Blockchain: Don’t always talk about “disruption”! The key is “implementation”!

If there is no bubble and imagination in the high-tech industry, the world will not be able to move forward. The same is true for the development of blockchain. Without enough money invested, blockchain technology will not make great progress; but we must also be clear that the threshold of the blockchain industry is not mainly money. The most difficult thing is to combine this technology with business scenarios and make this thing really useful.

Historically, when the concentrated power of governments and large enterprises is weakened or changes, many innovative enterprises and business models will emerge, creating a lot of wealth. Good technology will definitely bring great opportunities, and there will definitely be people who will fish in troubled waters, but I think the development of mainstream enterprises in the industry is still very positive: from the national level, from the government level, major banks, government agencies, all have great expectations for blockchain.

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Blockchain technology is considered to be the core technology with the greatest potential to trigger the fifth wave of disruptive revolution after steam engines, electricity, information and Internet technology. There are many discussions about blockchain technology, but how is it applied in specific scenarios? Not long ago, a press release published by the Electronic Standards Institute of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology revealed that Wanxiang Holdings, Ant Financial, WeBank, Ping An Technology, LeTV Finance and other companies are developing blockchain technology and experimenting and exploring specific application scenarios.

Recently, Yitiao Finance interviewed Yan Ting, CEO of Zhongxiang Bit Technology Co., Ltd. He said that the main barrier to entry in the blockchain industry is not money. The most difficult thing is to combine this technology with business scenarios to make this thing truly useful.

Why is blockchain so popular? Three main reasons

Yitiao Caijing: Recently, there have been a lot of conferences in the blockchain field. For example, two heavyweight conferences were held this month. One was on August 5, when the Electronic Standards Institute of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology organized a preparatory meeting for the Blockchain Technology and Industry Development Forum and a launch meeting for the writing of a white paper in Beijing . This marked an important step forward in China's blockchain technology standards and application research; the other was on August 21, when the China Blockchain Industry Conference was held at the Beijing National Convention Center. Currently, more than 1,300 people have signed up, and many leaders and industry leaders are attending the conference. Why is blockchain so popular?

Yan Ting: I think there are three reasons: the first is that financial technology (Fintech) is popular. Fintech is inherently designed to solve financial problems, and Bitcoin, the first successful application of blockchain, also has many financial attributes; the second is that VC (venture capital) is much more active now than it was ten years ago. The investment themes such as live broadcast, artificial intelligence, smart wearable devices and O2O are in the past, and blockchain is currently a hot spot in the world's investment field; the third reason is the superposition of online lending and the recent wave of entrepreneurship. Many traditional companies that do Bitcoin/virtual currency/points platforms have jumped on the blockchain, and now major powers around the world are paying attention to blockchain, so blockchain has become popular all of a sudden.

The main barrier to entry for the blockchain industry is not money.

Yitiao Finance: Some people say that blockchain technology is extremely disruptive, just like on a high-speed train with a speed of 350 kilometers per hour, some experts collectively say that the track ahead is being dismantled and subverted! Is it really that extreme? Or are there too many bubbles in it? You should know better if you "swim" in the river of this industry instead of watching from the shore.

Yan Ting: The threshold of blockchain seems very high-tech, especially for the general public who do not understand IT technology ; from a professional perspective, blockchain technologies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum are open source, and the source code is available. If there is a relatively senior engineer who understands a little logic, three or five people can build a blockchain with several nodes. It is not as complicated as imagined, and it will be ready in about a month. However, it is quite difficult to implement this technology and system in reality, because many aspects are not compatible with the current popular solutions. Now many companies are working on blockchain applications, and as a practitioner, I really hope that they can succeed.

I don’t completely agree that blockchain technology has too many bubbles. If there is no bubble and imagination in the high-tech industry, the world will not be able to move forward. The same is true for the development of blockchain. Without enough money, blockchain technology will not make great progress. However, we must also be clear that the threshold of the blockchain industry is not mainly money. Blockchain is not simply a demonstration system that allows investors to spend money after taking a look. The most difficult thing for all good technologies, including blockchain technology, is to combine this technology with business scenarios and make it truly useful. This is useful not because our technicians imagine how to use it, but because real users understand and actually use it in actual application scenarios. It is inevitable that blockchain technology has advantages in certain scenarios. Now, if blockchain can be combined with real scenarios and provide more efficient and safer applications than the current popular technology system, it is a real subversion. Enterprises that can implement blockchain technology applications are truly innovative enterprises.

