How blockchain changes the world
The future has come, just not yet popular.
Imagine our return to the gold standard world, and then record the amount of gold everyone owns in Alipay. We buy things and transfer money through this gold Alipay to complete, and the physical gold is hidden in one of us can not find The place. This is the world that digital currencies are trying to describe for us. There is an item that does not rely on national sovereignty (gold here) as a general equivalent. You will find out that this general equivalence is not important. History has also seen silver or even shellfish acting as Of course, it can also be bitcoin. What really matters is that this generic equivalent must be accepted by all. However, the world of digital currency is still somewhat different. In the world of digital currency, there is no Alipay. Instead, there is a system that does not belong to anybody or company and is jointly maintained and controlled by the majority and can help us to record for free Assets and trading, and never make mistakes, can not be attacked. This system is the blockchain.
How could anyone accept bitcoin?
It's not surprising that most people in the world have not accepted bitcoin, but of course there are other people who choose to accept bitcoin, such as Microsoft, which accepts bitcoin payments. At present, the total value of bitcoin is over 10 billion U.S. dollars, and the price of a single bitcoin is around 3,800 yuan. Bitcoin does not get the acceptance of the present overnight, in fact, from the advent of bitcoin to the present nearly eight years time, in 2010 produced the first bitcoin transaction, when a person with a million Bitcoin bought a pizza (which is probably the most expensive pizza ever seen), so there is a gradual acceptance of Bitcoin, so the right question should be exactly what motivates Bitcoin to be accepted. Obviously there was no bitcoin in the world at first, the process of generating bitcoin is called mining and you can think of it as gold mining. However, bitcoin mining is a process of spelling out numbers, and the system produces a mathematical question for all the computers that are mining, and whoever made the question got bitcoin. The main factors that affect the output of mining are calculating, and the higher the calculating power, the greater the probability of digging out bitcoin. Like mining gold, bitcoin mining also costs money, consumes power and wears down hardware. Now it costs about as much as 10 times the bitcoin's worth by digging a regular computer, Can wash and sleep. Most of the truly professional mines are built next to hydroelectric power stations, with low-cost access to energy and hardware and software optimization. For more details on mining, please refer to this article. Back to our question, how bitcoin is popular? The answer is that the efficiency of mining in different periods is different. There are few machines involved in mining in the early stage, and the competition is relatively small and it is easier to dig out bitcoin. Of course, bitcoin is not valuable at this time, and early involvement in mining Are geeks who often have the expectation that the currency bit will be more popular in the future. Circulation itself will bring value. In our initial golden example, actually we hide the gold without affecting the use of e-gold Trading, that is, we value not the value of gold, but its value as a carrier of the circulation value. From an economic point of view, the supply of mining is relatively stable, the wider circulation means that there are more people and scenarios need bitcoin, while the increase in demand will push up bitcoin prices. In other words, if you think bitcoin is going to be more popular, the price of bitcoin is on the rise, so more people will be involved in mining and some people will be involved in speculation. In short, more and more people This process, in turn, contributed to the rise in bitcoin prices, creating a positive feedback cycle that benefited early Bitcoin participants. Of course, the real situation is much more complex. Another important factor is that there is a constant need to open up the scene of bitcoin payment so that more businesses can accept bitcoin payments so as to really promote the circulation of bitcoin as currency, but in fact the problem The key, or let more understanding and acceptance of bitcoin and digital currency concept.
No Alipay, digital currency how to be recorded?
Here we need to explain the relationship between the blockchain and bitcoin. As mentioned above, bitcoin mining is a bitter math problem. In the system design, whenever a bitcoin is dug, it will Produce something called a block, each block will record from the last block to all the current bitcoin transactions. In addition, each block also has a head and tail, its function is through the principle of cryptography, the adjacent blocks connected to form a block chain, the effect is that if a block Of the content has been tampered with, it will conflict with its adjacent blocks, and then be found in the block. The design of the chain is that only the longest chain is valid. Suppose there is a bad node that wants to tamper with the content of the blockchain. It can not change a single block, but can only strive to generate new false blocks, which requires And all other nodes across the network confrontation, so if the node has more than 50% of the entire network computing power, we can achieve the block chain control, the term is called power attack. At present, the Bitcoin system has been widely distributed and it is very difficult to carry out the calculation of the bitcoin attack. Even if anyone can really do it, the cost of the bitcoin is greater than the value it obtains. This effectively eliminates the computational burden from an economic point of view. With the Bitcoin network growing in value, its value will be higher and higher, but with correspondingly higher computational costs, the balance will be maintained. In fact blockchain is a decentralized accounting system. For accounting systems in general,
How will blockchain change the world?
Now finally we can answer the question of our topic, how blockchain will change the world? Have you read this? If we accept the digital blockchain based currency, in fact, we do not need a bank? In fact you would not have heard of any bitcoin banking blockchain alternative to banks and Alipay alternatives to banks that are similar in that we put money in the bank for nothing more than three reasons: interest, security, and more Convenient payment, these features Alipay are available, and blockchain with the latter two, but the benefits of wealth management can replace interest income. Whether Alipay or a bank, are centralized accounting system, when we use non-cash way to pay, you need to have an authoritative accounting agency, to prove that our business is really rich, and help us Transfer the money to the merchant. The authority of the bank as a bookkeeping authority comes from endorsement of state regulation, and we believe Alipay is due to Alibaba's credit and technical capabilities. But the existence of such a bookkeeping agency creates a huge cost, considering how many offline outlets the bank has and how many service personnel it has. In addition, each bank will have its own IT billing system. When users pay and transfer funds, they will form a transaction between the banks, which are respectively recorded by two banks. This involves the issue of reconciliation and settlement. Fortunately, domestic transactions are easier because the central bank acts as an authoritative agency for liquidation among banks. However, because there are no authoritative agencies as intermediary for international transactions, the liquidation systems and processes in each country are greatly different, causing the transaction to become very troublesome. Blockchain solution is decentralized, all transactions are publicly recorded in the blockchain, which eliminates the trouble of reconciliation, transnational transactions do not need to wait until the day after the bank settlement is completed, and Is real-time arrival. At present, the cost per international liquidation is about 26 U.S. dollars. If the blockchain is applied, the annual cost savings alone will be in the tens or even tens of billions of U.S. dollars. To put it in a nutshell, the entire financial system is a system of trust. Originally, this system established trust through endorsement and financial supervision by the state. The emergence of a blockchain is a technical solution to the problem of trust, The financial system presents a lower cost alternative solution. As another example, we need to pay a fee for trading the stock on the exchange to cover the costs of running the exchange and the securities system. But if the blockchain can record all the stock trades, in theory we do not need exchanges anymore. According to a stock 200 billion daily trading volume, the average transaction cost of five ten thousandth calculation, only China's stock trading, the daily cost savings of 100 million yuan. Dramatic changes tend to occur when an industry's cost structure changes, from which point blockchain will reshape the financial industry. The annual output value of the global financial industry in the trillions of dollars, any application of a breakdown of the field, will be a huge market. In addition, there are many other applications that are trusted by the blockchain system, such as recording copyright and trading in such industries as video, music and publishing, recording the distribution of digital assets, recording medical history and medical conditions, and making it easier for doctors to understand patients Situation; record the production of all aspects of the supply chain in order to achieve traceability of the supply chain to prevent the production of fakes and so on. The blockchain shows us a world where all our assets will be digitized. On a value internet, the transfer of assets will be as fast, easy and cheap as the delivery of today's information. Do not know written here, do you still think I am in the description of a future world to borrow the words of William Gibson to the end: the future has come, but not yet popular.