Microsoft Talks Blockchain with Standard Consensus
Introduction: The application of blockchain technology has been extended to many fields such as digital finance, Internet of Things, intelligent manufacturing, and supply chain management. It is necessary to explore the application of "blockchain +" in the field of people's livelihood, and actively promote the application of blockchain technology in education, employment, elderly care, precision poverty alleviation, medical health, commodity anti-counterfeiting, food safety, public welfare, social assistance and other fields, and serve the people The masses provide smarter, more convenient, and better public services. In this context, Xu Yutao, the chief innovation technology consultant of Microsoft China, talked with Xu Jiang, the chief analyst of the standard consensus, to discuss the bottom of the technology, and actually discussed a conclusion-can I simplify the development of blockchain applications? ?
Xu Yutao: Good afternoon, friends! I am Xu Yutao, Chief Innovation Technology Consultant from Microsoft China. You can call me Tory. There is a handsome guy sitting next to me, he is the chief analyst of the standard consensus, Mr. Xu Jiang.
Teacher Xu Jiang said hello to everyone.
Xu Jiang: Hello everyone!
Xu Yutao: Teacher Xu Jiang, we are honored to invite you, how about you introduce yourself to our online friends.
Xu Jiang: Thank you everyone! I am honored that I also have a background in science and engineering and a programmer. I should be very kind to everyone. Before joining the blockchain industry, I was in the financial service circle and worked in Moody’s Analytics and Pactera for a while. I am now working at Standard Consensus as a lead analyst. Today I will talk to you all. about the blockchain.
Xu Yutao: Okay, thank you Mr. Xu Jiang. Today we will organize a topic with Mr. Xu Jiang, which is related to blockchain application development. During today's live broadcast, you can interact with us at any time.
Download the lecturer's PPT and watch the video playback link (you can also scan the QR code of the pier map)::https://app.ma.scrmtech.com/
Our live broadcast assistant will draw lucky viewers and present small gifts we made. Teacher Xu Jiang, the weather is still quite cold today, but the topic of our discussion today is very hot.
History and development of the blockchain industry
Xu Yutao: Because you are also an early practitioner of blockchain. Many people perceive the concept of blockchain from Bitcoin. Can you introduce your understanding of industry development or technology trends to us, thank you!
Xu Jiang: That's right, the blockchain has been around for many years. I am also a novice, because I do analysis and research work, I can share some things with you. In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto did not know who it was. He published a paper describing the most important content of the blockchain. Bitcoin has become a household name by now. We have seen the great development of blockchain technology, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, EOS and so on. Later, there are domestic public chain projects, including the application of current technology.
what is blockchain
what is blockchain
Xu Yutao: Teacher Xu Jiang, you also shared a lot of your own mental journey. Although you're modest about being a novice, it sounds like you're an industry veteran. This wave of technology has just begun. We still need to have a basic introduction to the blockchain. That is, we always talk about blockchain and blockchain, but what exactly is it? Can you use the perspective of an industry veteran, or your understanding, to briefly explain what blockchain is?
Xu Jiang: Technically speaking, the blockchain thing is actually a combination of many technological achievements that have existed in the past. Mainly cryptography. Others include: P2P network technology, distributed technology and data synchronization. It is the integration of these contents together, and then the blockchain technology is produced. It has very obvious characteristics, that is, it can be traced, cannot be changed, and it is uniquely programmable. So these characteristics create a lot of room for our imagination.
What can blockchain do
Xu Yutao: You explained it very well. You mentioned features, such as traceability and programming through smart contracts. We Microsoft started very early to embrace the ecology of the blockchain. But what we are doing more is how we serve our customers in many industries, such as manufacturing customers, retail customers, health industry customers, and retail insurance. We are also experimenting with them in scenarios in various industries. In these scenarios, go to the blockchain. But in the process of landing, we basically revolve around the traceability of the blockchain and its distributed storage technology. You are also a practitioner, and you also have a lot of experience communicating with industry practitioners. From your point of view, you can see what kind of trend is happening, or the application prospect or change of the industry. Can you share it with us?
