Talking about blockchain (I): The initial dream

What topics are most likely to excite people? —New and unheard of topics, such as "blockchain".

There have been more and more related reports in the market recently, but many friends still find it difficult to understand the obscure explanations, which are almost as complicated as "quantum teleportation". So let's change the way and talk about it.

The first person who brought me to this direction was a classmate who had "tricked" me into playing with Bitcoin a long time ago. However, this thing has regulatory risks not only in China, but also in the world. As time went by, in the second half of 2015, many people in the Bitcoin circle began to turn their attention to "blockchain", and in my opinion at the time, it was like the opium I used to smoke, and now I turned to ecstasy, which was still not very reliable. Suddenly one day, a friend told me that 13 top banks in the world, including Citi, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, and Societe Generale, jointly established the R3 blockchain alliance and started playing together. Things seemed to have changed. I tend to believe that some special effects can be extracted from "ecstasy" to cure the various "pain points" under the current centralized architecture.

Speaking of this "pain point", everyone may not care too much, because we have lived under this "centralized" rule for too long. The inventor of blockchain technology, "Satoshi Nakamoto", is most likely an anarchist. At least he does not trust the centralized rules, but only idealistically believes in the algorithm. The fundamental problem solved by this algorithm is how to establish "trust" in a group environment? For the specific principle, please refer to the related brain-burning article "Byzantine Generals Problem" (http://www.8btc.com/baizhantingjiangjun). By extension, the central bank's currency issuance, digital asset management, and transactions are all based on "trust". For example, when A buys something from B, A is unwilling to pay the money directly to B first, and B is unwilling to ship the goods first, but has to trade through Taobao, which increases the transaction cost; the transaction big data of A and B on Taobao should belong to A and B, but it is used for big data analysis and precision marketing, but A and B do not benefit; if Taobao's data center is hacked, everything will collapse.

What to do? - Introduce a "communist" rule: everyone participates, openness and transparency, equal rights, and pay according to work. Is this mechanism reliable? Let's build a "model house" first, so Bitcoin was born in 2009. In the more than 7 years of existence, Bitcoin has experienced various challenges such as hackers and regulators and has been running stably. Its robustness has impressed everyone. Today, everyone hopes to build a high-rise building and a city based on this algorithm to promote the application of blockchain algorithms in various fields.

Therefore, blockchain is an algorithm or protocol that can be expressed in various programming languages. It can be compared to the TCP/IP protocol in the Internet field. There is no business model for blockchain alone. The money-making part lies in the applications built on blockchain, just like the TCP/IP protocol is not used to make money, but Tencent and Taobao, which operate it, are making a lot of money.

Judging from the clock, blockchain technology is earlier than VR/AR, driverless cars, etc. and is still in its infancy. However, from the perspective of technological integration, blockchain can form various "blockchain +" and be grafted into the fields of Internet finance, Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence. This will greatly increase the hype of the topic and can be paid special attention to when market risk appetite is high.

Recently, we have visited the primary market intensively and have been deeply touched. The various technological evolutions and business model explorations are brilliant and colorful. Here is a brief introduction, to be continued...

PS: Our Guojun Communication team has always been curious about technology. After months of research, we published our first report on Valentine's Day, "The First In-depth Interpretation of Blockchain: Giants Leading Change, Blockchain Has a Great Future" Guojun Communication Song Jiaji Team [The First In-depth Interpretation of Blockchain: Giants Leading Change, Blockchain Has a Great Future] (Click the link to enter)

How can we do without the support of bigwigs? [Frontier Exploration - Minutes of the Telephone Conference "Talking about Blockchain with a Ph.D. in Physics from Tsinghua University" Guojun Communication Song Jiaji Team [Frontier Exploration - Minutes of the Telephone Conference "Talking about Blockchain with a Ph.D. in Physics from Tsinghua University"] (Click the link to enter)