Crossover, from Internet protocol to public chain
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Is the internet centralized or decentralized?
The rise of a technology is often accompanied by huge fantasies and fanatical bubbles. In the pre-Internet era of the Internet, from the 1980s to the early 2000s, Internet services were built on open protocols controlled by the Internet community. This means that people or businesses can strengthen their presence on the Internet, knowing that the rules of the game will not change later. The Internet at this time is "decentralized" in the practical sense, but Internet giants have also begun to appear in this era, including Google, Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube. In this process, the importance of centralized content platforms such as Yahoo and AOL has been greatly reduced.
In the second era of the Internet, from the mid-2000s to the present, for-profit tech companies (mainly Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Amazon, commonly known as FLAG) built software and services whose capabilities rapidly outpaced open protocols. The explosive growth of smartphones has accelerated this trend, and mobile applications have become the main factor for people to use the Internet. Eventually, users migrated from open services to these more advanced centralized services. Even when users still access open protocols like the Web, it's usually with FLAG software and services acting as an intermediary. Billions of people around the world enjoy cutting-edge technology, most of it for free. But it has become much more difficult for startups, content creators and other groups to build up their presence on the internet without worrying about centralized platforms changing the rules they face, robbing them of audiences and profits. This in turn stifled innovation, making the Internet less attractive and dynamic than it once was. Centralization also creates broader social tensions, as we see in debates over topics such as fake news, botnets, user “unplatforming,” EU privacy laws, and algorithmic bias. These debates have intensified in recent years.
The development of the Internet is the historical reference of blockchain technology. Blockchain is similar to the Internet in many ways. The current stage is very similar to the historical stage of the Internet in the early 2000s.
In 2000, many people advocated that the Internet was decentralized. So far, there is no need to explain. Is the Internet centralized or decentralized?
There is no doubt that in the early days of the Internet, when the platform had not yet been formed, there was a trend of decentralization. However, as the monopoly enterprises of platform companies in several fields became large enough, the Internet returned to centralized . Several platform companies have formed a new center, and the Internet has gradually deviated from true decentralization.
Facing the centralized Internet giants, people's first reaction is to implement supervision, which is similar to the past communication networks such as telegraph, radio, Internet TV, and telephone, as long as the hardware-based transmission source is set to pass or not and monitor. Logic can efficiently determine which content and functions are available to users. However, in the software-based Internet world, this kind of supervision has encountered difficulties, because code programming has brought endless possibilities. In the past, the hardware-based supervision model believed that the hardware architecture was difficult to redesign and build, but the Internet Software is a facility, and its architecture can be continuously redesigned under the promotion of giants or communities.
The decentralization of the Internet comes from the fact that it is based on a simple core layer, on which hundreds of millions of edge devices are connected. Each edge device has the right to participate in function (program) release and content release. Software is just human thinking presented through code, so it has almost unlimited design space. Computers connected to the Internet are basically free to run any software the owner chooses. With the right incentives, any product or service conceived can spread rapidly across the Internet. Internet architecture is where technical creativity and incentivized design meet.
In the late 2000s, this decentralization was gradually dominated by monopolies, and users were gradually forced to participate in the "free" secondary cyberspace created by the tech giants, where the rules were dictated by the giants' algorithms. However, this semi-monopoly state is destined not to last long, and the germination of new technologies is always on the edge of the giant's vision, even outside its business.
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Why does EOS set off huge waves
In the blockchain industry ecology, an efficient blockchain public application platform that can meet business needs is essential and occupies an extremely important position. The rise of Ethereum and its explosive growth in 2017 provide us with an excellent reference example. As blockchain 2.0, Ethereum has added smart contracts, and still uses the POW algorithm (the recently released Plasma will be converted to POS). EOS, which claims to replace the Ethereum ecosystem, adopts DpoS. EOS has attracted nearly 50 DAPPs before the mainnet goes live.
The smart contract design is a distributed Turing complete machine that can be used to calculate everything, a decentralized application platform, and an oracle machine that resolves financial/financial disputes. In order to fully realize the importance of scalability in the early ETH architecture, the resources of the entire network are shared and difficult to isolate. From past experience, ETH has experienced several large-scale congestions when tokens were released. The popularity of cryptokitties can block the transfer of the entire ETH network. With the wider application of blockchain technology, linear processing pressure is facing Risk of exceeding its designed capacity.
Blockchain is a system that can guarantee the trustworthiness of the output. The capacity of a decentralized system is inherently inferior to that of a centralized system. Therefore, for applications that require high capacity, you can choose a blockchain system with a higher degree of centralization and a lower degree of decentralization according to your needs. Basically, all so-called large-capacity and high-parallel Low-latency blockchain systems actually have a certain degree of centralization, and the higher the degree of centralization, the faster. Like the Internet, the blockchain does not provide complete decentralization, but you can use it to achieve any degree of decentralization at any level. Therefore, if you have a high demand for capacity, you need to be less decentralized. At least in terms of reliability, it may be stronger than a fully centralized system.
However, it has to be admitted that the entire blockchain industry is still in the initial stage of improving its infrastructure, and the biggest obstacle hindering the large-scale application of blockchain at this stage exists in technology. Ethereum's mechanism and operating efficiency are difficult to support a huge decentralized business application ecosystem.
