Meng Yan: Span 5 bridges from the Internet to the blockchain

Meng Yan talked about the blockchain, always interesting, young and old, but rushed into the inside, the vision is unique. He likes to use metaphors to make sense. In this article, Meng Yan uses good children, bad children and deaf children to describe the attributes of different blockchain projects; and uses three parallel worlds to describe physics and the Internet. And the three independent coexisting worlds of blockchains; and then, five bridges are used to describe the five thresholds that must be experienced from the Internet to the blockchain.

In Meng Yan's view, the blockchain has its own complete stack, not an extension of Internet technology. The blockchain itself is working to create a new parallel world. Apart from the original infrastructure, it is still wild and has great business opportunities to find.

If you pay attention to the blockchain technology for a while, you will find that the blockchains that different people say are very different, and it is not like saying the same thing.

Why is this so?

Because the blockchain itself has several faces. I call it the blockchain of good kids, the blockchain of bad kids and the blockchain of strange kids.

The Good Kids Blockchain is based on the benefit of the real world and helps everyone to improve efficiency without touching the real interest landscape.

For example, the famous Everledger project is used to trace the source of diamonds and prevent “blood diamonds” from entering the mainstream channels. It combines blockchain technology with gemstone fingerprinting technology to register fine gems such as diamonds, rubies, jadeites and more. Any subtle changes in the gem itself can be discovered by the device. This technology, combined with the blockchain, effectively manages the entire supply chain of diamonds.

What about the blockchain of bad kids? Typical are the air coins, pyramid money, and money laundering in the real world, and the use of digital currency for money laundering, black market transactions, and so on. This version of the blockchain will of course be hit, as China has done recently.

The most noteworthy is the blockchain of “Weird Kids”. This part of the people is committed to creating a parallel world. Let me talk about my thinking about this direction.

Hot spot for blockchain investment

What is the scale of the token economy? It is also growing rapidly, from 8 billion US dollars in December 2016 (including bitcoin 7 billion) to 15 billion in January 2017, to 150 billion in June, and reached 170 billion in early September 2017.

Such a large-scale investment cannot be supported by air coins and pyramid money. What is the investment logic behind the blockchain and token economy? Let's look at a few recent large-scale token financing cases:

1. FileCoin, Decentralized Storage Network (DSN)

On August 10, 2017, the company completed the issuance of US$252 million, which is currently the largest token financing project. Key selling points include, based on IPFS/IPDB technology, opening up global data storage and query economy, users paying FileCoin for data storage; storage miners provide storage space and time to earn FileCoin; and search miners earn FileCoin by providing retrieved data. The core technologies used are blockchain, IPFS, and IPDB.

2. Tezos, self-governing, self-correcting blockchain

On July 15, 2017, it was issued at $232 million in tokens. It is a dynamically updated blockchain developed by OCaml that automatically upgrades and automatically corrects the smart contract blockchain platform to eliminate hard forks and serious contract errors.

3. EOS

Known to surpass Ethereum's smart contract blockchain operating system, it has raised more than $200 million and is expected to be the largest token financing project. Its positioning is exactly the same as that of Ethereum, and its indicators are far superior to Ethereum.

In addition, Bancor, The DAO, Universa, MobileGo, Qtum Quantum Chain, BasicAttentionToken, iEx.ec and other token financing projects worthy of attention, you can understand.

If we analyze the investment hotspots of the current blockchain, we will slowly discover that some of these projects are at the base layer, some at the interoperability protocol layer, and some at the application layer. This hierarchical structure is like the Internet. This is very interesting.

If the blockchain is just an extension of Internet technology, then its innovative technology should focus on a certain level, but it also has its own complete application stack. What is this indicating?

Three parallel worlds

When the Internet first appeared, the real world and the Internet world were parallel to each other in two worlds, such as newspapers and news portals, post offices and e-mails, salon parties and social networks. Real-world things also have counterparts in the Internet world. . The communication between the real world and the Internet world needs to pass through the traffic bridge and the identity bridge, as shown in Figure 2.

The browsers, search engines, and mobile phones that we are familiar with are the traffic bridges through which people can cross the virtual world of the Internet in the real world; the identity bridge is slowly built up because of the need for supervision, such as the need to use real names such as mobile phone numbers. Certification can be online. Today, the Internet world has become a part of the real world.

