The next four years of blockchain: the east wind has arrived, from virtual to real

At 3:23 am on May 12, 2020, F2Pool mined the last block before the halving at block height 629999, and Bitcoin completed its third block reward halving.

For quite a long time, all major media and social platforms have reported and analyzed the halving on a large scale. It can be said that the halving is the biggest "event" in the industry. Some people predict that Bitcoin will reach one million US dollars after the halving; others say that good news will be bad news, and Bitcoin will continue to struggle in the long bear market.

Many people were waiting for the Bitcoin halving like they were waiting for the New Year's Eve bell of the Spring Festival Gala, fearing that the market would fluctuate drastically and cause losses to their assets. However, the result was beyond most people's expectations. The third Bitcoin halving was completed peacefully, which could be called a "Christmas Eve". This hot topic that has been attracting much attention since the end of last year finally came to an end.

There are still four years until the next Bitcoin halving. What will happen to the blockchain industry in the next four years?

In the past few years, although everyone has been shouting that blockchain is a great technology, a report once released by McKinsey even called blockchain technology the core technology with the greatest potential to trigger the fourth wave of disruptive revolutionary waves after the steam engine, electricity, and the Internet, and it is hoped that our current "information Internet" will be pushed into the era of value Internet.

But for quite a long time, Bitcoin and other digital currencies, apart from satisfying the demand for anonymous transactions in pornography, gambling and drugs, have been nothing but speculation. The so-called Blockchain 2.0 programmable smart contracts, decentralized on-chain governance, and even the fact that everything can be put on the chain, are largely to meet the demand for price speculation.

On the other hand, with the end of the bull market at the end of 2017, the entire blockchain industry entered a two-year low. Although the price of digital assets fluctuated during this period, a large number of blockchain projects stagnated due to funding issues , causing huge economic losses to investors, and a large amount of negative news also cast a shadow on the industry.

Many former "believers" and people who pay attention to the development of blockchain technology have also begun to reflect on whether blockchain technology is really valuable. Gartner even "eliminated" blockchain technology from its 2019 technology maturity curve.

In my opinion, it is not because blockchain technology is not promising, but because it is too advanced. Because the development and evolution of everything has a process. Many new technologies will encounter various problems in the process of evolution. They can only be put on the market after being continuously improved in the laboratory. In this process, only scientific researchers can get in touch with them.

On the other hand, blockchain technology is just like the saying "one step ahead is a pioneer, two steps ahead is a martyr". We can see that many blockchain projects are not because their technology is not advanced enough or their concepts are not advanced enough. On the contrary, the visions proposed by these blockchain projects are very good. For example, decentralized governance, supply chain traceability, cultural and creative copyright confirmation, supply chain finance, etc. are all very beautiful ideals, but unfortunately there was no soil for their realization at that time.

Bad money drives out good money. Many projects have no products, and even the teams are fabricated. They can get tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars in financing just by writing a white paper and finding a few big names in the cryptocurrency circle to support them. However, no one is interested in projects that are truly application-oriented.

The concept of "blockchain empowering the real economy" essentially means that the development trajectory of blockchain technology and multiple related technologies intersects with the development of the real economy, rather than the isolated development of blockchain technology.

Although people have already had enough imagination about the future application scenarios of blockchain, how to ensure that the efficiency of on-chain work can meet people's needs? How to ensure the security and ease of use of blockchain? Is the smart contract really "smart" and not just used to issue coins? This actually involves many fields and needs to be developed together.

If we talk about the technology that users perceive most strongly now, it should be mobile Internet, including the "5G dispute" that was heated last year. In terms of technology, it mainly benefits from the development of the following fields: high-performance mobile chips comparable to PC processors, continuous improvement of the underlying operating system, touch screens with outstanding display effects, longer battery life and faster charging speeds, and photo effects that are not inferior to cameras. Only by improving these basic technologies can the comprehensive performance of mobile phones be improved, and developers can develop various applications on them. Otherwise, it is just an improvement in mobile network speed, but there is no hardware equipment that can carry high-speed networks. Imagine the Nokia candy bar phone 20 years ago. What would it do even if it had a 5G network?

