This article is from: Mars FinanceMars Finance

On December 1, local time in the United States, Chinese-American physicist, tenured professor of Stanford University, academician of the American Academy of Sciences, foreign academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, founder of Danhua Capital, and independent director of Meitu Zhang Shoucheng died unexpectedly at the age of 55.

, Author: Lanlian, forwarded with authorization.

On December 1, local time in the United States, Chinese-American physicist, tenured professor of Stanford University, academician of the American Academy of Sciences, foreign academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, founder of Danhua Capital, and independent director of Meitu Zhang Shoucheng died unexpectedly at the age of 55.

This article is compiled from Mr. Zhang Shoucheng's speech:

Just like the history of human beings, the history of the Internet can also be summed up as "the long-term division must be combined, and the long-term unity must be divided."

When I went to the United States to study in 1983, there was a giant named AT&T, which seemed to never fail. My biggest dream at the time was not to become a professor in a university after graduation, but to work at Bell Labs, because here Has produced 30 Nobel Prize winners.

AT&T spends so much money to raise so many Nobel Prize-winning scientific researchers just to monopolize all network resources.

Slowly, a new protocol emerged, which is the network protocol. It is completely a decentralized protocol, enabling completely random exchanges between peers. I can take this path, or I can take another path, all paths lead to Rome, and I can finally reach the result, no longer needing the monopoly of the center.

Overnight, the company that I thought would never fail disappeared.

AT&T once appeared after the competition, but when a new network technology appears, it is the time when the long-term must be divided.

If everyone can communicate, everyone can create communication content, and this content is widely scattered on the peripheral Internet, then it will become very, very inconvenient for me to find a piece of information.

So in this case, long-term division must be combined, and some new centralized monopoly platforms have emerged, which are called Google and Facebook in the United States.

All the great companies in the history of mankind must not create new things by themselves, but rearrange and combine existing things.

For example, oil companies and chemical companies, what do they do? Crude oil is made up of atoms and can be dug directly out of the ground. The only thing they do is to rearrange these atoms and turn them into other chemicals, such as refined oil.

What do platforms like Google and Facebook do?

It is to rearrange and combine everyone's information. For example, Google, the first thing to do is to make an arrangement, which makes it very easy for us to find information. What these centralized platforms do is centrally reorganize the content we spread on the Internet.

This is an era in which long-term division must be united. Because of the new network protocol, AT&T fell, Cisco appeared, network resources were dispersed, and a huge platform appeared.

The blockchain technology emerging today will also lead to a new era.

The revolutionary intensity of this era may be ten or a hundred times that of the Internet revolution. The Internet era is only the era of information exchange, and the blockchain era has the exchange of value, we can generate a data market, everyone owns their own data, and then generate new value in the process of exchange.

I can describe this great era in one sentence, which is "In Math We Trust".

We all understand that the value of currency lies in consensus. So among all the knowledge of human beings, which one is the easiest to reach a consensus on? Obviously not economics, not law, not political science, not chemistry, not biology, not even physics, the easiest to reach consensus is mathematics.

Using mathematics as a mechanism for trust is the most natural approach. The real blockchain era is to build our mutual trust on the basis of mathematics.

If I make a cube myself, it will definitely not be perfect. But as a mathematical form, the cube is completely symmetrical, every corner is exactly the same, every side is exactly the same, and every face is exactly the same.

The form of mathematics is the most accurate, and in the sense of precision, it is also the easiest to reach consensus.

If you look at the deepest mysteries of the entire universe, then the core formulas and standard models of the entire universe in physics are also described with very, very delicate mathematics, most of which are also created by Mr. Yang Zhenning of.

Since the most fundamental laws of nature are described by mathematics, can we make the rules and trust of human society also be based on mathematical blocks?

The combination of public key and private key is based on number theory, and it is based on a higher-level number theory called elliptic curve.

You may know that one of the biggest conjectures in mathematics: Fermat's last law has been proved recently, and this proof is based on elliptic curves.

This sounds very, very abstract mathematics, but today we use wonderful mathematics every time we shop online.

The other is the hash function. It has a unidirectionality, anything that goes in, comes out as a string of random numbers. This is very similar to a black hole, where any input is made into the black hole, and all random numbers come out.

There is also a zero-knowledge proof (zero-knowledge proof). For example, I have solved a difficult problem, but I don't want to tell you my answer directly, but I want to convince you that I have indeed solved the difficult problem.

This is also a very wonderful mathematical problem, but there is a solution. I can give you one bit of information, I solved the puzzle, but not tell you anything else. This will be very, very useful for the entire data market. I can give information bit by bit instead of giving all the information at once.

For two millionaires, one may be a billionaire and the other may be a millionaire. They don't want to disclose their wealth, but they want to know who is richer.

This can be calculated using the method of Tsinghua University professor Yao Qizhi, who can know who is richer by giving only one bit of information.

