What will the blockchain world look like in 50 years?

(ID: quarkchain), author: Du Ting, published by Odaily with authorization.

- García Márquez, "One Hundred Years of Solitude"

mud

When I was young, I loved playing with mud. The mud I got from the river pond was made into various things for children to play with (sorry, it is different from the 10 yuan money bear and bear two in the park now). Knead into cars, pistols; some are little tigers, little lions, etc. After making good shapes, we will show them to others. The mud for making toys has become a valuable asset for everyone to scramble for. The toys we made might just be fights... For us, that was the most meaningful thing at that time. Then it changed suddenly. For example, no one played with mud anymore when I was in the third or fourth grade of elementary school. If I took a toy gun made of mud on the way to school in junior high school, I would be considered stupid. But if you told me before that playing in mud is pretty boring, we would have dismissed that comment.

The currency market can be described as crazy. The market value of some projects can shrink by 80% in one day, and then rise back to 50% in another day. In such an exciting game, everyone seems to be examined under a microscope, and the vicissitudes of life are like a farce, revealing the greed, fragility, and fear of human nature. But we're still stuck with it. In fact, for the entire blockchain, coins are equivalent to the mud of childhood, but it feels like it is valuable after playing with it. It is also possible that one day when you grow up suddenly, you feel how ridiculous you were at that time. Or if the entire industry develops, it will naturally say goodbye to the current situation.

Why do we have to discuss another 50 years, to 2068? It has been exactly 50 years since the Internet was developed in 1968, and the blockchain is also 50 years from 2018 to 2068. The Internet has developed by leaps and bounds in the past 50 years, especially in the last 20 years, and each of us has a deep understanding. But we still dare not say how long the Internet will evolve to its ultimate form in the future. The blockchain relies on the Internet, and the development laws of the two are similar. Therefore, at this point in time in 2068, the blockchain is neither just starting, we can see nothing clearly in the future through a layer of fog, nor is the system framework basically complete, and the pattern has been set without any suspense. This node is just right. So this time point is appropriate. The blockchain is still based on the Internet. Everyone has a deep feeling for the development of the Internet in the past 50 years, especially in the past 20 years. 50 years is not a long time, at least you have experienced the fastest 20 years.

Let's go back to the 1960s to see the history of that time:

At the beginning of the Arpanet (ARPA) operation, there were not many computers interconnected through the interface signal processor, and most of the computers were not compatible with each other. It is difficult to get the work done on one computer to be used on another computer, and it is also difficult to connect computers with different hardware and software to the Internet. The situation in the United States at that time was that the computers used by the Army were DEC series products, the computers used by the Navy were Honeywell winning machines, and the Air Force used IBM's winning computers. The computers of each military branch worked well in their respective departments, but There is a big drawback: resources cannot be shared. At that time, scientists put forward such an idea: "All computers are born equal." In order for these "born equal" computers to achieve "resource sharing", it must be based on the standards of these systems, and a common must be established for everyone. Comply with the standard, so that different computers can "negotiate" according to certain rules, and can "shake hands" after the negotiation.

secondary title

the Internet

Since the mid-1990s, the rapid development of the Internet has had a revolutionary impact on the culture and economy of society, and new things have emerged, such as: e-mail, instant messaging, VoIP Internet telephony, interactive video calls and WWW protocols. It has greatly enhanced the ability to link between people, and thus a new generation has emerged out of thin air, such as: social networking and e-commerce. Continuously generated data is transmitted through faster and faster optical fiber networks, from 1Gbit/s to 10Gbit/s, soon to 40Gbit/s, and then faster and faster. The Internet accounted for less than 1% of all human communication methods in 1993 to nearly 51% in 2000, and almost 97% in 2007. The Internet is conquering cities and conquering territory, constantly opening up new frontiers of information imperialism, invincible wherever it goes, from e-commerce to online advertising, from music to games, from movies to tourism, from zero to everything in the world. Then, Software is eating the world, and all of us are connected.

But when all of us were connected, we suddenly found ourselves caught in a vast ocean of data, almost all resources were monopolized by large companies, and all ascending channels were blocked by all kinds of predators. A once-in-a-ten-year-old man who had only passed five hurdles and cut six generals leaped over the dragon gate and became a true fruit, but turned into a new member of the predator family, opening his bloody mouth and wailing for food.

So the friends found that countless companies died in the past ten years, and no large technology company has emerged. Even the latest Facebook was born in 2004. This has led to the accumulation of more and more frustrated programmers around the world. They are weak, and the products they develop cannot be supported and promoted. It is difficult to generate huge social value, and they have to choose to sell early. . The Armstrong buddy of Coinbase said that he conservatively estimated that there may be 5 million such programmers, waiting to rise up at any time. (Yes, compare the programmers of this era to the programmers of the era when Bill Gates created Microsoft, and they are comparable in skill and ambition).