The emergence of the blockchain suddenly created a new world. The world is wild except for some primitive infrastructure. Many things in reality and the Internet world are still blank in this new world, and there are plenty of opportunities for development.

• At present, some pioneers have already stayed in the "blockchain world", such as Moneda corresponding to Alipay;

• Steemit, which corresponds to today's headlines and Facebook, can be used to write blogs to earn rewards, and to see the amount of money they earn in real time, all comments can also make money;

• Taobao's corresponding OpenBazaar;

The status of WeChat corresponds to its ambition to build a mobile operating system for the Ethereum ecosystem;

The Internet world is supported by Linux, AWS, and Alibaba Cloud infrastructure. Ethereum, EOS, FileCoin, small ants, and quantum chains in the blockchain are all trying to make infrastructure in the blockchain.

Five bridges from the Internet to the blockchain

From the Internet world to the blockchain world, it is not as easy as the Internet world to the real world. It requires not only traffic bridges, identity bridges, but also truth bridges, brain bridges, and capital bridges to form a blockchain world. Enter the threshold, as shown in Figure 3.

Truth Bridge:

In the blockchain world, the truth is very important.

For example, a smart contract is the will of the father to write to her daughter. "If I die, all my digital heritage will inherit from my daughter." Digital assets can be transferred through the blockchain, but the blockchain cannot know whether the father actually died. . So how to transfer the real information of the real world into the blockchain will be the key. If a bad girl sends a fake message to the blockchain, it will inherit the inheritance in advance.

The Truth Bridge can be done by predicting the market, such as predicting who will win in Brazil and Germany in the football finals next year, and we believe that the party that correctly predicts the winner of the market will be true.

Traffic bridge:

Ethereum's Mist browser, open the browser to access the Dapp decentralized application, the browser plug-in MetaMask can access the Web 3.0 decentralized website in the Chrome browser.

Status's ambition is to be a mobile operating system, everyone with a mobile phone with the Status operating system, ready to connect to the world of blockchain.

Brain Cave Bridge:

It is used to teach the rules of the blockchain world, such as Coindesk, which has just melted $100 million, because it is the company that guards the brain bridge.

Currency Bridge:

If you have a lot of money in the blockchain, but in the real world is a poor man, everything is meaningless, so try to convert the token into French currency.

The technical flaws of Bitcoin itself are not enough to support the entire blockchain world, but it can serve as a bridge to connect the real world and the blockchain world. Currency Network - Centralized Exchange, with Omisego as an example, all wallet applications can be considered as a capital bridge.

Identity Bridge:

Everyone can have countless identities in the blockchain world, and each private key is a new identity. There will be a huge gap with the real world, and everything can't be controlled by the government. At present, some blockchain startup projects have proposed digital identity solutions, which are particularly worthy of expectation.

Here we introduce the Estonian Digital Citizenship Program.

In real life, Estonia is only a small country with a population of 1.3 million. Ten years ago, a 38-year-old young man became prime minister. After taking office, he promoted all students in Estonia to learn programming. Estonian citizens in their 20s are basically programmed, and even many parts of the NATO military system are built by Estonia.

Estonia is currently preparing to open up Estonian digital citizenship and invites global citizen registration applications, regardless of the country in which you are a citizen.

This measure will make Estonia a superpower in the blockchain world in the future. In the future, many blockchain companies will be registered in Estonia. All goods, trade and services between the companies will be settled through the blockchain. The Estonian government only needs to set some basic regulations, and it is possible to obtain huge taxes and have the opportunity to become a super rich country in the future.

Then, what are the typical projects on the above five bridges.

Conclusion

The world of blockchain has its charm, your identity is protected, all trading activities and capital flows can be cross-border without any constraints, have great freedom, and no one in the real world knows everything you are doing, but at the same time It will also bring many problems in the real society, tax issues, money laundering issues, and black market transactions, which will hinder their full application when the entire system is not fully established.

But in retrospect, the Internet was full of problems at the beginning, but people who were more than 20 years ago did not retreat because of these problems, but embraced the Internet with enthusiasm. As a result, they created a prosperity in 20 years. Internet economy. I believe that the blockchain will also break down all kinds of obstacles, solve various problems, and become a technological movement that will bring about major changes in our lives.