The Utopia of Blockchain

Bitcoin was launched in 2009, and blockchain became popular in 2016, another example of the "seven-year itch". Blockchain is the underlying technology of Bitcoin, and this is a "generational" seven-year joy. According to my knowledge system of "Internet genes", blockchain meets all the characteristics of previous successful technologies. At the same time, it also meets people's idealistic expectations of all technologies in the early days of technology. The Internet has developed through continuous patching, and blockchain is a new patch. Web 2.0 allows everyone to be an author, smartphones allow everyone to be an App developer, cloud platforms allow everyone to be a SaaS producer, and blockchain hopes that everyone can be an asset manager. From the application perspective, blockchain is a public ledger that supports Bitcoin. From a technical perspective, blockchain is a distributed database system. Blockchain pursues platformization and programmability. It no longer only supports Bitcoin and is no longer just a public ledger, just like database technology is not only used for bookkeeping, the Internet is not only used for computer communication, and mobile phones are not only used for making calls. Around 2001, P2P network applications were widely favored. If the keyword "P2P" in the promotional copy of that year is replaced with today's "blockchain", it is almost completely applicable. 15 years later, P2P network applications have long since sunk into technologies such as cloud computing, big data, and blockchain. P2P network applications are dead, but their spirit lives on. Predicting that blockchain will change the world is like predicting that a certain currency will change the world, or a certain database technology will change the world. If you think that currency and database technology have already overturned the world, then blockchain will too. It depends on how big your world is and whether there is only God in your world. Blockchain cannot handle big data, at least for now. Blockchain is a strict block defined by structure, a chain composed of pointers, and a typical structured data. According to the CAP principle of distributed systems, any distributed system can only get two out of the three in terms of availability (A), consistency (C), and partition tolerance (P). Big data sacrifices C in exchange for A and P, but blockchain needs to prioritize C. The integration of blockchain and big data is an issue to be considered in the next seven years. There are many phenomena similar to the "CAP triangle" in the field of distributed computing and the "Mundell triangle" in the economic field, such as the "Zooko triangle" in the field of ID: how to give a website or a user an identity identifier while ensuring its security, decentralization and ease of use. DNS chose security and ease of use, retaining centralization; while blockchain chose security and decentralization, sacrificing ease of use. Traditional banks chose to make account numbers public and keep their ledgers confidential; blockchain chose to make ledgers public and anonymous. Big data tries to speak with data, while blockchain tries to speak with mathematics. Blockchain advocates "code is law" because only people can default, not machines. Blockchain requires us to trust the system, trust software, algorithms and mathematics, rather than a single node or authority. However, code is written by people, so code can also have problems; machines are controlled by people, so machines can also have failures. The law is controlled by the elite, but the code is controlled by a few hackers. If the modern representative system of elite governance is "tyranny of the minority", then blockchain advocates hacker governance, which is "tyranny of the individual". In June 2016, The DAO was exploited by hackers and lost $60 million. This incident made blockchain idealists hit the wall of realism: Should the unfair transactions caused by hacker attacks be cancelled (content justice), or should the losses be recovered through technical means (procedural justice)? Blockchain can realize decentralized credit services. However, there are many central nodes on the Internet that act as intermediaries, more of which are information intermediaries, not just credit intermediaries. For example, some are for access control, some are for user management or traffic scheduling, etc. What blockchain can remove are only centralized credit intermediaries. While blockchain brings advantages such as tamper-proof and decentralization, it must also pay the price of increased complexity, decreased performance, and reduced crime costs. It is not that the government cannot control the issuance of currency, but it is just for the sake of economy. It is not that the Internet cannot transmit value, but it needs intermediaries. It is not that traditional databases cannot be tamper-proof, but the cost is higher. Due to historical reasons, among the "extremist" believers of the Internet, Internet thinking is unique, and the "political correctness" of technology is more important than commercial rationality. For example, the communication mode must be connectionless (cl-ps) instead of connection-oriented (co-ps); the architecture must be end-to-end transparent and there must be no middlebox; the relationship between nodes should be peer-to-peer, not hierarchical; routing, etc. should be distributed, not centralized. However, over the past 30 years, the technical ideal of the Internet's "political correctness" has gradually decayed under the "corrosion" of business. In 1996, John Perry Barlow wrote in the opening of his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace: "Governments of the industrial world, you tiresome giants of flesh and steel, I come from cyberspace, the new home of thought. In the name of the future, I ask that you who belong to the past do not interfere with our freedom. We do not welcome you. You do not enjoy sovereignty where we gather." Facts over the past 20 years have proved that the Internet's utopia is only a flash in the pan. Blockchain still lives in the utopia because it has not grown up. Discussions on soft forks and hard forks, capacity expansion, private chains, consortium chains, evolution, community management rights, etc., as well as the realities of hacker attacks, cross-border flows and government regulation, are impacting the fairy tale kingdom of blockchain. (He Baohong, deputy director of the Standardization Institute of China Academy of Information and Communications Technology)