In 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto left a sentence on the Bitcoin genesis block: "The Minister of Finance is on the verge of implementing the second round of emergency bank rescues."
Twelve years later, affected by the world ’s new crown epidemic, the world economy is once again in danger. US stocks have suffered four meltdowns within 10 days. The Federal Reserve ’s bankruptcy of water flooded the digital asset market overnight.
Everything in the world is suffering, and the bank is indeed on the brink of emergency rescue, but Bitcoin does not seem to have become a "savior."
Suddenly a cycle of time has passed. Bitcoin has led the blockchain industry to develop rich blockchain industry formats including digital asset exchanges, mining industry chains, digital wallets, public chains, alliance chains, DApp applications, and DeFi applications.
From the blockchain 1.0 represented by Bitcoin, to the blockchain 2.0 dominated by smart contracts, to the blockchain 3.0 where everything can be chained, everything seems logical and natural, but thinking deeply about the entire evolution process, except for the currency price Besides, what has the era of blockchain started by Satoshi Nakamoto brought us?
I heard that my mother-in-law was suffering immensely.
Can't help but ask, has the vision of Satoshi Nakamoto's blockchain been realized?
01
Objectively speaking, after 12 years of precipitation and development, the development levels of various formats of the blockchain industry are also very different:
1) Bitcoin is absolutely successful. It is the leader in the digital asset market. It has a global solid consensus and an unshakable market position. Even if all other industries in the blockchain are withered, it cannot stop the development of Bitcoin;
2) Blockchain mining has spawned mining machine manufacturers, mining farms, mining pools, cloud mining services, and other industrial chains.
3) Blockchain public chain projects are mostly in the early stages of technology R & D for financing and burning money, and are still creating various technological breakthroughs. When will we be able to see the moon and the moon and see all the faith?
4) Blockchain + Imagination can be listed on the chain of vision, involving many factors such as policy, technology, market, etc. At present, only access scenarios, traceability, supply chain management, finance and other scenarios have found their way, most fields Still busy baking pancakes;
5) As for various types of fund projects, such as P2P financial management projects, drumming and pass-through scam projects, etc. that are based on the concept of blockchain, only those who wish can be hooked, which has nothing to do with blockchain technology.
You see, many people still pretend that blockchain is speculation, that is, a scam. In fact, the blockchain ecosystem is very complicated. There are many branches, each with different stages of development, and the market maturity is also 100,000. For eight thousand miles, if you do n’t recognize clearly, you can easily get cognitive bias.
This industry is far from being a “scam” or a “revolution”.
02
Let's first clarify how the evolution from the Bitcoin-based blockchain 1.0 to the blockchain 3.0 era?
In 2008, Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto published a white paper that defined Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer electronic cash payment system with technical features such as decentralization, openness and transparency, anonymity, and immutability. At this time, the blockchain is still in the 1.0 stage, which only refers to the underlying technical architecture that supports the operation of the Bitcoin system, which is a narrow blockchain. And at this stage, Bitcoin's goal is to replace the traditional financial system and explore the feasibility of becoming a global payment currency.
Around 2014, the genius boy V God used smart contracts to abstract technical features such as "decentralization, openness and transparency, consensus mechanisms, mining models, token models, and hash algorithms" in Bitcoin's technical architecture. Upgraded to Blockchain 2.0, and the concept of blockchain in a broad sense was born. This measure not only solves the problem of insufficient scalability of Bitcoin, but also extends the application scope of blockchain technology to many fields.
However, the Ethereum smart contract Lego combined model is like a "Pandora's Box", which not only spawns digital asset exchanges, digital wallets, DApp applications, etc. to enrich the industry format, but also attracts a large number of people with the 1CO model. This market.
As a result, the concept of blockchain 3.0 and even 4.0 quickly emerged, and the entire blockchain field seemed to usher in a Cambrian explosion. Blockchain + covers almost every aspect of life, including music video rights, food safety, medical health, logistics, judicial access cards, election voting, and more.
You see, overall, Bitcoin 1.0 to smart contracts to blockchain 3.0, the whole process also lasted for more than 10 years, the conversion process is still very smooth, the evolution process is also reasonable, everything seems logical, but because of this There was too much noise in the process, which led to a chaotic situation in the industry. For example, along with the technology-pursuing psychology of coin pursuing, the shearing is still chaotic.
03
I have always held the view that Bitcoin in Satoshi's vision is dead, and existing Bitcoin is a value storage carrier that has unexpectedly evolved.
Why do you say that?
According to the original idea of Satoshi Nakamoto, the founder of Bitcoin, Bitcoin is a product or application, an "experiment" that tries to impact the traditional financial currency issuance system.
From the perspective of the product, bitcoin's development should closely follow the needs of users and adapt to changes in market demand.
For example, after the mining hash power competition is Asicized, Bitcoin should think about solving the energy consumption problem caused by excessive hash power competition; for example, when the block transaction processing volume increases, Bitcoin should try to continue to do Block expansion or isolation verification, side chain, etc. to improve payment efficiency and so on. However, in fact, in order to consolidate the global unshakable consensus , the current Bitcoin system has refused to make any changes in terms of products. In this way, the vision of Bitcoin as a global payment system is actually a failure.
However, after ten years of change, Bitcoin did not kill in the end, but changed its attitude and got eternal life.
Bitcoin is now given a larger and stronger niche beyond payment:
1) Due to its strong consensus around the world, Bitcoin has become an anchor value asset for thousands of virtual assets in the digital asset field;
2) Due to its austerity issuance method and absolute scarcity, Bitcoin is making great strides towards the goal of becoming digital gold;
3) Due to its non-government supervision, Bitcoin is often regarded as a safe-haven or anti-inflation asset during geopolitical risks or when the government issues unlimited banknotes;
4) The most important thing is that Bitcoin has hundreds of millions of people in the world with a brand awareness and tens of millions of direct user groups, supporting a secondary market of financial derivatives with a market value of hundreds of billions of dollars.
