In a letter from Silicon Valley, Wu Jun（Google early scientist） wrote an article specifically about the exchange with Tom Ding, a big blockchain expert. Tom Ding talked about the application of the blockchain much wider and deeper than the world can think of now, he believes that in the future, machine intelligence will greatly enhance the productivity of mankind, and blockchain is to solve the future between people in the community The cooperative relationship, that is, the production relations. Nowadays, many blockchain projects are located in a large and broad application scene. Few people can understand the blockchain from the perspective of the operation of the entire social economy. This is the cognitive level of the cattle people. I attach this article's link to the end of the article for everyone to read.
We have seen in many science fiction films time and again the world's imagination of the future operation of society. Machine intelligence is highly developed and all human societies operate in a highly automated, highly ordered and highly efficient state of operation.
A scene: intelligent sleep device wake up automatically when you reach adequate sleep, you bath to the bathroom, the water temperature according to your physical condition gives the most suitable temperature, breakfast at the moment you arrive at the restaurant automatically cook, smart refrigerator Will automatically order a single purchase of supplementary food, today's travel needs transport have been scheduled and set a good schedule, the moment you walk out of your house, there is a car just waiting at your door, cleaning the robot When you leave, start cleaning automatically.
In the future, the development of human beings will become more and more automated and intelligent. This is an inevitable trend. The ultimate dream of mankind is to get rid of the shackles of forced labor and truly become the owner of time and self. To approach this goal, mankind will inevitably have to make machines replace labor more and more and allow people to be freed from simple and repetitive labor. Closer to this goal, machines will surely develop more and their productive forces will develop at a rapid pace. In the future, people, things and events in society will be like the precision gears in a very large machine. Each gear is running rapidly and orderly and efficiently. To achieve this level of precision and efficiency, the exchange of information and values between people, people and things must be very efficient. Funds must be paid in an instant exchange.
Blockchain and smart contract technologies combine to foresee all the scenarios in human society where instructional triggers and value exchanges are applied. When everyone in the world links to the blockchain and adheres to and enforces smart contracts at the bottom of mathematical and logical algorithms, the delivery of value is extremely smooth and fast.
In fact, the above scenario, today can be achieved through the services of some large companies, such as smart refrigerator connected to the Amazon smart speakers, will ask you no milk in the refrigerator, whether ordered from Amazon, you just confirm that Amazon The next day the logistics will send milk to your door. To go out, you can immediately call a drop, one minute later to your door waiting for you. Since these services have been provided by large companies, why do we still need blockchain technology to rebuild the services of this industry.
The reasons are:
First, now the Internet companies have significant head effects in every field, with one or two obvious advantages in the industry segments. With obvious dominant position, having a strong pricing power, taking away a large part of the profit in this area. For example, when we sit down and chatting with the driver, almost every driver complains that the platform cost is too high, but now he has to work on this platform because, after all, there are many users and the business is still good. Is the profit thin. In fact, drops took 25% of each transaction money, a lot of squeeze the driver's profit margins. Through the application of blockchain and smart contracts, the Internet is released to the Internet to utilize a large amount of idle machine computing power to intelligently match vehicles and passengers, remove platform providers and return the high profits of platform vendors to passengers and drivers.
Second, the data really in their own hands. Platform service providers, all the time we are collecting our behavioral data, and describe each person's consumer behavior, and then the sale of goods. When the user behavior data accumulated to a certain extent, it will inevitably lead to manipulation of commodity prices and "kill cooked" behavior, that is, according to your price tolerance given the price of the commodity, and prompting you to place an order. As a profitable company, it can be said that in the era of big data, this kind of behavior is inevitable and fully complies with the rules of business logic. Living a hotel, your psychological price is 300, while the psychological price of another person is 200, then the same hotel, the same room, you pay 100 yuan has become an absolute profit platform service providers. Big data era, thousands of people face it is nice to say that thousands of thousands of prices is the platform card dealer. Blockchain and smart contracts make your own private data access completely within your own hands.
Third, because of Bitcoin's best practices, let us believe that in any corner of the world wherever Internet access is possible, the value of assets can be transmitted efficiently across the blockchain without borders and the value of human labor throughout the world The exchange becomes efficient. At present, the monetary acceptance among countries, the high cost of conversion and brokering, and the restrictions on the state's monetary policy are all the pain points that we have criticized.
Blockchain, will transform the current social relations of production, subversion of social production mode of operation. It's just that teams and companies in various blockchain areas are now exploring and implementing.
In the nineties of the last century, Bill Gates wrote a book, "The Road to the Future," which describes the smart home in the future. Ten years later in 2005, we read the book's description, or the future, twenty years later In 2015, we look at the description of this book and think it is still the future. But when we read the description of this book again in 2018, we found that the future has come because of the explosion of smart speakers last year and the access of thousands of applications. Make it possible to voice control everything.
Today, entering the blockchain industry is a pioneer of the future world, but we have had a better foundation and technical conditions than the great sailing age. People tend to underestimate long-term expectations and have high expectations for the short-term. Actually, the operation of the world is not like this. It has an established law. Accumulation is very important. When the potential energy accumulates to the critical point, it is the moment when the blockchain world breaks out.
The following is a letter from Silicon Valley, Wu Jun, for everyone to read.
A few days ago Tom Ding chats with blockchain expert How to explain the blockchain to the public and understand its role. Tom Ding made a very interesting and easy to understand explanation - the blockchain is a production relationship.
