On the DeFi Protracted War
Editor's Note: This article is from:DeBankView (ID: DeBankView), Author: Jorge S, reproduced by Odaily with authorization.
Editor's Note: This article is from:
DeBankView (ID: DeBankView)
DeBankView (ID: DeBankView)
, Author: Jorge S, reproduced by Odaily with authorization.
text
DeFi is undoubtedly the Internet celebrity concept in the blockchain world in 2019. In terms of the time in the blockchain world, DeFi has been popular for a long time, so is it going to be out of date? We tried to put forward some slightly radical views, because if they are not radical, they are not worth refuting, and if they are not rebutted, there will be no discussion, and there is almost no need to raise views that do not trigger discussion.
Why DeFi Won't Fail
The philosopher Karl Popper once used a syllogism to prove that history is unpredictable:
1. The knowledge that humans possess will affect the development of history; 2. Human beings are constantly acquiring new knowledge, that is to say, there are always some knowledge that we don’t know today, but we will know tomorrow; 3. The knowledge that we can know tomorrow will also affect the development of history. The development of history, so today we cannot predict the future.
Popper's argument is elegantly concise, but still somewhat abstract. Science fiction writer Asimov proposed a more specific concept: the elevator effect. Asimov said, if I wrote a science fiction novel a hundred years ago to predict New York, I could predict skyscrapers, but I could not predict elevators. Since elevators are not foreseen, I would think that the cost of getting out of the building for people living in skyscrapers is very high, so they hardly come out, so a building will have to meet all the needs of a person, and some floors will become schools , some floors will turn into hospitals, and eventually one building will turn into a government... The novel may be wonderful, but none of its predictions hold true, and that's only because it doesn't predict such an insignificant "elevator" s things.
The blockchain is undoubtedly the biggest "elevator" in the past ten years. Its appearance is beyond everyone's expectations, and it is bound to invalidate many people's predictions about the future. Anarchists are the first to react, and they believe that decentralized technology will become the weapon they have longed for. But historical experience has told us that the problem of anarchists has never been the lack of weapons, but their own political naivety and weakness, and the blockchain cannot help them.
Then the speculators found their treasure and rushed into this brave new world. As a result, high-end and beautiful concepts emerged one after another, filled with empty PPTs and white papers, and began round after round of carnivals to harvest everything.
Well-informed, we can't help but ask, will DeFi be just another beautiful empty concept on the PPT? It really isn't. After the initial confusion, we can now finally see a glimpse of what the blockchain can become, which has the potential to help us build a financial (sub)system that is more efficient and less costly. This is the strongest logic among the various rhetoric currently surrounding the blockchain.
Decentralization is not business logic, but efficiency and cost are. It is difficult to establish anything in the world with naive and weak ideals, but a bloodthirsty business machine will suck up all opportunities to improve capital efficiency. DeFi may not become what its name implies in the end, but it will definitely change the appearance of the financial system and become part of the real order.
Why DeFi Can't Win Quickly
Whether DeFi can quickly complete the transformation of the old financial system, we need to analyze this issue from both internal and external perspectives.
The first is the external perspective. The well-known civil science Kevin Kelly told us a simple truth, complex systems can only grow (the logic of evolution), not designed (the logic of the machine). The financial system is undoubtedly the most typical complex system, which has been continuously grown and evolved in the production practice of human beings for thousands of years. This process is accompanied by countless trial and error, regression, repetition and games. Even without considering the paradigm shift that the blockchain may bring, just rebuilding the old financial system will take a long time.
It also ignores that the financial world is still changing and changing rapidly, and the problems to be solved are themselves dynamic.
From an internal perspective, the blockchain is still in its infancy and is far from fixed in its own shape. There are still a huge number of endogenous problems that need to be resolved, both macroscopically and microscopically. Compared with the size of the existing financial system, the scale of the blockchain world is still too small, many problems have not been exposed, and the ecological niche that is really suitable for DeFi is still unclear.
The evolutionary efficiency of a complex system is positively related to its scale, and it will take a long time before DeFi can truly be called an ecology.
In short, the problem is difficult to define clearly, and the solution has not really taken shape. Compared with the problems that need to be solved, the blockchain still has a long way to go. It needs time to gradually improve itself, and it needs time to evolve into a complex system.
But looking back on the past year, we are still full of confidence. Whether it is the steady growth of leading projects or the vigorous emergence of new projects, we feel that time is on our side.
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