You see, no matter how BCH, BSV and other digital assets, no matter how to do homework on block capacity, no matter how to promote their own application value, the status of native Bitcoin can never be shaken. Basically, because the bitcoin from the product perspective has long since died, the bitcoin that has survived is a test of 10 years of life and death, 10 years of brand awareness cultivation, and tens of millions of fans who have not abandoned their faith Value storage carrier.
Irreproducible, irreplaceable and difficult to die.
04
I do not conceal the love of Ethereum's founder V God. The reason is that when everyone is crazy about 1CO and drawing money, V God always keeps the most primitive exploration and research on blockchain technology, including the following points. Movies, Casper, and methodical POS upgrades, etc. Although the pace is a bit slower, the pace is steady. Moreover, as DeFi climbed up to the willow head, the value community of Ethereum has always thought it was underestimated.
But what I want to say is that the emergence of Ethereum is a double-edged sword for the blockchain ecosystem. When it discovered a new continent with smart contracts, it also accidentally opened a sinister "Pandora box".
1) The threshold for smart contract creation is very low. Anyone can create their own smart contracts and issue their own tokens through the ERC20 standard or other standards, which greatly reduces the threshold for user participation, but it is unknown that the unlimited reduction in the threshold for participation is a nightmare in the decentralized world. .
The threshold of the bitcoin public chain system is actually high. A bitcoin network includes a mining system. There are various thresholds such as miners' mining machines, electricity fees, field rent, and human input. This makes it costly for the Bitcoin community to want to do evil, no matter if the miners want to jointly engage in double-spend attacks or tamper with transactions, etc., they will often move to stone their own feet.
The biggest benefit of a high participation threshold is that it can reduce some asymmetric risks, while the low threshold of Ethereum completely brings in a variety of unknown risks and confusions (such as the recent N-house event is typical), which is important for subsequent governance. The level will undoubtedly increase the requirements. But don't forget, this is a decentralized world. In what name should it be governed?
2) Scenarios of conditional execution of smart contracts. The Ethereum smart contract is essentially a pipeline. What input corresponds to what is output is agreed at the beginning through layers of conditions, but not all scenarios are such simple input and output rules.
For example, in a DApp game, a user invokes a game contract to perform various operations such as login, logout, betting, reward return, and bookkeeping, but the smart contract is actually only applicable to the bookkeeping link, and all other links on the chain will greatly reduce the triggering efficiency of the contract. For second-level DApp lottery games, if the draw efficiency is too slow, it will definitely affect the game participation experience; for example, digital asset exchanges are limited by the natural barriers of the chain and the chain, in order to increase transaction pairs and financial gameplay to improve user transactions Experience, exchanges often have an internal ledger, and they only choose to be on the chain in the asset storage link.
But this brings a paradox. Since efficiency and experience cannot be separated from centralization, what is the significance of decentralization?
You see, if the world of blockchain 1.0 is still a clear stream, the world of blockchain 2.0 opened by Ethereum is already a mess. Because in the decentralized world, there are temporary technical flaws in the on-chain links, and there will always be a black box off-chain: for example, the issue of asset transparency in digital asset exchanges, whether the exchanges pull out network cables during currency price fluctuations, and the DeFi platform. Delays in predicting machine feed prices, black box operations in off-chain operations of DApps, smart contract self-retained backdoors, and other issues.
But for new technologies, I've never been a conservative because of slander. From an objective point of view, Ethereum smart contracts have made a qualitative leap in the scalability of blockchain technology. It is worthy of recognition, and there are some centralized transition platforms in the industry, including exchanges and digital wallets, as long as you do n’t do evil It is still necessary.
However, we should clearly recognize that there can be enthusiasm, but not blind investment. The best application scenario of smart contracts is actually in the financial field.
At present, the traditional financial market has a strong lag in asset delivery and clearing, and human participation has various uncontrollable factors, which has greatly weakened the flow and use of funds. The DeFi application is moving many traditional financial models such as lending, wealth management, insurance, and derivatives into the blockchain world, giving the most extensive application scenarios of smart contracts, and also providing the possibility for the further industrial extension of blockchain technology. .
Therefore, the DeFi concept that has been hot in the past two years seems to be speculating on the surface, but the industry development is on the right track. Seriously, it is more reliable than the so-called innovation models such as 1CO, 1EO, and xx, which are mining. too much.
05
The basic reason Buffett dislikes and disagrees with the digital asset market is to stay away from crazy people and noise.
This is also the reason why I insist on the output of value recognition. Only by quieting myself can I see the true background that supports the development of the industry.
In my opinion, the actual conditions are far from the time when the blockchain 3.0 is being promoted. Except for a few projects, most of them are now some noise.
The fact is the same. In the wave of the 1CO wealth revolution in 2017, a large number of people flooded into the blockchain circuit as projects under the name of "Blockchain 3.0". In their view, blockchain + can grow very plump wings like the Internet + model.
The problem is that technology empowerment of traditional industries is not a panacea. It is also necessary to consider the degree of fit between technology itself and the characteristics of various vertical industries. Internet + helps traditional industries, breaks through the physical geographical limitations, connects with online shopping consumer groups, improves the coverage of information, and then generates efficiency and connection value.
There is no concept of tallness here, nor is there a rare technical explanation, only the most popular business, the most sensitive perspective, the most unique insights. I am still a poor elementary school student in the blockchain industry. All the thoughts and thoughts in this article are broken thoughts.