in the United States. Joke, because then more than 64K of memory was created. Today, there are also new innovations and revolutions in the payment sector, but this is not all. In recent years, an underlying technology blockchain has been sought after by industry and capital because he can reshape and subvert the financial and economic and social applications.
The first point to note is that the blockchain is not an upper-layer business model, but more like a low-level protocol to solve some of the pain points in the specific process. For example, the above figure is a cross-section of our previous product analysis. Overseas business model - analysis of the import business model of cross-border payment. Based on the capital flow and cash flow inside, we will find that the purchase of an overseas website has been sent from an onshore consumer and the order has been submitted until the entire verification is completed, and a total of 11 steps have passed since this compliance check was completed. Obviously, this is very inconvenient.
Once a certain technology has a pain point, there will be corresponding technologies. Blockchain is such a technology. What is that blockchain? I want to quote an article from the Economist who describes the blockchain in five words.
In order for everyone to understand this concept more clearly and clearly, I will start with a story. This is a real case.
This is Honduras, a small country in Central America. One day in 2009, a group of policemen and demolition workers rushed to an old lady's house called Mariana, ready to let her leave, told her that the house was not yours, and then forced it. Remove the house. But she has lived in a dilapidated house for 30 years. Her property certificate was also complete and she appealed to the government. Unfortunately, the information of the local real estate department shows that her property belongs to another person who applied to the court for an expulsion order.
Eventually she was forced to leave the house.
Things like this kind of real estate registration is unknown or information is lost is actually very common in the world. The truth of this matter is that Honduras, because of officials corruption, joined forces to change the information in the database. In addition to the above-mentioned huts, he is still A large number of luxury homes and villas have been registered on the beach .
Later, the country of Honduras combined a blockchain technology company to do the right to real estate technology. What is a blockchain? In simple terms, blockchain is a more powerful technology. It is essentially sharable and trustworthy. Everyone can check the public ledger, but no single user can control it. The entire blockchain system Participants are constantly updated to update the general ledger. It can be revised in accordance with strict rules and open agreements.
To put it more simply, it is actually a distributed general ledger technology, and some people use distributed ledgers and distributed ledgers to call blockchains. What does this general account mean? For example, there are father and mother, grandparents and grandmothers in one family, and Xiao Ming and Xiao Meng are a lot of people. Everyone wants to control the financial power in their families. Then the question arises. Who will be responsible for making the required work? The blockchain was doing this way of using the blockchain at the bottom of the digital currency, that is to say, everyone worked together to keep accounts, and then they were updated and synchronized to the network, and they were updated in accordance with the unified rules. This eliminated the possibility of anyone making a denomination in their accounts. Sexuality, thereby generating public benefits. Honduras is using the same method and (English) this company to solve the problem of the right to determine the assets.
Why can the blockchain do these things? What are his characteristics?
First of all, it cannot be modified. Once an information record has been recorded in the blockchain, it cannot be changed.
Second, it is a complete database system for distributed storage. In the figure above, the upper left corner is the world's largest distribution of Bitcoin supply chain nodes, and the lower right public blockchain is the distribution of Ethernet's supply chain. There are a total of more than 6000 each, together with 12031 public nodes. . On these nodes, all their GL records are backed up. If a single centralized database fails or falsifies everything, then it's all over and the hacking data is complete. However, blockchain is a distributed storage, closing services is not possible, and hackers have no single target.
The third point is its security attributes. The first product in the blockchain is Bitcoin. Now seven years have passed, and now there is no code-level vulnerability. Thousands of hackers are trying, but now no one can succeed.
In the fourth point, there is another property of the blockchain that is traceability and traceability. The above transaction records and account book records are added one by one in chronological order. Users can follow this time for tracking and public verification.
Therefore, because the blockchain cannot be tampered with, it is also a distributed, secure, and traceable underlying protocol, which is equivalent to forming a set of consensus mechanisms on the blockchain - a set of trusts based on the underlying can be built mechanism.
Since he is the underlying protocol of trust, we can develop and program above it. HTTP, which is similar to our mail system and our web system, can be developed based on TCPIP.
If there is no blockchain, each payment, exchange, or financial value transmission operation must go through commercial bank A, then A to the central bank, and then the central bank will go to the next process and then send the money. To trade this non-face-to-face barter exchange online, we must find an appropriate and trusted intermediary to complete the entire payment and exchange process. After the blockchain is generated, a value transmission network is formed because it bases all account and transaction information on the bottom, algorithm-based, and protocol-based.
Therefore, a very big advantage of the blockchain is that it can abandon the role of transit banks and achieve point-to-point, quick and low-cost cross-border payments. Through the blockchain platform, cross-border transactions can not only bypass transit banks, reduce transfer fees, but also improve the security of cross-border remittances due to their characteristics, speed up the speed of settlement and liquidation, and greatly increase the utilization rate of funds. .