Xu Jiang: Okay, maybe you haven’t been in the industry and lack some practical experience. Let me introduce some interesting content that I have seen. First of all, it is because in the initial stage, taking Bitcoin as an example, the throughput efficiency of the Bitcoin network is relatively low and slow. There are relatively few applications on it. But then Ethereum appeared, and its throughput has increased, and there are many applications on it that mainly focus on games.
For example, everyone should have heard of Ethercat. You can raise a pet cat by yourself, customize various behaviors for it, and then trade. That is, there are such applications only when the throughput is improved. In fact, applying such technology to real scenarios, we see more applications in two aspects, and more in the financial field. Because finance has the advantage of natural digitization, because it does not need the process of putting physical objects on the chain. Therefore, whether it is the transfer of funds or the transfer of information, it will be more convenient.
The other one is still in the logistics industry, and it is used a lot. It is traceability, which can be used in quality assurance, public welfare projects and so on. In addition, in supply chain projects, there is a lot of room for imagination.
Xu Yutao: Our own projects in the enterprise also somewhat confirm your point of view. We are mainly providing a variety of blockchain development services based on the general supply chain. For example, in our pharmaceutical industry, they are also applying this kind of traceability to the supply chain. Here we see another case. It is in the supply chain financial scenario, with one of our Chinese partners, Fuzzy Beauty 33.CN. We are together in a core enterprise, a manufacturing enterprise. We went to land a supply chain scenario, and we mainly applied blockchain technology to complete the voucher of one of their accounts receivable. Through such a white line, we have opened up the circulation of the upstream and downstream supply chains. It is more convenient for my core company to issue such an account receivable, and it makes it easier for my downstream suppliers to get better endorsements, and the entire payment is transparent. This will also help them better use this kind of accounts receivable, or our new kind of IOUs, to go to financial institutions to get better loans. Finally, our core enterprise provides a guarantee for payment at maturity.
Blockchain Industry Application Cases
Xu Yutao: You see that you also mentioned the supply chain in your usual process. Do you see any cases that you have come into contact with? Or perceived cases, can you share one or two?
Xu Jiang: I know there is a state-owned joint-stock bank. It uses electronic billing. Our traditional electronic bill of exchange is accepted or paid through the central bank system. But there are also many regional ones. For example, Zhejiang Province or Jiangsu Province are economically developed regions with a relatively developed financial industry. Then in this region, various financial institutions can join the alliance. That is, various city commercial banks, joint-stock banks, and rural commercial banks can join in and use electronic bills for payment.
Xu Yutao: We have tried many scenes in many places, and everyone is trying. I will also share another case here. Because the case is very easy for many people to perceive it, it is Starbucks. People who like to drink coffee basically know it. But in the store, you can see that Starbucks has different coffee beans. Different coffee beans have different prices, and it will be produced in different places accordingly.
Microsoft has cooperated with Starbucks, and we provide a blockchain service based on our public cloud Azure. Help Starbucks quickly apply such a good feature of the blockchain to its entire coffee traceability process. It is equivalent to applying the traceable and immutable features of the blockchain to this kind of logistics industry, or the traceable content. Because you can see that when we drink coffee, the coffee beans start from planting, then picking, then to transportation, then roasting to the final transportation after roasting, transportation to the store and finally consumption by consumers, we completely complete the whole process Together with Starbucks, we went through a chain-up process. Then there are also Yangcheng Lake hairy crabs, which seem to be made in this way.
Xu Jiang: I have a question, how can we ensure that the physical objects off the chain are consistent with those on the chain, or how to go on the chain?
