The fetters of the blockchain: there will be a final battle between the public chain and the alliance chain

The word fetter in Japanese culture often expresses the relationship and bond between people.

The Naruto anime we are familiar with throughout is the bond between people in the ninja world. Among them, Naruto Uzumaki and Sasuke Uchihas continuous bond is the most thought-provoking, breaking your tear glands.

Regarding the ninja world, Naruto and Sasuke both had heart-wrenching pains of extermination when they were young, but their inner fetters were quite different when they grew up.

Narutos bond is that love can affect everything, and he hopes to use his own strength to make the world of ninjas unified, and the five shadow countries are harmonious and loving, without hatred, disputes and wars.

Sasukes fetter is that the world will never be peaceful, and he would rather bear all the hatred and pain alone, rebuild an ideal country, and let the entire ninja world truly realize love and peace. This is no different from the Infinite Tsukiyomi world that his grandfather Uchiha Madara tried to build (a technique that controls the consciousness of all people and makes them live in dreams).

Because there are always confrontations and disputes in terms of strength and resources between countries in the ninja world of fire, earth, thunder, wind, and water.

Sasuke believes that short-term peace is only temporary, and only by becoming the common enemy of the world can he exchange for peace.

Narutos Ninja Way is to protect his partners no matter what, never abandon or give up.

In the blockchain world, the relationship between public chain and alliance chain is just like the bond between Sasuke and Naruto.

Some people say that the public chain is the ideal country pursued by geeks, but it is difficult to realize the beauty, and the alliance chain is the ultimate destination of value; The soul of blockchain decentralization.

I said that the public chain and the alliance chain are a pair of brothers and sisters, one is an expansion technology, and the other is a landing application. In the short term, the alliance chain has more market, and in the long run, the public chain is the winner.

Like the war crisis facing the ninja world, the explosion of information has seriously diluted the trust between people, and the Internet world urgently needs to reshape the trust relationship between users.

Therefore, Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin in 2008, and in the following years, a great trend of thought about blockchain technology was extended. All of this is just like the originator of the ninja, Sage of the Six Paths, who built the ninja world with Chakra as the core.

Blockchain technology is just the fetter in the value Internet world, and it is a trusted agreement that reshapes the relationship between people.

We define the blockchain as a decentralized, open, transparent, and traceable systematic network. Anyone has the right to read the transaction content in the network, and the transaction information sent to the system can be quickly verified. confirm.

If the network is open to the entire network and there is no user authorization mechanism, it is a public chain. If the network is only accessible to authorized nodes, and the users viewing authority is also limited, it is an alliance chain.

As far as the technical core is concerned, the public chain and the consortium chain are nothing more than distributed data storage, nodes participating in bookkeeping and block generation, and right verification. The biggest difference between the two lies in the difference between the node governance authorization mechanism and the disclosure scope, which also determines the difficulty of their implementation.

The public chain is aimed at users all over the world, so there is an impossible triangular problem of security, efficiency, and decentralization, and it is restricted by the verification rate between nodes, and its transaction processing efficiency is relatively slow.

The entry threshold of the alliance chain is its authorized nodes and users, which is more like a local open shared database, so the efficiency will be improved a lot.

Whether the public chain is more important or the alliance chain is more reliable, it is difficult to have a unified value evaluation standard.

Originally, Bitcoin was just a point-to-point electronic cash payment system, a mature application based on blockchain technology. V God, the founder of Ethereum, innovatively extracted the hard-core architecture of Bitcoins asymmetric encryption technology and distributed node verification, developed a general technical architecture of smart contracts, and officially opened the blockchain A new era of world public chain competition.

This model breakthrough not only brought ETH to a height comparable to BTC, but also brought a large number of public chains into the public eye, including: EOS, TRX, AE, ONT, IOST, BTM, etc. They all have a similar vision, to build a set of underlying technical standards and protocols, and then become the general infrastructure of the new blockchain world in the future.

After all, the public chains are competing to innovate, and the main challenge is the impossible triangle problem in the blockchain trusted protocol technology, making it possible. Not much to say about safety. The digital assets of the blockchain are all on the chain. If the security is not guaranteed, everything is out of the question. The direction of everyones efforts is fundamentally to solve the paradoxical problem of decentralization and efficiency.