Therefore, in the current situation where "high-tech products are the result of the collaboration of multiple basic technologies", if one of the technologies develops particularly rapidly and its concept is particularly advanced, while other supporting technologies have not yet met the requirements, then its development will actually have little effect on the emergence of the product, and in some cases, it will even be a drag on the company that develops this technology.

It is not difficult to see why blockchain technology has been a buzzword in the past few years, but has no applications. This is because the public's awareness of blockchain, talent pool, and supporting technologies are not enough.

So what will happen in the next four years? Will blockchain technology remain at the stage of digital asset speculation or will it be truly implemented and move from virtual to real? I think the time is ripe.

First, at the national level, on October 25, 2019, the top leaders collectively studied blockchain and proposed to use blockchain technology as an important breakthrough for independent innovation.

On April 20, the National Development and Reform Commission held a regular online press conference. Wu Hao, Director of the Innovation and High-tech Development Department of the National Development and Reform Commission, said that the concept of new infrastructure is an infrastructure system that is guided by new development concepts, driven by technological innovation, based on information networks, and oriented towards the needs of high-quality development and provides services such as digital transformation, intelligent upgrading, and integrated innovation.

Information infrastructure mainly refers to infrastructure generated based on the evolution of new generation information technology. For example, communication network infrastructure represented by 5G, Internet of Things, Industrial Internet, and Satellite Internet, and new infrastructure represented by artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and blockchain. The country has placed blockchain on a par with artificial intelligence and cloud computing, and this positioning is not low. It should be noted that artificial intelligence and cloud computing have been widely used after years of development.

Not only at the national level, but also at the local level, various places have successively introduced development plans and supporting policies. As the epidemic in China has been effectively controlled, economic activities have also begun to resume. A few days ago, many provinces and cities such as Guizhou, Hunan, Guangzhou, and Ganzhou issued blockchain development action plans, planning the construction of blockchain platforms and industrial clusters and promoting tens of thousands of enterprises to "go on the chain". Many places will build blockchain open innovation platforms and promote key enterprises to "go on the chain" as the next focus of work. Guizhou Province stated that in the future, it will build 3 to 5 blockchain open innovation platforms and public service platforms, and introduce and cultivate more than 100 growing blockchain companies. Hunan Province has proposed the goal of promoting 30,000 enterprises to "go on the chain" by 2022. Guangzhou and Ganzhou also stated that they will cultivate a group of key blockchain enterprises and promote typical application demonstration scenarios.

The research and development of the much-anticipated central bank digital currency DCEP is also progressing steadily, and has basically completed top-level design, standard setting, function development, joint debugging and testing. The screenshots of the digital RMB of the Agricultural Bank of China and the Construction Bank that circulated on the Internet a while ago are enough to show that the central bank's digital currency has reached the experimental stage.

Our national conditions determine that we can concentrate our efforts on major tasks, mobilize a lot of resources, and work together as a whole country to concentrate our efforts on one thing. As long as we want to vigorously promote something, it will be easy to achieve.

In addition, the regulatory level is also taking strong measures. Financial management departments and law enforcement agencies in various places are cracking down on those who use the names of "blockchain" and "digital currency" to engage in illegal crimes such as online pyramid schemes and fraud. This will also help to crack down on those "bad coins", so that those evangelists who work hard to promote the development of the industry can have a better living environment, and at the same time, it can also clear the name of blockchain.

It is an extremely difficult task to truly implement blockchain. In the past, people involved had to face the uncertainty of technological progress and economic development, and endure the resistance of some policymakers who were on the sidelines. Now the time is ripe, policymakers are actively embracing and clearing the obstacles on our road. The east wind has come, are you ready?

At 18:15:05 on January 3, 2009, the Bitcoin Genesis Block was born. Satoshi Nakamoto quoted the headline of the front-page article of The Times on that day on the Genesis Block - "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks", and a new era began.

At 3:23 am on May 12, 2020, F2Pool mined the last block before the halving at block height 629999, and left a message to pay tribute to Satoshi Nakamoto: "NYTimes 09 / Apr / 2020 With $2.3T Injection, Fed's Plan Far Exceeds 2008 Rescue".

Will this mark the beginning of a new era? The era of blockchain moving from virtual to real?