If the data is owned by myself, I will never learn the wisdom of big data. But I want to know the statistics, others want to protect their privacy, so there is a very simple way:

Some noise is intentionally added to the personal privacy data, which makes it impossible for you to tell whether the data is your own personal data or not. After collecting these data, in the environment of big data, these noises will cancel each other out, and the statistics I got are still completely accurate. This method is called differential privacy.

The last concept is called formal verification.

The greatest mathematical discovery of the last century was the proof of the incompleteness of mathematics. If I want to recommend a book to the students here, there is one that I think is a wonderful book through the ages. It talks about the commonality between the incompleteness theorem of mathematics, the artist's painting and the composer. The book is Gödel, Escher, Bach (GEB).

These wonderful mathematics can be used on the blockchain and can be used for Formal verification.

Because today we are in the era of open source, and our smart contracts on the blockchain today are completely open source. But after the open source is written, ordinary people can't understand it, and even experts may not understand it.

So is there a mathematical program that can tell you whether the smart contract is in line with what you want to do in the white paper? This is a very wonderful idea, using logic in mathematics.

There are two major trends in computer science, one is AI and the other is blockchain, and there is an inevitable coexistence relationship between the two.

We have smart brains and smart algorithms, but the data is monopolized on the central platform, so it is not easy for AI to learn. You come up with an algorithm and don't know where the data is.

But with the blockchain and the data market, we have returned to the era I just mentioned, and we can personally own all the data.

In this way, I contribute part of my personal data while protecting my personal privacy. In the era of blockchain, I can get a certain return, and everyone will have the motivation to protect their privacy. With privacy, there is value, and once there is value, if I contribute this data for AI to learn, it will inevitably bring about rapid changes in AI.

In addition to changing AI by leaps and bounds, it can also make society leaps and bounds.

What is the contribution of blockchain to society? At least I see it can lead to greater justice in society. The injustice in our society today is mainly due to our discrimination against minorities. In the Nazi empire, it was discrimination against Jews.

And if we come to the data market in the blockchain era, the situation will be completely different. For example, I have an AI algorithm that is already 90% accurate. If I want to make it more accurate, 99% accurate requires machine learning. So what do I need to do?

First of all, the data I want to learn cannot be the same as the data I learned before. If it was 99% data before, they already represent the majority, but to be more accurate, if 99% becomes 99.9%, you need What is learned is the data that is completely different from before. The more different it is from before and from the public, the more valuable the data will be.

So if in a completely private data market, everyone will pay more tokens for the minority data, which will bring social justice and turn the ugly duckling into a white swan. Because the ugly duckling is not ugly, it is just different from others, but in this world, the more different it is from others, the more it will get.

Another great ideal is to have all personal data owned by individuals.

The data that individuals most need to have are genetic data and medical data. The data is owned by the individual, and it must be the supreme standard. After the individual owns the data, he is worried that he will not be able to calculate anything. He just protects privacy all day long and cannot use big data and artificial intelligence to learn what the concerns behind the genetic data are.

For example, what we most want to know is what gene mutations correspond to certain diseases, but once we let individuals own all personal genetic information and medical information, we will generate a very effective data market.

How does the virtual currency on the blockchain develop? This can correspond one-to-one with the currency structure in the current society.

The current currency structure includes M0, M1, M2, M3, etc., and derivatives can be continuously established on the bottom layer.

I think that a blockchain like Bitcoin, because it corresponds to gold, corresponds to the most universal value, that is, the currency of M0, which is equivalent to saying that under this system, any two people in the world Anyone can form a transaction. If you and I have known each other for ten years and are not two strangers to each other, then we can trade with M1.

I think the Lightning Network is in line with this nature. The two of us conduct transactions and have a certain degree of trust between each other, but we still need a trust mechanism to strengthen it. After we sign the contract, we mortgage some currency on the Bitcoin and the blockchain, and every subsequent transaction, we can regularly publicize it once on the blockchain.

The development of the entire virtual currency will inevitably be the same as the development of the current world currency. On M0, or Bitcoin, or a greener Bitcoin, a lightning network can be established, and there will also be a prediction market.

Among our current financial products, one is futures. Futures are predictions of the future, but now futures have to go through the courts to really guarantee us, and after we use the blockchain, Internet users all over the world can testify for us.

All these network systems help each other to make it more efficient, but the current billing system is not very effective, I give you some bandwidth, and I don't get enough in return.

With the blockchain, very fair and relatively accurate records can be achieved, so that the operation of the entire network will become more and more effective.

From 4G to 5G, and then to 6G, there will inevitably be network operations in it.

My favorite is Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, which I personally own the first edition of which was published in 1723. Using the principles of mathematics to understand all natural sciences is Newton's greatness.

In the blockchain, the bottom layer is mathematics, the middle layer is law, and the upper layer is economic behavior.

Social science has never been able to find fundamental mathematical principles, and it may indeed be difficult to find them, because many economic behaviors are based on human irrationality.

In the era of blockchain, the most fundamental economic behavior is the mechanism of trust, which is based on mathematics.