Tom Ding is one of the earliest entrepreneurs to see the role of blockchain in the world. Only 4 years have passed since the founding of blockchain-based businesses in the world. Tom Ding has been in business for three and a half years. Although he himself is Asian, His team members are American and European whites many years older than him, most of them mathematicians, especially cryptographers, and the institutes he founded are one of the best in the world.
Blockchain is essentially a book of accounts. When a commodity, an act, a transaction starts, a block can be created whose entire life cycle of the flow is recorded in detail, forming a chain . Where is this book? It is not placed on a server belonging to a company, institution or individual, but rather on the Internet, so no one can theoretically remove, tamper with, or destroy it.
According to Tom Ding, machine intelligence can greatly increase the productivity of our society and hence productivity, while blockchain deals with people-to-people relationships and the distribution of benefits in economic activities and therefore corresponds to the relations of production. Why do you say that? Let us look at two specific cases.
Today everyone is using a network of about car service, such as drops. What is the nature of the drop? It is actually a platform that offers two kinds of values. The first is to automatically generate a match between passengers and drivers. The second is to provide a payment system that everyone trusts and must respect.
Of course, in order to achieve these two goals, a lot of things should be done, such as providing enough IT services, including buying hardware, handling defaults in order to maintain the credit of the platform, and marketing for everyone to use . These all need money, in the end the money is actually from the consumer. It's hard to figure it out now because it subsidizes so much, but its predecessor, Uber, charges 25% of the deal in the United States and some established markets.
Prior to this, eBay, an online auction company similar to Uber's business model, profited from 1998, charging a price of 15% of the transaction price to a cap. That is to say, after providing such a platform, they take 15% -25% of the transaction amount out of economic life.
Of course, the trick is that Drip, Uber or eBay, and not the other companies, eventually took over these markets because they did three things: technical services (including hardware), marketing and credit. Then drop and Uber take this intermediate link can be given to the block chain to complete it? In theory, it is completely possible, in the implementation process also need to address the above three issues.
Then use blockchain to replace the above companies to complete the transaction, these problems are how to solve it? First of all, its service platform is the entire Internet. All the computers that serve the blockchain have become servers for future transactions. It does not belong to a single company. Second, its credit comes from the blockchain protocol itself. Finally, its marketing can only be based on word of mouth, or by eliminating the intermediate costs of 15% -25%, we get the benefits of natural migration.
If this can be done, then all the parties to the means of production (servers) have become the entire Internet from one company and the relationship between people becomes a simple match between supply and demand, without the need for third parties, In the past, the company had no control over the lifeblood of drivers. In the end, the way in which profits were allocated to commerce was changed. No one charged a large intermediate fee anymore.
Of course, blockchain developers and servers (agencies) may get a small share, but Tom Ding estimates that they are not needed for any share of 1%. We know that the three basic elements of the relations of production are ownership of the means of production, human-human relations in production and commerce, and the distribution system. When all three change, the relationship of production has changed, so Tom Ding believes that the blockchain changes the relationship of production.
If we adopt this new production relations, we can get what benefits? First, both parties can maximize their benefits by reducing transaction costs. Second, from a security perspective, blockchain protocols can be more secure than having centralized control of data and transactions by any single company. Thirdly, in terms of reliability, if the service goes through a company and the service collapses once the company's data center collapses, and if the blockchain protocol is used, the service will continue until the entire Internet collapses Can go on. Finally, from the perspective of information security, the blockchain approach can prevent users from losing privacy when accessing Internet services.
Speaking of data security and privacy, one of the important reasons why big data therapies are hard to work with today is privacy concerns. For example, if we hand over our case to a big data company then they see the health of each of us. Simply hiding our name and ID number does not solve the problem, because based on the multi-dimensional nature of big data, it is easy to find out who this person is.
Is it possible for those who engage in big data statistics to complete both the statistics and the data? This can not be done in the past, but this is possible with the new blockchain technology (today's third generation).
In the past, we needed to get a data entity (Entity) to determine whether it has a certain attribute, such as we got a case of a person, to know if he is suffering from high blood pressure. Similarly, if we were to buy cigarettes by shopping at the mall, or by tracking the fact that I smoked through IoT, we also need to know who this person is and to be able to relate this person's smoking to his high blood pressure . If we remove the human logo, we can not achieve this connection, then the big data statistics can not be completed.
With the third generation of blockchain technology, the way data is used can change radically. In recent years, many mathematicians and cryptographers have joined the research of blockchain technology, and blockchain has many new breakthroughs and applications in cryptography. Whether or not an entity has an attribute can be queried by agreement without obtaining the data, whether you have this attribute, or what the value of a specific indicator is, and this entity can give you an answer, but You can not know who answered it.
In this way, big data statistics company, you do not need to get the data, but the data can be used. Ownership of the data can then be returned to ourselves from several big data companies. As a result, the ownership of the data resources has changed, an important factor equivalent to the production relationship has changed.
Now almost all the small companies have the experience that they can not compete with big companies in data. This is not only the small amount of data they receive, but more importantly, we do not trust the data to be given to them. Of course, we do not trust the data in big companies. There is no better solution. If you use blockchain technology, you can put the data in the supercomputer by the blockchain (in fact, the entire Internet), the owner of the data really all data, other companies, large and small, are in accordance with the agreement Using data, as a result, not only do we have a sense of security, but also to be fair on the Internet.
Further, after we have our own data, we can trade the data to make money. On this point, we have the opportunity to talk later. From my exchange with Tom Ding, I once again realized that many outstanding people really look deeper than us. For example, understanding of the blockchain, we did not rise to the height of the production relations in the past.