Blockchain standard consistency: The industry needs to prepare for it

On Wednesday, the final day of CoinDesk's 2016 Segment Forum, an in-depth study of enterprise standards for blockchain applications attracted a large number of professionals for in-depth discussion.

What was supposed to be an open question-and-answer session featuring author William Mujaya; Simon Taylor, head of blockchain distributed ledger at Barclays; and Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum, eventually evolved into a natural conversation that delved into the standards.

At the outset, Buterin describes the differentiation of corporate executives and managers driven by standards, because different invisible standards are required for people to improve in actual technical application work.

“Standardization is something that people, especially business people, love to talk about,” he told attendees. “It’s kind of a departure from the need for standardization among developers. I sometimes wonder, ‘Well, where do we even start? How do you know what standards people are looking for?’ ”

The subsequent question and answer (Q&A) session further enhanced the interaction and game of communication, and discussed the specific and precise standards that should be pursued and established in this industry.

First of all, all participants hope to avoid the useless work of "reinventing the wheel" to a considerable extent when formulating standards, or to promote the development of industry standards by benchmarking or drawing on existing standards of other technology industries.

Just as important, workshop participants said, is the need to avoid making any type of standard an invisible burden on developers and startups as they work to create industry standards. This was also brought up during the Q&A session and later in the breakout sessions.

"We need to give the technology time to develop and give the standards developers time to create their work," said one participant.

Other areas of interest include the development of standards for open and closed blockchain networks; the relationship between programming languages; privacy and standards for specific elements such as smart contracts.

Finally, the discussion board concluded that more collisions of ideas and debates are necessary and meaningful. Although this brings together a large number of participants, more long-term solutions for blockchain standards have begun to sprout from the industry itself.