A more tragic fact is that, somehow, wealth begins to depreciate quietly in the pockets of ordinary people. Companies with a market value of 500 billion U.S. dollars in the industrial era, such as GE or Ford, employ about 600,000 to 800,000 people (they are undoubtedly the middle class), while by the end of last year, Facebook’s market value of 500 billion U.S. dollars only employed 25,105 people Full-time employees (middle class, needless to say), Tencent has a market value of 447.7 billion US dollars, how many people does it employ? 44796! (Certainly not all of them are middle class), so what about the hundreds of thousands of De-middleclass people? It doesn’t matter, we have Meituan, Ctrip, Ele.me, Didi, Uber, Airbnb, Taobao, Maoyan Movies, Tinder, Kuaishou, Pinduoduo… Maybe they can help us overcome our fear temporarily, but who can say for sure , won't it bring new scares the day they grow up?

Mary Meeker, the Queen of the Internet, comes to an Internet trend report every year, and its core is nothing more than emphasizing two trends: mobile phones are getting smaller, more in number, and more powerful in function; we are getting less and less money (so-called asset light ). Pinduoduo's so-called "consumption downgrade" caused an uproar among the leek group. Although the label "Chinese people love saving" belongs to history, the change of people's overall risk concept lags behind the times. Especially at present, when China's medical care, insurance, pension and other systems have not been fundamentally improved, people will most likely need to pay for the uncertainty of the future.

In this context, China, where consumption has been downgraded, has such a market situation - people are quickly in debt due to anxiety and panic, and at the same time they need time to adapt to the high monthly interest payments, and they are full of insecurity about potential future expenditures. Sexual spending plummeted. The logic of Pinduoduo is to adapt to such market conditions and provide simple and rude services-experience the pleasure of normal consumption with less money!

The development of semiconductor technology: the increasingly rapid development of the semiconductor industry;

The development of these technologies is generally a continuation of the thinking of the industrial age, which is to make the production capacity stronger and the efficiency of unit capital also become greater, so that individuals are empowered and have more social resources, or make Individuals become part of a more powerful social resource.

Thanks to the development of Internet technology, the world has undergone some changes. Looking back ten years later, what the Internet provides is a wider information transmission channel and a more reliable and faster communication tool. Thanks to the significant enhancement of the three links between people and people, between people and machines, and between machines and machines, content services such as information, advertisements, games, music, and movies have flourished in the Internet environment. The Internet is no longer satisfied with merely playing the role of an information transmission channel. It also enables online consumption, payment of bills, conclusion of transactions, and large-scale collaboration. With the emergence of more intelligent devices, cameras, and mobile computing platforms, the boundaries between the physical world and the digital world are gradually blurring, and the two worlds are no longer distinct, but begin to penetrate and merge with each other. In order to improve efficiency, improve accuracy, and provide goods and services with more marginal effects, in 2008, there was a thunder on the ground, and Bitcoin was born.

We call it the Internet of Value, Internet of Value! It's just perfect, but...

adventure

Actually? Mud! Yes, the mud mentioned at the beginning! Whether it is speculation in coins or building a chain, they are all in the stage of children's play house, and they are all playing with mud!

Why?

Also, reforms can only succeed if the pie is made bigger, and this is true of reforms in any field.

So what are you doing now?

If you can still understand what I am talking about after reading this, please allow me to insert an advertisement: In the future, QuarkChain, which solves the lack of scalability of the current blockchain, is likely to appear in this top ten list. The foundation of the public chain determines the superstructure. At present, QuarkChain has reached 14,000 TPS (test results in July) using sharding technology. And in order to cope with the fact that changes in the future world will remain unchanged, QuarkChain uses state sharding technology to focus on building the flexibility of the underlying public chain system. Not only is it compatible with multiple consensus and programming languages, but the economic structure of the pass is also flexible and open. In the future, our small goal of 1 million TPS is believed to be just around the corner. At that time, the flexible QuarkChain will become the most solid backing for the ecology on the chain! Seeing that you don't believe it, you might as well test it out and see the real chapter on the Internet! (testnet testnet.QuarkChain.io)

50 years later

1) Based on the development of 5G communication technology

2) Based on the development of semiconductor technology

The van der Waals two-dimensional stacking structure constructed of graphene and two-dimensional sulfide semiconductors will make the size of future devices beyond your imagination. Because they are too thin, these devices with super computing power will easily change your "tough" impression of semiconductor devices and easily integrate with clothes. The ultra-high electron mobility and excellent heat dissipation performance of the new generation of semiconductors will bring new design ideas to chip designers.

3) Moore's Law and Blockchain

"When the price remains constant, the number of components that can be accommodated on an integrated circuit will double approximately every 18-24 months, and the performance will also double. In other words, the computer that can be bought per dollar Performance will more than double every 18-24 months." This is the famous Moore's Law. In fact, while enjoying cheaper computers, the rapid development of industries such as semiconductors, chips, computers, and the Internet has brought us much more than this. The blockchain with mining equipment and nodes is obviously also a member of this fast-growing system. The blockchain technology at this stage will accompany the development of these underlying technologies, laying the foundation for the future value Internet and becoming the foundation of the future Internet.

The popularization of autonomous driving technology and the intelligentization of traffic road network;