When Pumpkin Zhang led Jianan Yunzhi to ring the bell on NASDAQ, the entire currency circle was excited and joyful, as if everything was guarded and the moon was shining brightly. Everyone’s suffering in the currency circle will one day be like Pumpkin sheets will be honored as well.
Shao Jianliang, general manager of Canaan Yunzhis blockchain business department, posted on Weibo that the birth of a listed company represents the maturity of an industry. Canaan Technologys hard work for more than 6 years will finally usher in a bright moment.
Many blockchain practitioners couldn’t hold back their inner joy when they heard this. Not long ago, they just received the support of the national strategy. Today, there is another listed company with the main body of the blockchain. If Bitcoin is halved next year, there will be another magnificent wave In the big bull market, there is an irresistible comfort when you think about it.
However, can the listing of Canaan Creative, the worlds first blockchain stock, really represent the maturity of the blockchain industry?
To judge whether an industry is mature or not, we usually look at whether the upstream, midstream and downstream of the industry have been connected (take the e-commerce industry as an example):
1. Whether the downstream demand of the industry is strong enough, whether the consumer market is sinking, etc., can form a large-scale production demand, stimulate the mass production of the upstream supply side, fundamentally dilute the production cost, and finally transfer profits to downstream consumers;
2. Whether the basic service facilities in the middle reaches of the industry are perfect enough, and the competitive business model tends to be healthy and benign, such as whether the distribution and expansion channels are convenient, whether the logistics and distribution are in place, whether the habit of electronic payment is developed, whether the problem of fake and defective products is solved, etc.;
3. Whether the upstream productivity of the industry is sufficient for cutting-edge innovation, the speed of product updates and iterations, the ability to digest inventory, the ability to return funds, etc.
Judging by this standard, regardless of whether the overall blockchain industry is mature or not, its mining industry has obviously, or more precisely, only approached maturity.
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Mining is a unique term in the blockchain era. It is a need created by the founder of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. The delivery guy is like the beauty anchor created in the video era. In fact, the truly great model innovation lies in whether it can give birth to a huge and self-operating industrial cluster.
The greatness of Bitcoins innovation is that it uses an automatic operation program to develop a one-stop industrial cluster of mining machine production, mining, trading market, and blockchain technology ecology, and its collaboration is also decentralized. It is globalized and eventually evolved into a new industry with a market value of over 200 billion US dollars.
How exactly? To put it simply, Bitcoin is a point-to-point electronic cash payment system, which builds an open, transparent, and non-tamperable public ledger through asymmetric encryption, P2P transmission, hash algorithm, distributed storage and other technologies. So, who will be responsible for bookkeeping, and how to ensure that people continue to participate in bookkeeping?
In order to attract people to take the initiative to participate in bookkeeping, Satoshi Nakamoto designed a bitcoin reward for every user who participates in bookkeeping (block packing). Since there are rewards, there will definitely be many people vying for them, and when there are many people vying for the bookkeeping, who should give the right to bookkeeping?
Satoshi Nakamoto asked everyone who wants to participate in bookkeeping to solve a math problem. The difficulty of this problem will increase with the number of participants, but it will be solved every 10 minutes on average. Whoever solves it first You can get the bookkeeping right (reward).
Solving math problems is the process of computers colliding with a large number of hash operations. Whoever has the greater computing power will solve the problem faster, and the probability of digging out the reward is relatively greater.
This is what we often call mining. The core of the competition is the computing power.
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Early mining was computer CPU mining, but because it only supported 2-8 threads, the speed was slow, and later it gradually evolved into GPU (graphics processor) mining, which can support integer calculation concurrency of hundreds of threads at the same time, It was later developed into a more efficient ASIC mining machine.
ASIC mining machine is an integrated circuit specially designed for a specific purpose. It has the advantages of smaller size, lower power consumption, and higher efficiency. Its mining computing power is tens of thousands of times higher than that of CPU and GPU. It is the current Mainstream mining manufacturers, including Avalon, Antminer, etc., are commonly used mining methods.
It can be said that ASIC mining machines have completely liberated the productivity of mining, allowing Bitcoin mining computing power to achieve exponential growth. This also laid the hardware foundation for the later maturity of the blockchain mining industry.
With the continuous evolution and development of the blockchain mining industry, its upstream, middle and downstream are gradually being opened up.
Mining machine giants such as Canaan Creative, Bitmain, and Ebang International have emerged in the upstream. They continue to strengthen the performance innovation of mining machines to expand market share. In August last year, Canaan released the worlds first 7nm mass-produced chip, making the mining chip move from the mainstream 16nm to the more advanced 7nm process technology. The newly released A11 series mining machine has a stand-alone computing power of 73T. /s, constantly leading the iterative innovation of mining hardware.
