OKCoin CEO Xu Mingxing's TEDx speech: May everyone have a gleam of confidence in their eyes

"I once rented a car in New York and a black man took me to pick up the car. He held the keys and swayed his body in a rock and roll style while walking and humming a song. He looked very happy and confident. I didn't see any sad expression on his face, only his enthusiasm for work. There is not a single standard for evaluating people, work and success. Being a car rental guide, a cook or even a painter can also bring simple happiness."

At the TEDxNanjing speech on September 26, OKCoin CEO Mingxing Xu shared a story. As a frequent visitor to the United States, what impressed him most was not the towering skyscrapers, the glittering financial markets, or the lights of Manhattan, but the bright light in everyone's eyes. This light explains the value of being human and the diverse world.

"Multiverse" is the theme of this TEDx conference, which aims to explore the possibilities, diversity and richness of people, things and ideas.

Curator Duan Xinxing introduced that the TEDxNanjing conference held every autumn invites the most outstanding figures in the fields of technology, entertainment, design, humanities, etc. to share their unique creativity, concepts and ideas through storytelling to inspire thinking and action. It is called the "18-minute super brain feast."

The idiom "Multiverse" comes from Chinese and Indian mythology. It originally referred to countless universes, where "three thousand" represents rich, diverse, and endless possibilities; "world" includes the attributes of time (world) and space (realm), and is where we live, the basis of our imagination, thinking, and creation.

In Duan Xinxing's view, TEDx invited Xu Mingxing not only because he is a serial entrepreneur, but also because he is an idealist who wants to bring innovative changes to society. After resigning from the position of CTO of Docin, Xu Mingxing founded the OKCoin trading platform and introduced the concept and market of Bitcoin to China. He regards Bitcoin as a social experiment, and the related blockchain technology and distributed systems will have more development and applications in the future.

“Variety is the origin of the world”

OKCoin CEO Xu Mingxing is a typical "science guy" who loves mathematics and has studied quantum mechanics. However, unlike most science guys who don't care about humanities and social sciences, he also has a rich reserve of knowledge and warm humanistic care.

"It should be understood that diversity is the source of happiness." This sentence was said by philosopher Bertrand Russell in "History of Western Philosophy". It was quoted by Wang Xiaobo in "The Silent Majority" and is also the title of Xu Mingxing's TEDx speech.

From the smallest particles that make up matter to outer space and the universe, diversity is the origin of the world and the source of happiness. From the perspective of genetics, species, and culture, diversity is closely related to evolution. The richer the genes a species contains, the stronger its ability to adapt to the environment. Genetic diversity is the basis of life evolution and species differentiation.

The Distributed Autonomous Corporation (DAC) is a decentralized and diversified system that brings more possibilities and imagination to the future world. It can operate autonomously without human intervention and management through a series of open and fair rules.

Judging from the definition alone, it may be difficult for us to understand what a distributed system is. Mr. Xu Mingxing gave two examples from his daily life.

The sardine migration is known as one of the most spectacular wonders of nature. Every year, hundreds of millions of sardines migrate northward from the cold waters near the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa along the eastern coast into the Indian Ocean. During this period, dolphins, whales, sharks and seabirds are all their natural enemies. There is no "leader" in the sardine group, but when the natural enemy breaks into the camp, they can automatically adjust their formation and form a dense formation to form the "eye of the storm", surrounding the natural enemy in the middle to resist the attack.

They use collective intelligence and distributed wisdom to resist natural enemies. This is an instinct evolved by life and an advantage of natural selection.

In addition to animals in nature, there are also typical distributed systems in the physical world. When the external environment, such as temperature, electric field, magnetic field and other conditions, changes, electrons will form a new stable state through movement.

It's not just schools of fish and crystals. If we focus on human society and economic life, distributed automatic systems also exist and are used.

Looking back at the 5,000-year history of currency, mankind has gone through a process from distributed currency to centralized credit currency. Whether it is the shells and fruits used by primitive people, or the use of precious metals as general equivalents, they all reflect the characteristics of distribution. Until the disintegration of the Bretton Woods system, the US dollar was no longer tied to gold, and countries around the world issued currencies according to their own theories, and human society entered the first era of currency issuance that was not based on natural principles.

There are reasons for the emergence of credit money, but over-issuance can also lead to economic problems such as inflation. Hayek and Keynes, two famous economists and old rivals, have both made brilliant expositions on free economy and state capitalism.