Xu Yutao: The question is very good. We also incorporate technologies from the Internet of Things. It is in these processes that we go through the new 4G network or 5G network in places. The necessary bandwidth guarantee is provided. I added IoT devices. I will complete the data collection on the device side, of course after we have collected it. Not all data is uploaded to the chain. We still upload the core data to the chain, and at the same time we will do a process, that is, we need to do the necessary privacy protection. It is related to personal privacy, because now various countries are also very concerned about the protection of privacy. We still put the sharable data in the transaction link or the data that needs to be used in the process of multi-party circulation, and we put it on the chain for everyone to query.
Xu Jiang: If Yangcheng Lake hairy crabs can do this in the future, it can be guaranteed that they are not bath crabs.
Xu Yutao: Yes, maybe we can scan it in the future to see where it was produced, and there may even be a video. We also have a good practice because like you mentioned the earliest blockchain at the beginning, many people feel that it started with Bitcoin? Bitcoin is when we talk about the blockchain, or when we talk about this kind of Token. It is also a digital currency recognized by everyone, with the highest degree of consensus. We are in an Office of Microsoft, and everyone is using a tool in Office called Excel, which is used to make various reports. Here, we have a commonly used function, which is to do data or data statistics. BTC is also used here as an endorsement. Or a consensus currency unit is supported inside, and everyone can directly use it as a currency unit. Come to do the necessary statistics and analysis of the data. You can even set the necessary exchange rate yourself to complete the value exchange with other currencies. We have a very good case.
I'd love to hear that too in a moment, especially if you mentioned games too. Games are a very good use, but you see this scene where games are made on the public chain. In terms of revenue, Microsoft is the third largest game company in the world. On Xbox, we will have such a multi-party process to process transactions and account reconciliation. That is, the publisher releases the game, and then we provide services for the user and the user wants to buy it. So we put their purchase records on the blockchain, which is a distributed ledger. In this way, what we hope to shorten is the previous reconciliation process.
Development of blockchain technology
Xu Yutao: We mentioned a very good topic here, and we have been discussing it until you can see that blockchain technology has an evolution process. You also mentioned that it is possible that we may call it 0.00 to 1.0 or someone may call it 2.0. From your point of view, let's talk about these blockchain technologies that are common to us now. What kind of evolution trend will we have next? Or you can share with us based on your understanding.
Xu Jiang: The trend seems to be speculative, although this technology has not yet arrived. Because BTC has been in the form of Bitcoin from the very beginning, it is equivalent to completing the initial proof of concept. After Ethereum comes out, more things can be done using smart contracts. For example, the Ethercat game we just mentioned. Of course, it is also possible to deploy smart contracts and apply real application scenarios. Later, we may see that the path is from the initial proof of concept to the next logical step. There are really virtual digital things that can be played or entertained or applied. In the end, at least the next step should be something more pragmatic, which is to really use blockchain technology to change the world and improve production efficiency. In terms of improving production efficiency, as long as the blockchain is made, it will definitely change the world very much. I think both our country's central bank and traditional institutions represented by Facebook are working hard to do this.
Xu Yutao: We also agree with your point of view. In the process of chatting with enterprises, they also hope to use this blockchain technology to improve their efficiency. Because the enterprise is more about efficiency, it has always been about reducing costs and increasing efficiency. But when they are embracing or using the blockchain, most of them are traditional developers. They have traditional databases and traditional development languages, but we use new development languages in smart contracts like ETH. So we still need to do business system docking, so we at Microsoft have also seen that this is a very huge project.
Xu Jiang: Yes, I am also a programmer. From the beginning of my contact with the world of blockchain technology, it is obvious that it is very different from the original programming development. So Microsoft will definitely be able to improve the efficiency of programming or reduce our learning costs in this regard, I am still looking forward to it.
