Xu Mingxing: The future of blockchain is not a "chain", but a "network" and "graph"

Editor's note: On May 19, 2018, the 3rd China Financial Enlightenment Annual Conference was held in Beijing. The theme of this annual conference was "Financial Risk and Security Management", co-sponsored by China Finance Museum (Group) and China Financial Enlightenment Center , co-organized by China Blockchain Application Research Center. Xu Mingxing, the founder of OK Blockchain Engineering Academy, attended the meeting and delivered a speech. The following is the content of the speech.

Xu Mingxing, founder of OK Blockchain Engineering Institute:

Dear leaders and guests, just now many leaders talked about financial risks and financial security issues from a macro perspective. I may introduce such a controversial emerging technology as blockchain from a micro perspective.

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First of all, I think a popular computer science definition should be given to the blockchain. From the current development of the blockchain in the world, I think the essence of the blockchain is aDistributed, irreversible database.

In fact, database technology has a very close relationship with the development of the entire Internet civilization. The earliest Yahoo portal appeared in the 1990s, which itself istwo-dimensional flat database. With more and more web pages, Google developed aA new type of inverted index database, allowing us to retrieve the vast amount of human information. Later, with the research and development of famous enterprises in the worldRelational Database, These databases can perform very precise data calculation and storage to ensure that it is 100% accurate. They are called relational databases.

Relational database is one of the core technologies of today's modern financial informatization and e-commerce. After social networks become more and more developed, products like Weibo, many Weibo users may have one million followers. Technology storage, another kind of database invented by humans isKV database, With such a database, there will be Weibo.

Like YouTube that appeared abroad earlier and Douyin and Kuaishou that appeared recently in China are very popular. How to store a large number of short videos? human inventedfile database.It is such a database technology that allows us to store a large number of short videos. Blockchain is a new type of database, which is a distributed and irreversible database.

The current blockchain database is still just beginning, and there are many problems. For example, what everyone talks about is its throughput. Its performance is relatively slow, and the expansion of blockchain has been developing continuously for many years. Another aspect is its security risk. There are many incidents of bitcoin being stolen in the world, and the current blockchain has not been combined with customer identification, one of the core elements of global financial supervision. At present, many blockchain products do not have The introduction of the real-name system has brought about many regulatory problems.

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Next, I will introduce the latest technology direction of the global industry. First, we see that there are many new designs on the blockchain, which move from a chain structure to a graph structure, which we callDAG Directed Acyclic Graph，Such a structure allows the storage of the blockchain to store massive data without a single node, and can share their storage resources and technical resources on computers around the world.Several blockchain products have been successfully practiced around the world, so the future blockchain may not be a chain, but a network or a graph. Then the graph is also one of the fundamental data structures of computer science.

The latest Ethereum technology represented by many new blockchains,They implement sharding technology.This sharding technique,A large number of transactions can be divided into different areas on the distributed network, and different nodes can perform parallel calculations, and finally merged into the main chain after the calculation is completed.Then the current Ethereum should be able to implement sharding technology on a large scale in the next year or two. Of course, there are many new blockchains that have already implemented such technology. Therefore, sharding technology will greatly improve the processing performance of the entire blockchain.

The third one we call it DHT is a distributed storage technology.At present, in many blockchain designs, a single node needs to store massive amounts of data. But it will face great challenges, but in fact, the storage, bandwidth, and computing of everyone's mobile phone and computer in the world are very redundant. Then this distributed storage technology allows each node to store only a small amount of technology, and everyone can make the blockchain more performant by sharing storage and network.

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In fact, there are still big problems in the current blockchain, forks often occur. Since the blockchain technology is a distributed network, there is no central node to control it. If you want to upgrade this network, you need to obtain the consent of most of the nodes, which is a long operation process. Computers have proposed many trusted computing methods very early. The general concept is that after any blockchain node adopts a trusted computing module, if it does not upgrade, it cannot become a node of this blockchain, or in other words It will run at lower performance. Therefore, trusted computing can make it easier to upgrade and iterate technologies in distributed networks.

In terms of the real-name system of the blockchain, MIT in the United States has a blockchain laboratory, and they have proposed many technical solutions for the real-name system. For example, the current blockchain is point-to-point. In many countries such as South Korea, each of them has an electronic certificate, and the real-name electronic certificate must be used to sign the transaction. Of course, there is also a simpler solution. We can store the IP address of the entire device as part of the transaction on the blockchain. In this way, the transaction of the entire blockchain can realize the real-name system of technology. So this is an optional real-name system. We can build a real-name blockchain network or an anonymous blockchain network.

The super key is also a major advancement in the development of the current blockchain, because of a distributed network, how do we supervise it and how do we control it? Cryptography, we call the so-called multi-signature. We design a different blockchain network,If it is a blockchain network used by a bank, we can design a super key, and the keys of all nodes must be together with the super key to generate a wallet. Then this super key must be in the hands of regulators or some institutions, who can exercise limited control over the blockchain.secondary title

The controversy brought about by the blockchain in the world has a lot to do with language. Bitcoin has been translated into currency. In fact, Bitcoin was originally called Bitcoin Gold. It is not a currency in essence. It is like Q coins. It is a certain credit in a specific Internet community. Some young people may like it, and some people don’t like it. It is just a digital asset. .

Decentralization is also a major misunderstanding. I think its essence is to remove intermediate links.In fact, it can be seen that, taking Bitcoin, the current experimental product of the blockchain, as an example, it has been developed around the world for nine years, and its users are distributed in almost one hundred countries. Then the early designer of this network (I don’t know who it is now) let Satoshi Nakamoto design a set of rules, then this rule has actually been in operation for nine years, and no one can change it. The original rule designer is the biggest center. This technology actually ensures that the rules designed by the center are executed accurately in all corners. Therefore, decentralization may be a more accurate description of the current technical characteristics of the blockchain.

In the future, the global blockchain may have a development trend. Blockchain has a multi-layer structure,The first is the device layer, everyone's mobile phone and computer, which will become the lowest-level device.Then the storage, computing, and bandwidth of our mobile phones and computers are largely idle, and a file system layer IPSF will be established. At present, such technology is developing very fast. Devices all over the world will be connected by a network, and the application layer only needs to be in The storage on the above ensures the security of the technology through encryption technology, and we don't care where the data is stored. On top of IPSF, ledgers and virtual machines can be built to run smart contracts. Set up various applications on this ledger and virtual machine, including game chains and so on. At the same time, supervision can develop this blockchain into a controllable blockchain through technology.

Therefore, a network that connects all devices in the world is currently developing rapidly, and has received great investment from industries and government supervision around the world. Such a technology may be an undeterminable technology. As such a technology, we can only master it, control it, and turn it into a controllable and powerful technology. If in the future all our blockchain applications in China run on the public blockchain network designed by the United States or international companies, this will actually be very detrimental to our financial security or many aspects, so we can use such technology Development, through the formulation of rules, make it a controlled, not only a distributed network, but also the infrastructure of society.