In the middle reaches, industrial clusters with rich business types such as mining farms, mining pools, and cloud mining have been formed, providing systematic soft power for Bitcoin mining.
Mining farms, because mining not only has the cost of purchasing mining machine hardware, but also generates huge power consumption during the operation process. Therefore, in order to quickly pay back the cost, it is not cost-effective to rely on small workshops for mining, and relatively cheap electricity prices are required. mines for mining. The representative one is Tiance Guizhou Mine;
Mining pools, as the competition for mining computing power intensifies, ordinary users cannot obtain mining rewards at all with a small amount of computing power, so there is a form of joint mining that combines computing power and increases the probability of individual mining success. Mining pools include Coinin Pool, BTC.com, F2Pool (Fish Pool), AntPool (Ant Pool), etc.
Cloud mining, when individual miners find that the price is becoming more and more unstable, the mining return rate is low, and the risk is uncontrollable, a more convenient shared mining service appears. Just like shared bicycles, users can use other peoples resources remotely. Provided mining machines for mining (mining machine rental service). This will greatly reduce the threshold and cost for ordinary users to participate in mining, and make mining for all people a fact.
As for the demand for downstream mining machines, the demand for bitcoin mining has always been strong. Compared with direct purchases in the secondary market, Bitcoin mining costs are lower and the profits are greater, so the demand for mining is in a cyclical crazy trend. Once the market improves, the order volume of mining machines and the price of mining machines will increase accordingly.
It is well known in the industry that Canaan has overlord clauses such as no refund under any circumstances, no after-sales service, no promise of on-time delivery, and no change to the receiving address once it is confirmed. In this way, it is self-evident how strong the downstream demand for mining machines is.
It is not difficult to see that whether it is the innovation drive of the upstream, the competitive format of the midstream, or even the huge demand of the downstream, it has verified the relative maturity of the blockchain mining industry.
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However, looking at it from another perspective, the fierce competition in the mining industry, the grouping of computing power, and the cutting-edge technology will also cause various unstable factors that may destroy the ecological balance at any time, such as higher mining costs and monopoly control of computing power.
For example, computing power competition will continue to expand mining costs. There are three factors that determine mining costs: 1. The hardware of the mining machine; 2. The cost of electricity; 3. The size of the participating mining computing power. Due to the high price volatility in the virtual currency market, many mining machines are easy to approach the shutdown price. Once the mining income is lower than the mining cost, the miners will face more and more sales, and the more they sell, the more they will fall, and finally even the mining machine They all ended up being sold by the catty;
Another example is that competition has made the computing power gradually collectivized. According to the data of BTC.com, the computing power of four mining pools including Biyin Ant has reached 59.4% of the total computing power in the past month. The situation will become more serious.
It is well known that Bitcoin has the possibility of 51% attack. Although no one is stupid enough to spend a lot of money on meaningless destruction (digging his own grave), in any case, the over-centralization of computing power is something that everyone does not want to see (think Thinking about last year, Wu Jihan mobilized computing power to fight against Ao Bencong, and what kind of impact it brought to the market, what a miserable word);
Looking into the longer-term future, mining for rewards will sooner or later withdraw from the stage of history. In the early stage, miners can be motivated through the release of packaged block rewards. In the later stage, the system must rely on the platforms huge peer-to-peer transaction demand and transaction fees.
What if the application of Bitcoin is not popularized by then, and the transaction fee cannot support the huge mining cost? Although this is more than 100 years later, the logic is actually very clear. Industrial competition will only intensify, and mining costs will only increase. This will directly lead to the price of Bitcoin becoming the key to the normal operation of the mining ecosystem. The essential.
In any case, I do not hope that the development of an industry will ultimately depend on the price of the currency to support it. To break the threat beyond the active boundary of the currency price, the only way is to constantly peel off the shell of the currency speculation and seek the inner core of the blockchain technology. Value, and then truly find a sustainable commercial application scenario.
In fact, in addition to POW (Proof of Work), the current blockchain industry is exploring and trying distributed node consistency verification methods such as POS (Proof of Stake) and DPOS (Delegated Proof of Stake), which are also competitive. The performance of industrial progress under the format.
Of course, you often hear people criticizing that computing power competition will generate a lot of power consumption, saying that Bitcoin power consumption exceeds 6 million kWh per hour, and it is a high-energy-consuming and polluting industry that should be banned. The logic of this kind of criticism is ridiculous or even absurd, because it ignores the fact that any industry with sufficient competition will have the waste fact of survival of the fittest, and there will always be a process of big waves washing sand before the industry matures.
For example, when the sharing economy was booming, didnt competition from a large number of manufacturers also lead to a pile of shared bicycle cemeteries? , does the production of bicycles not consume energy and produce pollution? The attitude of giving up food because of choking is, in the final analysis, just showing ignorance by prejudiced people.
