OKCoin discusses blockchain with Bitcoin Core developer Jeff Garzik

Recently, Xu Mingxing, a pioneer in the Bitcoin field and founder and CEO of OKCoin, China's leading Bitcoin trading platform, invited Jeff Garzik, a Bitcoin core developer, to discuss the development prospects of Bitcoin and the application of blockchain.

The blockchain technology underlying digital currency has become more and more familiar and accepted by more and more people. Many mainstream financial institutions in Europe and the United States, including Nasdaq, have tried the blockchain technology. As a disruptive technology, central banks around the world are also paying careful attention to blockchain technology.

Jeff Garzik, a core developer of Bitcoin, is a software engineer, blogger, futurist and entrepreneur. He helped pioneer CNN.com on the Internet in the early 1990s and has been developing source code software engineering projects for more than two decades.

For ordinary people who don’t know much about technology, blockchain is an unfamiliar term. In short, it is a distributed shared ledger, one of the most disruptive Internet technologies in recent years. By building a self-organizing network, a time-ordered, tamper-proof ledger, and a distributed consensus algorithm, it can achieve decentralized trust and transformation.

Currently, dozens of financial institutions, including Nasdaq, NYSE, Citibank, UBS, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley, are carrying out blockchain financial innovation. In addition to the financial industry, blockchain technology can also be applied to Internet business, government public information, electronic evidence, data security and other fields. Data blockchain technology has been regarded as one of the basic protocols of the next generation of value Internet, and its importance to my country's financial industry and financial system cannot be ignored.

Jeff Garzik introduced that he discovered Bitcoin on Great Slashdotting in July 2010. Jeff believes that Bitcoin is an amazing invention that proves that money can operate without a central administrator as long as the community agrees on common social rules.

Jeff believes that the next application of Bitcoin and blockchain technology is in loan settlement, stock settlement, P2P bonds and P2P stocks. At present, these are very easy to achieve. Later, people will see the transaction of smart assets: for example, if you assign a digital token to a car, you can trade the car with others point-to-point, without the need for third parties such as the government and lawyers: "After smart assets are actually applied on blockchain technology, people can use smart contracts to formulate rules for transferring these assets and automate them."

Jeff pointed out that there are three stages in the application of Bitcoin and blockchain technology: the initial stage is the digital currency itself; the second stage is simple financial products, such as stocks, bonds, asset management, etc.; smart assets and smart contracts are the third step.

In the application of financial products, once P2P stocks and digital identities are realized, people can set up various markets at any time. So there will be many decentralized markets in the future. This will also be one of the ways for people to trade stocks, bonds, cars and other products in the future.

Jeff believes that there will be many "chains" in the future. One of them is of course the Bitcoin "chain", which is also the most secure "chain". Through the Bitcoin "chain", people can protect other "side chains", such as stock "chains", payment "chains", or land deeds, file encryption, etc. 2016 or 2017 will be the year when these applications will explode.

Picture: Jack, International Business Director of OKCoin, Jeff, Bitcoin Core Developer, and Xu Mingxing, Founder and CEO of OKCoin

Jeff now not only works as a Bitcoin core developer, he is also an open source evangelist for BitPay. In addition, Jeff is also the CEO of Dunvegan Space Systems, the management company of the BitSat project.