The change from centralization to decentralization is a spiral process

Yitiao Finance: Some people now particularly emphasize the decentralized value of blockchain technology. What do you think?

Yan Ting: I personally believe that the changes in the centralization and decentralization of the entire Internet are a spiral upward process, which is contradictory but complementary, and is mutually developed and integrated. Let me give you an example, such as Didi, Uber, Airbnb, Tesla batteries, Bitcoin, etc., which are obvious trends from centralization to decentralization. It used to be very troublesome to call a taxi, and you had to find a taxi company. Now there is direct contact between passengers and users, which is the sharing economy. Existing technology will bring about qualitative changes with the rapid growth of this type of sharing economy business volume. The centralized network will be unable to bear the qualitative changes brought about by this quantitative change, and the value of decentralization will emerge.

After the emergence of Bitcoin, especially after the economic crisis, the legal tender of many countries is not as good as Bitcoin in terms of value preservation. For example, in some countries in South America and Africa, the black market exchange rate for US dollars far exceeds that of the central bank. After the emergence of Bitcoin/blockchain technology, the resources controlled by the governments and large enterprises of these countries and their own roles have changed greatly.

Historically, when the concentrated power of governments and large enterprises is weakened or changes, many innovative enterprises and business models will emerge, creating a lot of wealth. Now that blockchain is so popular, I think there will be a lot of entrepreneurial opportunities.

Blockchain technology can be applied in at least three aspects

A financial saying: Where wealth and opportunities gather, there are often good and bad people mixed together.

Yan Ting: Blockchain technology will definitely be popular in the future, which is foreseeable to us practitioners. Good technology will definitely bring great opportunities, and there will definitely be people who will take advantage of it, but I think the development of mainstream companies in the industry is still very positive: from the national level, from the government level, major banks and government agencies have great expectations for blockchain. I think there are several aspects to apply this technology: First, for example, statistical data, the data from all over the country added together are often different from the national data. Blockchain can play a good role in data disclosure and fairness; second, China's perfect credit system has not yet been established, and the natural attributes of blockchain technology can trace all historical behaviors and establish a perfect credit system; third, with the advancement of mobile Internet communication technology, smart hardware, especially the development of smart terminals such as mobile phones, the computing and communication capabilities of each terminal are now equivalent to a PC or even a server ten years ago. It makes sense that blockchain is popular. The sinking of computing and the guarantee of network bandwidth have enabled decentralized blockchain to turn from theory into reality.

Blockchain technology will not revolutionize the industry as soon as it appears

Yitiao Finance: There are actually very few reports on the application of blockchain at present. A few days ago, there was a news report that Ant Financial applied blockchain technology to charitable donations. How much significance does this have? Or is it just a gimmick?

Yan Ting: We can't think that this is just a gimmick. Any new thing must start from small things little by little. Everyone should look at it with a positive perspective. Around 1998, when the Internet first started, it seemed that there was nothing, but now the Internet is everywhere. There are few reports on the application of blockchain. Maybe it will slowly change in one or two years. I think the large-scale application of blockchain is possible. Blockchain technology will not "turn the world upside down" as soon as it appears. Any technology will slowly merge with some current technologies. This is a gradual process. Our team does not regard blockchain as a so-called "disruption". We regard blockchain technology as a very important IT technology. Our company started from the year before last. During this period, we participated in some projects and made some interesting explorations, such as combining with existing databases and cloud computing applications; at the same time, we are also implementing these innovations and combining them with users' existing application systems to truly bring out the value of blockchain.

Blockchain must follow the business and know how to implement it

Yitiao Finance: Is it difficult to use blockchain technology in securities trading? For example, there are tens of thousands of stock transactions per second.

Yan Ting: Actually, it is not difficult. There are many types of securities transactions. At present, blockchain is not suitable for particularly concentrated and concurrent transactions, such as secondary market stock transactions. At present, there are also solutions for high-concurrency transactions being developed in the industry. However, not all transactions are concentrated and high-frequency, so it depends on the application scenario and user needs. I think blockchain must follow the business, and business implementation is very important. Now the "opponents" we encounter on the user side, those companies claiming to do blockchain solutions are mostly traditional financial software providers and integrators. Most of them are doing consulting, and not many of them have been implemented. In the blockchain industry, only when it is implemented, we will know what to do.