Under such circumstances, we judge that although Ethereum has successfully popularized the technology of smart contracts on the chain and established a huge ecosystem including various blockchain applications and ERC-20 tokens, it is far from being able to develop An application platform that meets real business needs. The obstacle that limits its commercial development lies in its technical mechanism.
Why EOS has the potential to become a more complete blockchain public application platform? Because EOS can solve some obvious problems of Ethereum. EOS's DPOS consensus algorithm and graphene underlying tool set can meet the enterprise-level application requirements of tens of thousands or even millions of transaction requests per second. EOS software also provides a complete account system, which can help developers quickly develop their own DAPPs. However, if you want to develop DAPPs on Ethereum, you need to spend more time developing the underlying modules.
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Leap - from Internet protocol to public chain
This year (2018) has become the first year of public chain competition. So far, for the entire digital currency field, it basically follows the development logic of "underlying public chain → solution → project application". The underlying public chain is equivalent to the infrastructure of the blockchain world, and the solution is used to expand the performance of the underlying public chain or provide service support for commercial applications. Only on the basis of the solid, stable and efficient operation of the underlying public chain, can the commercial application of the blockchain develop and land. The importance and necessity of the public chain in the entire blockchain field can be seen from this.
Today, the underlying public chain is still in a very weak position, and it is still unable to achieve real security, reliability and efficiency. This also obviously restricts the development of the entire blockchain industry. Various deficiencies exposed by these blockchains include overall energy inefficiency, poor or limited functionality, and lack of mature governance mechanisms. In order to expand the transaction throughput of Bitcoin, many solutions such as Segregated Witness and Block Size expansion have been developed. In order to improve the performance of Ethereum, there are also cross-chain projects such as Raiden Network and Polkadot, but these vertical expansion Solutions are limited by the capacity of a single physical machine, or their auditability feature will have to be compromised.
2018 is a year of public chain competition, and it is also a historic opportunity for investors to deploy public chains. If the competition pattern is clear, the winner should control the ecology like the current Internet giants. But now, it is not clear who will win. Compared with the traditional Internet industry, the total market value of blockchain assets is still at a low level. At present, there are many blockchain public chain projects under research and development, and the design philosophy and application scenarios of each public chain also have their own advantages and disadvantages. In addition to projects such as Ethereum and EOS that occupy a certain first-mover advantage, some public chains also have certain technical characteristics, such as Cardano and Zilliqa hope to increase the throughput of the main network through layered architecture technology; Aelf and Dfinity through Cloud computing to improve the processing efficiency of blocks; EKT and Polkadot focus on cross-chain, and achieve great connectivity by establishing information highways between chains; QTUM, NEO, etc. hope to subvert the underlying prediction technology and consensus mechanism to build A whole new ecosystem. Because of the huge room for foreseeable growth, most of these public chains also have a lot of fans and community supporters. As far as the current development of the blockchain industry is concerned, various public chains will compete, but they also have their own characteristics and space, and it may not be a situation where a few dominance appear like the Internet. In the future, public chain projects with good scalability and ease of use, which can attract more users and developers to build a better ecology will also be just needed in the blockchain world.
Although most public chain projects will propose standard indicators such as high TPS, high availability, high scalability, and cross-chain, in the world of the underlying framework of the blockchain, it is still necessary to solve the triangular problem of performance, decentralization, and security. A huge hurdle to jump over. The first-generation blockchain only has a block ledger (Bitcoin), and the second-generation blockchain adds an oracle (Ethereum) on the basis of the block ledger, but the second-generation blockchain is widely used Today, its exposed performance bottlenecks and expansion problems are gradually causing dissatisfaction in the community. Obviously, under this big wave of blockchain, the public chain, as the infrastructure of the blockchain world, will always be valued by core developers. In the future, the multi-chain and cross-chain ecology of the third-generation blockchain will gradually become popular, and the new-generation public chains similar to EOS are all gearing up on the track and eager to try.
epilogue
epilogue
The Internet is currently in a stage of over-centralization. In 1989, Berners-Lee proposed to establish a global hypertext project - the World Wide Web (WWW), so that everyone can smoothly obtain and share information from the Internet. He certainly did not expect that his conception would affect the development of human civilization in the future. He certainly did not expect that after nearly three decades, he would feel deeply worried about the excessive centralization of the Internet. The Internet has been monopolized by giants, and there are only a few websites or apps that everyone uses frequently. The Chinese are the BAT series, and the Americans are Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple... This is almost a global trend. The public blockchain serves as a trusted public computing facility. This new underlying technical architecture gives us new possibilities. Allow users to easily control their identity and behavior data. All personal privacy data can be owned by the user himself, and a third party is authorized to use it when necessary. Based on the blockchain, we are expected to be free from "data exploitation" by oligarchs. Standing at the macro level of the blockchain industry to understand the value foundation and realization expectations of public chain projects for the entire industry. In this way, even if there are errors in our investment choices, the deviations will definitely not be large. As long as the pattern is large enough, we will not miss this historic investment opportunity.