Xu Yutao: Thank you Mr. Xu Jiang for your recognition. We will report to you a few things we are doing now in the process, just to share, we have talked a lot about blockchain, which was not born for enterprises at first. From the perspective of its transaction efficiency, with the smart contract, I can do the necessary execution through the program. In the end, we still need to integrate with existing technologies. Therefore, when we talk to enterprise developers or community developers and non-blockchain data developers, they will have many challenges. For example, it takes a long time for them to do POC. So how do they integrate with existing companies? So, we made a public cloud Azure for this. We provide a variety of services for developing blockchain applications. For example, our Azure Blockchain Service. We have tools like Workbag. We hope that this will lower the barriers to entry for developers and at the same time integrate with existing security management features on the cloud.
Xu Jiang: On behalf of those who have entered the blockchain industry and want to use Microsoft Cloud, I would like to ask, for example, if I want to release a smart contract and deploy it to Microsoft Cloud, who will pay for the gas fee based on ETH?
Xu Yutao: Good question, we are mainly working on chain-based scenarios. We did not say what kind of supply chain Microsoft provides, we did not do such work. So here, when we help enterprises use it, you can regard it as a supply chain. For example, if I build the virtual machine of ETH myself, or even use Hyperledger to build one myself, it becomes a form like a private chain. Enterprises use it a lot. When enterprises are using it, because our individual developers can directly use the capabilities and network built on the public chain when using the public chain, and there are nodes, as long as I have Gas fees and Tokens, I can go to it Released for Dapps. In the enterprise, we still provide a relatively rich deployment method.
For example, stand-alone nodes do development and debugging for him, and then we build an enterprise intranet in a single area for simulation, and we can also do a multi-node method for a cross-region and cross-network environment. To simulate our current public chain that everyone imagines, there are multiple parties with consensus nodes. These consensus nodes are that we may not know each other.
Xu Jiang: Is it on the Microsoft cloud, whether it is Hyperledger or ETH virtual machines or other public chains, are they transparent to developers?
Xu Yutao: So we divide it into two types. One scenario is that we have a relatively high consensus with the blockchain service provider here, such as the Hyperledger and Ethereum you mentioned. Together we will build a service based on them. For this kind of service, we hope that enterprises will not have to think too much about the emerging technology on the blockchain. It can still use existing technology. It pays more attention to its own business process, because enterprises still have to put it in their own application scenarios in the end. So we hope that we will have service providers for this kind of enterprise contract below. Microsoft we use our build we can be seen as a BaaS service on the cloud. Through these services, we can quickly use the existing blockchain network of the service provider of this enterprise ledger with a relatively high degree of consensus. This is what we are doing now.
Xu Jiang: So what functions or APIs have been integrated on the Microsoft cloud that can be used well by everyone?
Xu Yutao: Let me say two more things along the lines of your question. First. We are on the technology provider of the enterprise contract, we will be like Ethereum and Hyperledger as our partners. Second, we have provided services such as Azure Blockchain Service and Azure Blockchain Token in the blockchain services for enterprises to help you quickly use these blockchain technologies and issue your own tokens quickly. Certificate Token. More importantly, we are very concerned about the security and privacy of this data. After all, the blockchain is related to a lot of data, and we guarantee that all data will meet the requirements of the laws and regulations of various countries around the world when using our cloud and our services.
Blockchain Ecology
Xu Yutao: We have talked a lot about the blockchain services that Microsoft provides and how to help everyone do enterprise application development. Another very important point for us is our partner ecology. But our partner ecology is based on our perspective. But I believe Mr. Xu Jiang, you have a bigger ecology from the perspective of practitioners, including yourself. Can you give us an introduction? Then I will go back to talk about how Microsoft does our ecology. It may be that you will see different things from the perspective of different companies.