From the perspective of the development process of the productivity of the current Internet communication, the operating efficiency of the centralized network world is already extremely fast. It is said that the Double Eleven Aliyun system has achieved a processing capacity of 540,000 transactions per second, while Bitcoin can only process 7 transactions per second. After the Istanbul upgrade, Ethereum is said to be able to achieve 3000+TPS. It has a pie of millions of TPS, but in fact it can only process 4000 transactions per second.

Not talking about decentralization, but simply talking about efficiency, the Internet turns the blockchain into scum in seconds.

However, the processing speed in the Internet environment is a speed match between machines. The main body behind the machines is Alibaba, which is an absolute centralized service.

In the blockchain world, in order to ensure the decentralization of information transmission, N people with different responsibility subjects need to be added to the machine-to-machine speed-dating link to participate in the verification. This verification and confirmation process is still relatively slow , which greatly affects the TPS (system throughput) efficiency of the public chain.

Taking Bitcoin as an example, according to the limitation of the longest chain consensus of Satoshi Nakamoto, theoretically, after a transaction is packaged and uploaded to the chain, it takes 6 blocks of confirmation (about an hour) to finally confirm the rights and achieve the goal of immutability. This is simply unbearable in the Internet world where everyone is used to high-frequency transactions.

In order to speed up the rate of verification and confirmation between nodes and improve the efficiency of TPS, the current mainstream public chains have given different solutions:

1) Some public chains, such as Ethereum, have chosen to optimize technologies such as layer 2, sharding, and beacon chains, and try to increase the speed by stripping out key information and opening a special fast lane for ETC.

2) Some developers use the public chain as a side chain extension layer auxiliary network, and only upload key asset settlement information to improve efficiency, such as Lightning Network;

3) There are also some public chains that have optimized the consensus mechanism, such as EOS, which has changed the past POW consensus mechanism to the DPOS entrusted proof-of-stake mechanism, and only uses 21 super nodes to produce blocks efficiently.

Ahead is the sea of ​​stars, but now it is covered with thorns and mud.

There seem to be some small episodes in the games of the braves of the current public chain, such as: being trapped in the disorderly quagmire of the Token economic model, and finding no transaction volume and no users after the mainnet launch, and the DApp ecosystem that burns money and subsidies in the short term. No hope in sight and so on. Too many technical difficulties and ecological problems need to be faced and overcome.

Generally speaking, there are not so many people who formulate standards and specifications at the protocol layer. There are often one or two common protocols. It is normal to transition from a protocol-based application era to a hundred flowers. Now, on the contrary, there are not a few reliable projects coming out at the application layer, but the politicians and congressmen at the protocol layer are talking and laughing and pointing out the blockchain. (Among them, there are a few who do things seriously, I am afraid only they know it).

In the sad song of this public chain competition, some people began to think, if the pursuit of decentralization does not get positive feedback, why not settle for the second best.

Finally, the decentralized Flag of blockchain technology has emerged.

Some people began to think that absolute decentralization is not that important, and that relatively decentralized methods can be used to greatly improve efficiency and accelerate the implementation of blockchain technology at the application layer.

Especially after 1024, the top-level design of the country set blockchain technology as the core breakthrough. This allows most people to see the possibility of blockchain technology combined with various vertical fields such as finance, law, medical care, energy, public welfare, and government affairs. Garden of Eden, and has great practical application value.

Utilizing the advantages of blockchain technology in product traceability, non-tampering, distributed database and other technical advantages can take the lead in playing a role in application scenarios such as supply chain finance, cross-border payment, electronic deposit certificate, and commodity anti-counterfeiting.

In fact, in recent years, a large number of companies engaged in alliance chain solutions have emerged, such as: Alibaba, Tencent, JD.com, Wanxiang Blockchain, Qulian Technology, etc. There are also foreign countries including R3 Blockchain Financial Alliance, Hyperledger Hyperledger, Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), etc.

On the surface, the alliance chain avoids the difficulty of complete decentralization and improves the efficiency of collaboration by verifying the rights of nodes under the authorization relationship, but it also faces many obstacles.

The public chain is supported by the packaged token rewards of nodes producing blocks, but what should be driven by the alliance chain that has no short-term benefits?

1) Take the lead in leading companies in subdivided industries, open up some data, and attract small and medium-sized enterprises to join in to build an open sharing system. To a certain extent, leading companies earn monopoly money, so why should they give up their profits?

