Is the writing of "China Scam" also a scam? Count down the five "false fabrications" in the strange article!

Original article of "Is Blockchain a Chinese Scam?" published by Jinping Media

"Breaking News: China's Blockchain Scam" published by Jinping Media on Baidu Baike

►Chaotic logic and appalling viewpoints, why can such a bad article become popular? When we find the source of the article, we see that it is a patchwork of many articles. This phenomenon can only be explained by the law of communication. After the first article appeared on April 24, there were constant forwarding of curious and concerned self-media until the big explosion at the end of July.

►It is clear that the author has no knowledge of encryption and decryption technologies that are widely discussed and used in the fields of cloud computing and blockchain.

►Those who advocate blockchain are popular, while those who oppose blockchain are taking advantage of it. The confused ideas need to be clarified in the debate. If you don’t agree, come and fight. Come to the “China Blockchain Industry Conference & Wanlixing” to exchange and discuss - August 21, Beijing National Convention Center.

Recently, the WeChat group was flooded with an article "Heavy: China's blockchain scam". Since everyone has different perspectives and depths, some people may think that this article is well-written. As a programmer, I think I should uphold the principle that those who offend the mighty Han will be punished no matter how far away they are. I would like to refute this article a little bit, "blush and take a bath", it is always good to be reasonable.

In general, I would like to say to the author that if you want to criticize, you need to operate several blockchain systems first, and learn something about encryption, game theory, distributed computing, and informatics. Otherwise, such criticism will be empty and powerless.

In view of the previous content, let’s first find out the five major technical misunderstandings.

First: "Tear up" and then "restore"? Really imaginative

【Original】：Blockchain is a decentralized database. For example, a company has multiple branches. After doing accounting, the branches store the books in the headquarters. This is a traditional database, which is relatively easy to tamper with. Each time a branch does a page of accounting, it makes multiple copies, tears them up and distributes them randomly to other branches, and then reassembles and restores them when needed. This is a decentralized database, which is difficult to tamper with.

[Comment]: Currently implemented blockchain systems all have four major distributed systems: distributed encryption, distributed consensus, distributed transmission, and distributed storage. The last one is a distributed database.

Moreover, the decentralization reflected by distributed means the decentralization of technology and hardware infrastructure, but in terms of logic such as supervision and convenience of data acquisition, a highly consistent centralization is achieved. It is not something that can be torn into pieces and then reassembled when needed.

Second: What is the greatness of blockchain?

【Original】：The most important achievement of blockchain technology is Bitcoin. Many friends are working on it, and I have been paying attention to it. Although Bitcoin is controversial, it makes sense in principle. How many coins each account has and how many coins it has given to other accounts need to be publicly broadcast to the entire network and archived in a decentralized manner.

[Comment by Renxiong]: The greatest idea that can be extracted from the Bitcoin blockchain system is to introduce the market mechanism into the virtual Cyberspace, introduce the concept of property rights into the digital files that are easy to modify and copy, make the abundant and overflowing 01010101 scarce, and introduce the original rules of human social activities such as the law of value, supply and demand, and the law of competition into the Internet space. Instead of what the author of the article said, "how many coins each account has, how many coins are given to other accounts", there are no coins in the Bitcoin account, only some Arabic numerals, but it is a scarce token recognized by the participants in the system as a medium of value conversion.

Third: Distributed storage is not professional.

【Original】：The most important achievement of blockchain technology is Bitcoin. Many friends are working on it, and I have been paying attention to it. Although Bitcoin is controversial, it makes sense in principle. How many coins each account has and how many coins it has given to other accounts need to be publicly broadcast to the entire network and archived in a decentralized manner.

[Comment by my friend]: Currently, the contents of all known blockchain databases are stored by full-function nodes, but at the same time, ordinary users can only store account data related to themselves. In any case, as long as it is stored, the content is consistent. This is the essence of distributed storage. Using "distributed storage" like this seems very unprofessional.

Fourth: Distributed processing greatly reduces the credit cost of collaboration

【Original】：Currently, the bottleneck of credit investigation is: too little data, too poor quality, and too low relevance to credit. "A good cook cannot cook without rice." No matter how sophisticated the model and algorithm are, it is difficult to accurately judge the credit of users. Whether the database is decentralized or not is not important at all.

[Comment]: Cost is always an important factor to be considered in economic activities, and the Internet economy is no exception. Whether the database is "centralized" determines the cost distribution of computing, transmission, and storage, which is determined by the manufacturing cost of transistors, the cost of developing software running on transistors, and the energy cost of long-term operation of transistors. Blockchain uses a distributed processing method to ensure the authenticity of data while also dramatically reducing the credit cost for collaboration.

Fifth: The author knows nothing about blockchain encryption and decryption technology

【Original】: In addition, credit-related data is very sensitive, and neither credit reporting agencies nor users want it to be made public. Data is the lifeblood of credit reporting agencies, and everyone wants others to make it public, but they keep it confidential. Users also don’t want their data to be made public, and every word and action is broadcast to the entire network. It’s scary to think about it, like "1984": "Blockchain is watching you!"

[Comment by Renxiong]: It is obvious that the author knows nothing about the encryption and decryption technologies widely discussed and used in the fields of cloud computing and blockchain, such as zero-knowledge proof and homomorphic encryption. The purpose of these technologies is to protect privacy and prevent information from being abused. For example, homomorphic encryption allows the processing of ciphertext to obtain an encrypted result, which is the same as the result obtained by processing and encrypting the plaintext. This is homomorphic encryption. The result of the application of homomorphic encryption is that data will have the following properties: it can be borrowed but not owned, it can be viewed from a distance but not played with, and it can be marked with a price for how long and how many times it can be used. With the data rights confirmation technology brought by blockchain, the transaction costs that block the development of the big data industry market will be reduced to zero, and the rights of counterparties in the "open and shared" of big data will be properly resolved.

Why can such a bad article become popular?

Confusing logic and appalling viewpoints, why can such a bad article become popular? When we find the source of the article, we find that it is a patchwork of many articles. This phenomenon can only be explained by the law of communication. After the first article on April 24 (the boss of a P2P Internet company (the familiar CEO Tiao Shu) appeared, there were constant forwarding of self-media out of curiosity and concern, until the big explosion at the end of July.

Those who advocate blockchain have become popular, while those who oppose blockchain have jumped on the bandwagon. The confused ideas need to be clarified in the debate. If you don’t agree, come and fight. Come to the “China Blockchain Industry Conference & Wanlixing” to exchange and discuss - August 21, 2016, Beijing National Convention Center.