“Distribution is the driving force behind the evolution of all things”

Because of the many problems with credit currencies, some technology geeks are thinking about whether there is a currency that does not rely on central control. In 2009, a man named Satoshi Nakamoto proposed the concept of Bitcoin. This is a distributed currency that can exist on the Internet. According to Satoshi Nakamoto's paper, Bitcoin is a P2P digital currency, and peer-to-peer transmission means a decentralized payment system.

Unlike most currencies, Bitcoin is not issued by a specific monetary institution, but is generated through a large amount of calculations based on a specific algorithm. The Bitcoin economy uses a distributed database of many nodes in the entire P2P network to confirm and record all transactions, and uses cryptographic design to ensure the security of each link in the currency circulation.

The decentralized nature of P2P and the algorithm itself ensure that the value of the currency cannot be manipulated by mass production of Bitcoin. The cryptographic design allows Bitcoin to be transferred or paid only by the real owner, which also ensures the anonymity of currency ownership and circulation transactions.

In his speech, Xu Mingxing summarized the characteristics of Bitcoin. Bitcoin uses mathematical methods to simulate the properties of precious metals. Since the total number will be permanently limited to 21 million, it has extremely strong scarcity and is the closest thing to precious metals on earth. It is called "digital gold." Bitcoin is an invisible and intangible Internet credit. It is the third large-scale cross-national and cross-organizational credit in human history, in addition to gold and the US dollar.

Currently, international giants including Microsoft, Newegg, Dell, and Expedia all support Bitcoin payments, which also allows Bitcoin to move from the Internet to real life.

The distributed storage system, Blockchain, is an important concept of Bitcoin. It is a string of data blocks generated using cryptographic methods. Each data block contains information about a Bitcoin network transaction, which is used to verify the validity of the information (anti-counterfeiting) and generate the next block.

But in fact, blockchain technology is the foundation of applications that go beyond currency itself. These technologies can facilitate smart transactions, distributed equity issuance and asset transfer. In the future, blockchain technology may revolutionize our currency transactions, assets and data.

"Distribution and diversity are the basic driving forces of the multiverse and the driving force of the evolution of all things," said Xu Mingxing.

When distributed risk control is combined with traditional finance

From distributed currency, data storage and credit on the Internet, when we return to the traditional financial field, distributed risk control also brings us unexpected surprises.

The core of finance is the pricing of risk and credit. Traditional P2P has strict requirements on the personal credit of users, and provides risk control for lending based on the analysis of user consumption data and integrity data. However, acquaintance lending can ensure the safety of users' funds by using distributed risk control.

Based on this, Xu Mingxing and product managers began to build an Internet financial product, Haoyouqian, which focuses on acquaintance lending. In addition to distributed risk control based on acquaintance relationships, Haoyouqian also provides electronic contracts, video evidence and other evidence chains. In response to defaults, Haoyouqian has also set up compulsory measures such as platform debt collection and default exposure, which are more efficient and safe. "When an old lady falls on the street, every passerby will feel sympathy. However, a few cases of fraud, lack of urban surveillance, and imperfect laws make most people choose to ignore them, so they sigh at the coldness of the world. Similarly, in the field of lending, everyone has a deep understanding that those who owe money have become the boss. It is human nature to be willing to help others, but due to the lack of integrity, many friends are hurt when talking about money! Kindness and integrity are the nature of the Chinese. I believe that the combination of distributed risk control and traditional finance will have the opportunity to improve these problems and rebuild social virtues!"

During the speech, OKCoin&Haoyouqian CEO Xu Mingxing also mentioned a little story: "When I was 23 years old, I interviewed a 35-year-old employee. Seeing his age, I felt that it was not easy for him and I felt sympathy for him. In fact, he was not suitable for this job, so I had to fire him."

As an entrepreneur, he needs to consider the efficiency of the company's operation, and firing him is an inevitable choice. However, Xu Mingxing is still concerned about the whereabouts of this employee: "It is said that he was depressed for a while, but later he got married, had two children, and ran a hotel, and he did very well."

“The value of a person is not determined by a unified standard. It is precisely because of the existence of distributed systems that we can see the possibilities, diversity and richness of people, things and concepts. I hope everyone has the light of confidence in their eyes.
——Xu Mingxing