2) It is jointly established by small and medium-sized enterprises in various industries to fight against the monopoly of leading enterprises. Everyone is a small shrimp, who will pay for the organization cost?

3) Unified scheduling by the sovereign state to promote the implementation of the alliance chain in various industries with the endorsement of power and trust. Its not up to us to decide.

It is not difficult to see that it is not easy for the alliance chain to achieve large-scale popularization.

Moreover, there is an unsolvable question at the consensus layer. Losing the soul of decentralization, is the alliance chain still the original blockchain? Whether the distribution of nodes under the authorization mechanism is pseudo-decentralization, whether the opening under the supervision of restricted public access is pseudo-open, etc.

Naruto and Sasuke in the ninja world, because of the different bonds, finally fought a battle in the Valley of the End.

What if we have to decide between the “public chain” and the “alliance chain”?

The public chain has built a new set of rules and order, with a Token incentive model, a smart contract supercomputer execution mechanism, and a new ecology of DApp ecology. Once the contradiction between decentralization and efficiency is resolved. In the future, the blockchain public chain will build a new value Internet world with cross-border, DAO organization, openness, fairness, transparency, and privacy protection.

In the long period of time when the public chain application is launched, the alliance chain is likely to be the first to start a blockchain Cambrian explosion era. At that time, the financial system including banking, insurance, and securities, some industries with upstream, midstream and downstream, group companies, industry associations, etc. will try to organize alliance chains to optimize traditional business processes. Based on the data and information shared by various vertical industry alliance chains, some to c third-party application startups will also rise, and everyone will soon be able to enjoy the convenience of the blockchain alliance chain era.

In the short term, the alliance chain can give the market confidence in the application layer, and also give the public chain in the quagmire a chance to breathe. In the long run, I believe that the public chain can become the cornerstone of the future digital economy era. why?

An information delivery system can be divided into protocol layer, extension layer, application layer, etc.

At that time, American scientists Kahn and Cerf jointly invented the TCP/IP protocol, and then there was the SMTP protocol for mail transmission, and then the HTTP protocol in the World Wide Web era. Until the popularization of PC computers, smart phones, and Internet information transmission technology flew into the homes of ordinary people, who knew how the lowest-level protocol was formulated? The realization of the value of the public chain in the protocol layer of the blockchain world will also go through this process.

In this battle, talk about subversion, and along the way, there are constant tribulations.

Just like the technology promotion, cognitive transformation, and habit formation that the Internet has to go through to become the mainstream, the popularization of blockchain technology is by no means a matter of overnight. Short videos appeared around 2013, but only became popular in 2017. The 4G bandwidth upgrade behind this, the popularization of smart phone hardware, the mature online payment system, and the development of user consumption habits are all boosting factors. The same is true for blockchain technology, which needs to be gradually popularized under the joint action of 5G, graphene technology, public chain, alliance chain, and DApp killer applications in the future.

Lets go back to the ninja world. In the Boruto biography after Naruto Shippuden, the ninja world war inevitably broke out.

Naruto, who embraced love and peace, finally saw the war he least wanted to see. Although the peaceful world of Infinite Moon Reading by the extreme man Sasuke is difficult to achieve, it is more worth exploring and pursuit.

We regard the rapid development of human beings on the Internet in the past few decades as a breakthrough in productivity. In the next few decades, human beings are likely to usher in a return to ancestors of technology and seek evolution in production relations .

Facts have proved that the era of blindly pursuing the limit of productivity may come to an end temporarily. The physical limit of semiconductor 5nm is approaching, Moores Law will also fail, and human technological productivity is about to hit the ceiling.

We should be clear that technology can create a market, but if the technology is immature, the market will be difficult to popularize. In various vertical fields where AI replaces labor, wearable devices replace mobile terminals, and the VR world replaces reality, we have encountered the problem that the technology is still immature and the market is over-exaggerated. Since the rapid growth of productivity will slow down, why not reorganize the old situation and change the production relationship?

In essence, blockchain technology is a production relationship, a fetter that reorganizes the chaotic order of the information Internet and builds an open, honest, and transparent value Internet world.

Perhaps, Satoshi Nakamoto is also a fan of Naruto. He used a Japanese pseudonym to explore this fetter in the dark.