Some people actually speculate on coins and say that it is because the cost of mining is getting higher and higher that the price of Bitcoin will continue to rise. Well, what you said makes sense (it seems that those who mine will pull the market, you must know that the miners are the big ones who sell every day).
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The Internet industry has developed to this day, with mature network communication underlying technologies such as 4G and 5G, a mature hardware business environment such as PC terminals, smart phones, and wearable devices, and mature software operating systems such as Android, ios, and Windows. , using it as a carrier to form rich applications such as website portals, social software, e-commerce platforms, short video communities, and live broadcast platforms, it can be said that it is mature enough.
In contrast, in the blockchain industry, only the mining industry has matured, and other blockchain industry ecology still has a long way to go.
1. Technical infrastructure services, mainly companies that research and develop technologies such as public chains, cross-chains, side chains, and protocols, are mainly committed to higher TPS, greater expansion, and more reliable security of blockchain technology. At present, the fastest chain, EOS, has a TPS of only about 4000. It is conceivable that it will be difficult to truly replace the Internet with a transaction rate of tens of millions.
2. The products and applications that have been implemented are mainly virtual currency exchanges, digital wallets, and other products, and mainly provide secondary market transaction services such as over-the-counter transactions, currency transactions, and asset custody. In fact, the business model of the exchange is considered very mature, and the top exchanges such as Huobi and Binance are also particularly profitable, and the main problems they face are compliance issues;
But the digital wallet is very embarrassing. A private key management has become the biggest threshold for incremental users to enter the market, and users who have finally developed will face the problem of too low activity. Ask another thought-provoking question, if the speculators are eliminated, will there still be users in the currency circle?
3. The ecology and extension scenarios to be implemented, mainly DApp ecology, DeFi application ecology, etc., mainly provide richer implementation scenarios for existing industries, especially exploring killer application scenarios such as financial management and games other than currency speculation , providing greater possibilities for the blockchain rail Internet. This is the market opportunity that is most likely to see incremental growth. The popularity of DApps in gaming applications, and the step-by-step development of financial management habits on DeFi lending platforms, etc., are all wonderful to imagine, and all they need is time.
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The listing of Canaan Zhizhi is definitely good news for the blockchain industry, and it may not be good news. To use a self-deprecating saying by people in the currency circle, does a blockchain company that was born to go public in the form of ICO still need to go to the traditional capital securities market to apply for an IPO? Could it be that the revolutionaries were recruited?
This is not so much a self-mockery as a realization. Over the years, we have been deceived by many concepts, thinking that ICO is a subversive revolution, that decentralization means breaking away from policy supervision, thinking that speculating in coins can lead to wealth freedom, thinking that blockchain technology is omnipotent, and thinking that currency prices will It has been skyrocketing. . It wasn’t until the principal was locked up and the big stick of supervision came that we finally realized that in any industry, doing anything, breaking away from the value orientation, even if we get lucky, it’s just luck. What we should improve is our own Ability and cognition, isnt it?
When the bell for Canaan Yunzhi’s listing rang, some people were looking forward to another wave of market pull for the concept of the first share of the “global blockchain”, but as a result, a mighty domestic currency circle “encircled and suppressed” The curtain is kicking off. Regulatory policy suppression, media bombardment of public opinion, and currency prices plummeted, causing the entire industry to fall into the same panic and anxiety as in 1994 in previous years.
The carnival of a mining machine company, the desolation of an industry.
What we should think more about is why Jianan Zhizhi under the cloak of blockchain can be listed?
Kong Jianping, the co-chairman of Canaan Zhizhi, emphasized Canaan Zhizhis compliance many times in an interview with Babbitt. Although it is a mining machine manufacturer, it focuses on chip design and has a higher degree of compliance; The mining machine only accepts payment in RMB, which removes the potential illegality of virtual currency collection; although it earns cash flow from the blockchain mining machine business, it also does not give up the long-term layout on AI; it may deploy outside the mining machine business, but will not issue coins in the short term, nor will it directly conduct exchanges.
It is true that it has made money in the blockchain mining industry, but it has always maintained a certain distance from the blockchain. This is the thick black knowledge of Canaans successful listing.
However, facts speak louder than words. Canaan Zhizhi has given many companies in the blockchain industry ecology a successful model-compliance. Only compliance is the beginning of the maturity of the blockchain industry. Only by taking advantage of the more mainstream capital market can we enjoy the blessings of the national blockchain strategy and undertake the needs of the middle and lower reaches of the healthier industry. Only one day can stand under the shining spotlight and ring the bell like Canaan Yunzhi.
There is a good saying, Carnival is the loneliness of a group of people, and loneliness is a carnival of one person. Clear away the clouds and mist, and when everything goes away from the false to the true, you will see the beauty.
