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In 1995, Gartner Consulting proposed a technology development curve to study the relationship between media exposure and technology maturity after emerging technologies.
In their research, they found that almost all technologies had a bubble stage that was over-propagated in the early stage of their production. At this stage, whether it was media reports, talents, or capital, they quickly flowed into the industry. But soon, everyone will find that in the early stage of technological development, because his application scenarios cannot support market expectations, the concept will cool down quickly, and sometimes because the cooling speed is too fast, it will even be slandered as a scam. Once big data, Cloud computing, AR, VR It's all so.
Blockchain also obeys this law, but compared to other technical concepts, blockchain has its special features. Because of the existence of cryptocurrency, people have found a way to realize the blockchain very early. Moreover, the speed of this realization method is faster than most people imagine.
Three or five people set up a chain, issued a new digital currency, followed a bunch of advanced technologies, and then recruited a few celebrities to do endorsements, and went to the exchange as soon as possible, and then began to sell the market and price speculation. The so-called currency does not serve the real economy at all, which is idling.
And such projects are not one or two. In fact, most of the projects have no possibility of landing, and they are completely "air projects." However, no matter what kind of project the project is, as long as Ishio can make money.
For example, Fanstime, which has been raging in the past two days, proposed to "lead thousands of star fan groups to embrace the blockchain". After the event was launched, the number of Weibo reposts exceeded 2 million. It is difficult for you to judge whether this is a reliable project or an unreliable puzzle.
However, as everyone is full of enthusiasm and sleeplessly discussing how to make money with cryptocurrency, calm thinking about the real application scenarios of blockchain becomes more precious. Because no matter what kind of technology and how big the bubble is, the winners must be those technologies that have real application scenarios and create value that can be used by people.
Many Internet companies have also seen these trends and have begun to lay out the blockchain field. Many major technology companies, including BAT, have begun to think about how to expand in the blockchain world.
In April 2017, Tencent released the "Tencent Blockchain Solution White Paper", which will develop the blockchain technology from three levels of independent research and development of the underlying technology, product service platform for B-end users, and specific applications for mass users.
On July 15, 2017, JD and Alibaba released their own blockchain application projects at the same time. They are both e-commerce companies. The functions of the applications of both parties are also very similar. Both use the verification features of blockchain technology to ensure the source of goods. Reliability and quality assurance reduce the defective rate of products on e-commerce platforms.
On January 12, it was reported that Baidu launched the blockchain open platform "BaaS". In response, Baidu Finance stated that the platform was launched on July 21 last year and has so far solved the authenticity problem of more than 50 billion yuan in assets.
The recently released "2017 Global Blockchain Enterprise Patent Ranking (Top 100)" shows that China's growth rate of blockchain patents far exceeds that of the United States, leading the world. Among the top 100, Chinese companies accounted for 49%, followed by the United States with 33%; Alibaba ranked first with 49.
In addition to some of the companies just mentioned, there is also news that Erma (WMT), Visa (V) and Amazon (AMZN) are testing the application of blockchain technology in their systems. In fact, the latest Juniper research survey also reported that nearly 6 of every 10 large companies are considering the application of blockchain technology.
Obviously, the big companies' attention to the blockchain is not only to make a handful of dollars, but to really see the possibility of the blockchain to change the world. In the words of UBS experts, blockchain is a potentially transformative technology. In the next two decades, the impact of blockchain and related technologies on the world will be as far-reaching as the impact of the Internet in the past two decades.
However, as we just said, blockchain projects are still in a mixed phase, and it is difficult to clearly distinguish between truly valuable projects and "air projects". If you want to make a good investment in the blockchain, you must pay attention to those applications that make good use of the technical features of the blockchain.
Blockchain technology, in the simplest terms, is: "Have a database with historical data that cannot be tampered with." A stable, secure, and non-tamperable database is the most important foundation for many promising directions in the future, such as big data. , The Internet of Things and the sharing economy.
Next, let's take a look at how the blockchain will integrate with these future technologies.
Big Data
Big data and blockchain technology naturally have parts that can learn from each other.
In recent years, big data has become the standard equipment of large Internet companies, and various software and applications such as travel, e-commerce, and social networking are closely related to big data. It can be said that how to use big data is an important foundation for many future technologies. But big data currently faces many problems. The core one is that the security and accuracy of data cannot be guaranteed.
Data breaches are very common nowadays. If you have ever received spam messages like "winning a lottery", "increased loan limit", "credit card consumption record" and other spam messages, it means that your personal information has been leaked. Moreover, it is not only small companies that leak information, but large companies also have similar problems. Two days ago, Apple just revealed the news that internal employees stole
iCloud
Data, and threaten the user, if he does not pay, all his personal information will be leaked. As the world's most valuable company, Apple's technical strength is beyond doubt, and this problem cannot be completely avoided.
Many people have thought of many ways to solve this problem, but they all face a huge dilemma, that is, under the existing technical conditions, if you want to improve safety, it will bring about a substantial increase in costs. And if you want to spend less, security will have no alternative but to decrease. Not to mention the possible risk of guarding theft, making data security precarious.
Blockchain allows people to see low-cost solutions to problems for the first time.
As mentioned earlier, the blockchain is a "big ledger that cannot be tampered with." In such a big ledger, two major problems of big data applications can be solved at one time:
First, data security is assured. The foundation of the blockchain is encryption technology. Whether it is tampering or stealing data, it is very difficult. From the perspective of existing technology, it is as difficult to successfully crack the encryption system of the blockchain as it is to discover extraterrestrial life.
Second, the accuracy of the data has been tangibly improved. In addition to the good encryption of blockchain technology, another important performance is that it can be traced back. All data records can be traced back to the moment he connected to the network, what changes happened during the period, and how the changes are all traceable. The accuracy of the data can be greatly improved.
This is not an imagination, but an application that has already been realized. GXB has successfully realized the combination of data transaction and blockchain. On the Gongxinbao platform, all data can be connected to the blockchain. By encrypting the data, the risk of data leakage or theft is largely avoided. Moreover, because of the point-to-point transmission function of the blockchain, data can be directly transmitted between the two parties in the transaction, and no third party is required for storage and transmission.
More importantly, GXB provides a solution that can solve data quality problems while protecting the rights and interests of data producers. This solution has been recognized by financial institutions including China UnionPay, China Unicom, CreditEase, Sui Shou Ji and other financial institutions. They believe that data sharing will ultimately bring true value to people's credit.