Xu Jiang: Let me just talk about what kind of situation we saw from our side. From our side, we can see that the participants in the entire industry are divided into several roles. The first role is when we talk about supply chain projects, that is, Bitcoin, Ethereum and EOS that we have just mentioned. Besides them there are many other public chains. On the basis of public chains, there may be corresponding developers who provide application scenarios and services for these public chains. For example, Ethercat, which develops games, or it is said to issue tokens, or it can be said to do quantitative transactions. These are equivalent to doing things based on these public chains. At the same time, there will be corresponding companies like ours to study these public chain projects, including policies and macroeconomics. Mainly research in the direction of finance. We will provide readers or users with relatively in-depth research reports. There are also like, for example, the media and the community. They are here to provide user services for these public chain projects. Vitalik, the founder of Ethereum, came to China to do fundraising for Ethereum. Vitalik is equivalent to going to the media and the community to help him with financing. Then the current famous Ethereum was created. The ecology is also becoming more and more complex with more and more participants.
Xu Yutao: When we at Microsoft were doing ecology, we still focused on a mission of our company in the past two years. We hope to help each enterprise and each person to achieve the career he wants to achieve. Because you can see that our previous introduction basically focuses on how to help enterprises use blockchain and how to solve problems in their enterprise scenarios. We are trying to constantly build our own ecosystem of partners based on the public cloud Azure, including partners like Fuzzy, TrueChain and NEO mentioned above.
We work with them to let them bring their blockchain technology to our public cloud platform, make a service for them, and then deliver it to customers through us. These solutions must be particularly easy to obtain, and we have placed them on our public cloud market. As long as our users want to use it, they can quickly build such a network directly in the cloud market and start doing necessary development. At the same time, there are some documents for development. As a developer in the past, you have to find various documents. You think that each chain has its own various communities in this area to build such documents. We are a technical team, and we have also built a small community. We made a website to put all kinds of documents that we need to develop on it.
You can see that we put a Chain 33 parachain used by an authorized body provided by Complex Beauty, because we made a parachain to make it more efficient. Second, the Token issued above does not have any cost, because it Nor is it a real production environment. In this way, developers can quickly create transfer items in our portal, and then create accounts to generate wallets and configure tokens, which can be used quickly.
The development trend of blockchain technology
Xu Yutao: We have talked about this, and today's topic is basically over. But I have one last topic, Mr. Xu Jiang, to give us an outlook, because it is the end of the year, and we are about to enter 2020 from 2019. Blockchain technology and us have been constantly evolving. What major technical directions do you think the next evolution will have? For example, we often say that Ethereum is also evolving. Do you have any information you have seen or insight to share with us?
Xu Jiang: There may be two points:
The first point is that the throughput will definitely be greatly improved. Because the TPS of Bitcoin was very low from the very beginning, and now it has increased dozens of times in Ethereum. But it is now Ethereum 2.0, it will increase dozens of times, and it will reach thousands of TPS. First of all, we can confirm various trends to show that the throughput will definitely increase. Because now Bitcoin needs six nodes to confirm a transaction, which takes about a few hours. It takes about ten minutes for Ethereum, and less than one minute for EOS. We can clearly see that the improvement of efficiency is certain. Another point is the consensus mechanism. The consensus mechanism is a bit like the democratic mechanism or voting mechanism in our real society. Some are universal suffrage, that is, one person, one vote. POW is such a consensus mechanism. In addition, the proxy mechanism is POS represented by EOS. This mechanism is to select an agent first, and then the agent will vote for you. The consensus mechanism seen at present will be more popular. Because it is more efficient and more controllable. This may be the future trend.
Xu Yutao: Okay, thank you Mr. Xu Jiang for sharing your personal views. Thank you guys in front of the screen! That's all for our sharing today, if you still have more to say. We have prepared a questionnaire, you can scan the QR code on the screen, and you can quickly establish direct contact with us. If you have any questions, you can find me, or even teacher Xu Jiang.
risk warning:
risk warning:
Be vigilant against illegal financial activities under the banner of blockchain and new technologies. The standard consensus resolutely resists all kinds of illegal activities such as illegal fundraising, network pyramid schemes, ICO and various variants, and dissemination of bad information using blockchain.
