The 1st viewpoint of the Block Chains from a freshman: A Brief Introduction of Block Chain Technology

Block chain technology has become a very potential application technology in today's era. Many people have expressed concern about block chain technology, but most of them still have a wait-and-see attitude or even ignore it. This paper will give a brief introduction to block chain technology.

Let's first give a general overview of the development of block chain technology.

In 1976, Bailey W. Diffie and Martin E. Hellman, two masters of cryptography, published a paper entitled New Directions of Cryptography, which laid the foundation for the development of cryptography so far and laid the foundation for the birth of block chain technology. In the same year, Hayek, a master of political economics, published his last economic book in his life, The Decentralization of Money, which laid a guide for decentralized currencies, such as Bitcoin. In 1993, Eric Hughes wrote a book called The Crypto Punk Manifesto, which played a vital role in the development of cryptography technology. In 1997, HashCash arithmetic appeared, which contains the basic germination of block chain mining thought. In November 2008, Nakamoto published his famous paper Bitcoin: Point-to-Point Electronic Cash System, which laid down the basic ideas for the birth of Bitcoin. In January 2009, the Bitcoin algorithm network was officially launched. In the same month, Nakamoto dug out the first block and won the first Bitcoin award. In 2015, the ETF network block officially launched, marking the block chain technology into the 2.0 era. From 2017 to 2018, the technology of block chain, represented by the encryption of digital currency, entered a period of vigorous development, which attracted the attention of many investors and attracted the supervision of state departments. This marked the entry of block chain technology into the 3.0 era.

So what exactly is a block chain? In essence or by definition, block chains are computational techniques that use cryptographic methods to generate data (blocks) layer by layer.

Then let's look at the characteristics or advantages of block chain technology.

Block chain technology has the following characteristics: first, decentralization, simply speaking, no one or institution will be the authority or center of the whole link, system, chain, so that on the one hand, everyone has the power of high or low, on the other hand, they will enjoy similar rights to each other. Secondly, it is highly open, that is, all other public data in the block chain are highly open except the private information of the parties involved in the transaction. Anyone can query, obtain and analyze them. Therefore, it gives the masses a low-cost or even zero-cost opportunity to participate, which has great technical value for the future trend of socialization. Thirdly, to be trustworthy means that the block chain system is constructed according to mathematical algorithms, and has its own extension method, rather than relying on human instructions. In this way, it is no longer necessary to trust the other party's traders in the transaction activities, because there is no trader, instead of the trading machine, technology, algorithm, so as to get rid of the trust of the unreliable traders, and build an era of machine trust. Fourth, high anonymity, because transactions are based on algorithms, rely on machine trust rather than trust of the transaction object, so there is no need for both sides of the transaction to disclose their identity, which is very helpful to protect their privacy in the information age. Fifth, high capacity, which means that block chain technology will connect all the computers involved, including central computers and private computers, to operate together, increasing network capacity, which has a greater advantage than relying solely on central processors. Sixthly, real information, that is, information can not be tampered with and will remain true forever. Traditional centralized databases are vulnerable to intrusion and tampering. Block chain technology has no effect on the whole data chain because of the highly dispersed and continuous progress of information.

However, block chain technology also has its drawbacks. What are its disadvantages? There are four main drawbacks: the first is the problem of decentralization. Although decentralization guarantees everyone's participation, it is precisely the lack of an authority that can be judged. When there are contradictions between each other, it is impossible to seek the judgement of the third party. The most famous example of this malpractice in history is the death of Socrates by the Athenian public. Now let's take a look at the example of all kinds of people issuing virtual coins, making the circle of coins run wild with all kinds of "air coins". If there is a centralized judge, the problems arising from people's selfishness in the area of block chains may be better solved. The second is energy consumption. The generation of blocks requires huge mathematical operations by miners, which is very energy-consuming. Taking Bitcoin as an example, it is estimated that up to now (2019.1.10), Bitcoin mining power consumption has exceeded 1% of global electricity consumption. Among them, the most important power-consuming area is China, which also explains why the Chinese government suppressed Bitcoin mining some time ago. The third is efficiency, because block chains require every transaction to be written in data, and all transactions to be written in one stroke, so inevitably there is inefficiency when writing data. Take Bitcoin for example, the time of each transaction is 10 minutes, which is enough for small-scale transactions, but with Taobao, Jingdong such super. Level trading centers are far from functional enough to support data traffic as large as they are. Therefore, block chain technology is not suitable for future large traffic transactions. The fourth is the problem of arithmetic attack, that is, as long as more than 51% of users in the block chain agree that Zhang San's money belongs to Li Si and writes data together, then the money belongs to Zhang San is Li Si's. Two days ago, the Ethernet workshop was attacked like this, losing a large amount of Ethernet workshop, breaking the security myth of block chain technology, which deserves to be alerted.

Finally, a brief look at the application prospects of block chains. As a potential emerging thing, it can be gradually applied in the following three levels. At the first level, the currency level, which is also the most extensive application of block chain technology at present, is to exercise the function of legal currency as a high-quality and efficient encrypted currency, and play a role in preserving value and transferring money. The second level, contract level, in many places where it is applied to contracts, plays the role of intelligent contracts and resolves the credit problems of both sides of the transaction by exerting its characteristics of Trustlessness and high degree of information. The third level is the social level, that is to say, to give full play to its de-centralization characteristics, and in many areas of society, such as literature, art, science, health and other fields, to entrust machine autonomy to build a future co-construction, sharing and co-governance society.

From an outsider's point of view, this paper gives a brief overview of block chain technology, which can only play a general role in science popularization, and there will inevitably be many omissions, especially in the eyes of professionals. So please forgive me.