Based on blockchain or blockchain technologies, we have a very large number of cross-border solutions. For example, a cross-branch agreement facilitates rapid interbank liquidation. He allows parties involved in the agreement to see the same account. This, reduces inconsistency, but also has a characteristic, that is to say there is an agreement similar to trust transfer, if A is to be transferred to D, but there is no trust between A and D, A trust B, B trust C, C If you trust D, it can accomplish such a nature.
The blockchain as a low-level protocol also has a very powerful property called programmability. In the Ethernet implementation we call it a smart contract. In other words, in the blockchain, we can not only operate it as a payment system and exchange system, but we can also use our scripts to use our code to execute and write executable treaties. for example:
In 2016, at Miami Blockchain Technology Expo, there was a company called “Halousnâ€. The company used programmability to set some preconditions for performing operations on the blockchain, and then people could leave. Can carry out receipt, inspection, payment automatically. Their solution is to install sensors in the wine. When the sensor determines that the temperature and humidity of the wine can reach the parameters set in the smart contract, the entire order can be completed, otherwise it is cancelled. In the Internet of Everything and everything connected to the IoT payment infrastructure, people can set parameter conditions and achieve behaviors that will enable many intelligent operations. This is also the central bank’s special attention to the blockchain, because programmability, when combined with digital currency, can produce very strong and beneficial results. This can meet the requirements of Zhou Xiaochuan’s then-president and help the effective operation of monetary policy. Conduction.
In times of economic downturn, we always have some stimulus policies, but in reality the central bank has its own plans and overall plans. For example, the central bank does not want this money to enter the real estate sector and does not want him to enter some high-capacity, high-consumption Can go to this area. However, once funds are allocated, capital has a profit-making property that is difficult to control locally. If you combine programmability with digital currency, you can monitor where the money has gone and now What kind of state, if it is invested in real estate, it can report an alarm, which can be automatically implemented without the need of third-party trust points. This effectively achieves a strong control and supervision of the entire economy and the circulation and operation of the entire currency.
Although he certainly has some immaturity now, we can already fully realize that this technology is enough to bring about great possibility of reform in the financial and real world.
Discussion: At present, the heat of the blockchain is gradually increasing, but the actual application scenario does not seem to be much. Is it because the technology is not yet mature? What is the state of the technology now?Paragraph: From the perspective of the current development stage of the blockchain, it is digital and Bitcoin that form the form from 2009 to 15 years. On this basis, the early players and geeks established an upstream or downstream digital wallet exchange, and Other services. In the 16th to 19th years, we expect that it is still in a development stage, but there will be a commercial stage. It will be used by corporate banks and financial institutions to adopt clearing and settlement payments, and the technology will not appear until 2020. Civilian-level technologies, including healthy big data encrypted data storage, will gradually mature.
This is a description of the judgment and status quo of the entire industry and the entire practical application. At present, apart from Bitcoin's entire industrial chain, the application of other blockchains is in the proof of concept phase.
Some time ago, DAO was attacked. We all know that it has nothing to do with the blockchain's features such as non-tamperable, distributed storage, system security, and traceability. However, is the upper application still vulnerable to attack?
Paragraph: DAO is actually a project based on Ethereum. Ethereum is now the world's second largest blockchain public blockchain, with a market value of about 1 billion US dollars, equivalent to 7% to 10% of Bitcoin's supply chain. But his problem with this is actually a bit different from the idea of ​​designing Ethereum. Ethereum thinks that because Bitcoin is a robust blockchain system that does digital currency, building an operating system based on a blockchain, it is possible to develop distributed blockchain applications in the operating system and to make such an operating system. In the underlying platform, it embeds smart contracts in this platform, but he has some aspects of the embedded process that are not handled well. For example, there are loopholes in the Turing completion of smart contracts and their opcodes. Then there were some problems with the code when it was applied again on this smart contract. This is equivalent to some problems with the top-level application code. Then about 3.6 million Ether coins were stolen, equivalent to $60 million worth of Ethereum stolen.
Later, the Ethereum team's soft birth failed. They made a software patch and found that the software patch had many loopholes and used only hard labor. I was talking to the founder of Ethereum. "After you designed these questions, did you ever think of changing him to be as safe as the Bitcoin supply chain?" I mean, can you do the same as the Bitcoin supply chain? The structure of the side chain isolates this and then applies it on the side? If this is a risk, it can be interrupted in time. His answer is that everything is a double-edged sword. If he wants to introduce scalability, the problem of security is also inevitable. He hopes that the improvement of this code in the future will make this system more robust and good. The direction of development.
The decentralization of the blockchain seems to be contrary to national policies. Will the central bank be an obstacle to its promotion?Duan: I used to contact some officials of the People's Bank of China and found that their attitude towards the blockchain is still OK. Their opinion is that as long as they are able to supervise and then cancel the anonymity of the previous Bitcoin era blockchain 1.0 era to ensure that they are not used for money laundering and terrorist financing, his attitude towards this is open. He did not say that he wanted to kill a stick, including their own application of blockchain and research and exploration of technology.