Blockchain Theme Salon Held in Shenzhen on Sunday: Blockchain Technology, Science Fiction and the Future

On the afternoon of January 10, the "Blockchain Technology Science Fiction and the Future" themed salon hosted by Bitmain (WeChat ID: Bitmaintech) and Babbitt (WeChat ID: Bitcoin8btc) and co-organized by Bikan Bitcoin (WeChat ID: btckan) and Nanyouquan (WeChat ID: nanyouquan) was held as scheduled in Shenzhen, the capital of entrepreneurship, attracting many media and investment institutions to participate on site. Babbitt founder and science fiction writer Chang Qia, Bitmain co-founder Li Yingfei, Bikan Bitcoin CEO Liu Yang and Shenzhen University ATR National Defense Science and Technology Key Laboratory Ph.D. Shentu Qingchun made brain-burning and interesting sharing at the event.

The sci-fi wave led by "The Three-Body Problem" has made people excited. The technological changes brought by blockchain have turned science fiction into reality, just as the Internet has reconstructed the production and organization of human society. This salon combines blockchain and science fiction, two niche but popular topics, to create a different spark.

The end of money, the beginning of credit: blockchain introduces the arrow of time to transactions

On May 28, 2015, Alipay was down for two hours due to a fiber optic cable being dug up; the question of how to prove "your mother is your mother" is ridiculous but must be faced. This is a problem caused by the centralized network and centralized authentication that are prevalent in the real world. Chang Qia believes that when Bitcoin or blockchain becomes a basic application, such problems can be avoided. The core of Bitcoin is decentralization, and Bitcoin and blockchain technology will bring essential changes to today's business society.

In Chang Qia's opinion, the existing e-commerce credit establishment is not reasonable because it is built on stores rather than people, and Bitcoin and blockchain technology can achieve cross-platform and cross-time and space personal credit management. At the same time, Bitcoin and blockchain technology can guarantee the absolute exclusivity of users, which contains two meanings. The first is that credit and address are personal rather than any platform. As long as you have the private key, you can perform self-authentication at any time; the second meaning is that Bitcoin accounts are non-tradable. As a non-competitive resource, Bitcoin account credit is lifelong credit.

There is a sentence in the book "The Hacker and the Painter": "Every word written by humans becomes a software. There will be as many software and software companies as there are words written by humans."

Chang Jian explained the meaning of this sentence as follows:

"It actually means that the printing press gave birth to the IT revolution. It was very difficult to copy something before, but in the digital world, the marginal cost is zero, and it can be copied infinitely. This is why some very common profit models have emerged in the Internet world, that is, we do not make money, and are even willing to pay to acquire users. In the digital world, the marginal cost of copying is zero, but it is very difficult to prevent being copied. Before Bitcoin, there was no technology that could prevent being copied. Mining has enabled Bitcoin to establish competitive resources. Why Bitcoin will change the world is because it is the first time that competitive resources have been established in the digital world."

The Internet of Everything - A Router That Can Mine Coins

Li Yingfei from Bitmain brought everyone back to the real world of Bitcoin mining from their wild imaginations. Bitmain was founded in 2013 and has a full range of chips, mining machines, cloud computing power, and mining pools. It currently has a market share of 60% in the Bitcoin mining industry.

According to Li Yingfei, 35% of Bitcoin miners mine using informal electricity from steel mills, oil fields, coal mines, company offices, etc., 45% use formal electricity obtained from low-cost energy sources to mine, and about 10% engage in innovative mining.

In this sharing session, Li Yingfei specifically introduced the Antminer Router R1. The subsequent development direction of the R1, which can realize solo mining, is the integration of low-power research and development of Bitcoin chips and traditional equipment.

Li Yingfei revealed that Bitmain will develop and connect distributed mining for home users, other electronic equipment joint businesses, and integrated mining of Bitcoin new energy in the future, so as to achieve the goal of universal mining in the direction of the Internet of Everything.

Past and present: Internet and blockchain

Liu Yang, CEO of Bikan Bitcoin, was previously the director of Huawei's department and the head of the wireless new business department. After leaving Huawei, he chose to start a business in the Bitcoin industry. This time, he talked about his understanding of the "past and present" of blockchain.

Liu Yang believes that the Internet can be seen as the previous life of blockchain. The Internet is the largest and most efficient social form. Survival is the first basic need of human beings. Socialization allows humans to obtain more resources. The higher the efficiency and the larger the scale, the more resources there are. Exchange efficiency is the factor that restricts the scale, gradually transitioning from family to clan, tribe, city-state, and country. The imperfect Internet society makes Bitcoin imminent. The Internet is already a new social form of human beings, and blockchain is another great revolutionary technology after the Internet.

Applications of blockchain

The blockchain of "this life" is generally understood as a unique global account book. It has the following features: distributed storage in wallets/mining machines (decentralized); a bill is generated every 10 minutes and then placed at the end of the account book; the first record of the bill is a special transaction without a transfer address; the first bill with the smallest number that meets the conditions is selected by consensus; private key signature, public key verification, can generate a transaction record; the bill is mathematically hashed, and the bills are linked to each other to ensure that they are not tampered with; the blockchain is open source, maintained by the community, and all nodes agree on the evolution

Hot blockchain: the rise of startups and the advancement of giants

Currently, dozens of financial institutions, including Nasdaq, NYSE, Citibank, UBS, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley, have launched blockchain financial innovations. Startups such as Factom, Chain, and Colu have also received millions of dollars in investment this year. In addition to the financial industry, blockchain technology can also be applied to Internet business, insurance industry, government public information, electronic evidence, data security and other fields.

Shentu Qingchun, a Ph.D. from the ATR National Defense Science and Technology Key Laboratory of Shenzhen University, introduced the investment and financing situation in the blockchain field and the development prospects of blockchain at the end of the salon.

Shentu Qingchun believes that the emergence of blockchain is a huge opportunity for the banking industry, but the specific model of banks adopting blockchain needs further discussion. He proposed the concept of permissioned chain, that is, alliance chain and private chain, using user permission system. However, permissioned chain still faces challenges in consensus algorithm, transaction processing speed and storage.

Shentu Qingchun also mentioned that the Shenzhen Blockchain Research Institute is under construction. Following the Wanxiang Blockchain Laboratory, the Blockchain Hundred People's Forum, and the Blockchain Technology Application Research Institute, more and more blockchain-related institutions and organizations have emerged in China.

The profound and easy-to-understand sharing of several guests has aroused heated discussions both online and offline. Blockchain technology and science fiction, two seemingly unrelated topics, are connected by people who share a common concern for the future, technology and innovation. These two niche topics may become mainstream in the near future.

“Everyone is looking for ways to make money against time, and perhaps blockchain and Bitcoin are good ways to try.”