Release source: Bikan K Station; Author: Liu Yang Leon
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one. Evolution of the digital society
What are the most basic elements of human society? is an exchange.
Current biological research shows that, about 70,000 years ago, besides Homo sapiens, there were many ancient species including Homo erectus on the earth. Homo sapiens is the weakest species of mammals, neither in terms of strength nor speed, so humans can only survive in harsh natural environments by relying on social cooperation.
The basic resources for human survival are obtained through social exchange. For example, if a man is good at hunting and a woman is good at weaving, they need to exchange necessities to better adapt to the environment. That's it: exchange.
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1. Exchange of information
Information exchange is the basis of material exchange. Because the exchange must be negotiated, the exchange cannot be performed if the exchange partner cannot be seen or contacted.
The size of a society depends on the efficiency of communication between people. In the past human society, the boundaries of evolution depended on the constraints of transportation and communication tools. So human society gradually experienced tribes, villages, city-states and even countries from the earliest family.
The Internet, which was born in the 1970s, has expanded the boundaries of people's information exchange, and the information exchange in human society has achieved unprecedented efficiency. Through Internet tools, people can exchange information at the speed of light.
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2. Exchange of materials
The second basic exchange in human society is the exchange of materials. With the increasing abundance of materials and the increasing social boundaries, the n*(n-1) exchange relationship of barter exchange has become difficult to satisfy the social production relationship. So people naturally thought of using a commodity recognized by everyone as an intermediate exchange, which is the origin of currency. In the early days, common commodities such as shells, sheep, cattle, ores, etc. were experienced, but the output of these products was not stable, and it was not conducive to division.
Soon, humans chose a metal that is easy to mine, stable in output, stable in nature and easy to divide - gold. When gold is used as currency, exchanges are frequent and efficient. However, due to the limited nature of gold, it will inevitably lead to an increase in the price of gold, requiring smaller divisions. When it is difficult to divide gold into one thousandth or one ten thousandth, it can be divided into smaller parts by mixing other metals, so metal currency appears, and copper coins are a typical representative.
With the evolution of society, metal currency has become more and more inconvenient. Think about the spectacular scene where a big business needs to be transported by ox carts and horse-drawn carts, so people cleverly designed the paper money. tokens. This kind of token is still gold in essence, but it is similar to an IOU. Although it is a small evolution, it provides great convenience for transactions. Even later, modern currencies such as British pounds and U.S. dollars were produced.
Until the 1970s, with the rapid development of the global economy, the existing gold standard currency system could no longer meet the needs of social exchange at that time, so the US dollar officially abolished the gold standard. The U.S. dollar at this time was really just a piece of paper, but the contemporary economy is based on this paper money system.
Entering the Internet era, banknotes can no longer satisfy the exchange of materials on the Internet, so there is electronic banknotes. Please note that this electronic process can be compared to the silver corresponding to the bank notes at that time, and the change in form is well adapted to the efficiency of capital transfer in the Internet.
With the continuous expansion of the Internet society, Internet economic exchanges have become increasingly frequent. In the Internet, there are no national boundaries, but the electronic legal currency has national boundaries. The existing electronic legal currency system has gradually exposed its limitations, so in the Internet society, there will inevitably be a step similar to the separation of paper money from gold in the past-electronic currency is completely separated from paper money, which is digital currency.
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2. Evolution of digital currency
On November 1, 2008, a person named Satoshi Nakamoto released a paper "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" (Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System). It is recorded as the first year of digital currency.
Inspired by Bitcoin, various altcoins have also sprung up. Including: Litecoin (LTC), Ethereum (ETH), Dash (DASH), etc.
On July 20, 2017, a vulnerability attack occurred on the application The DAO on ETH. Due to the disagreement of ideas, some voices in the community disagreed with the rollback. As a result, for the first time in history, Ethereum Classic (ETC) was born through a hard fork, and then on August 1, a large block of Bitcoin Cash (BCH) was also born, and later a series of IFO coins were produced; due to ETH provides Turing's complete smart contract mechanism. In November 2015, the ERC20 protocol was born, which directly triggered the explosion of ICO in 2017, and thousands of tokens (Token) based on the ERC20 protocol were born.
The above three different types of coins or tokens reflect the three dimensions of digital currency evolution. Perhaps it is a coincidence that these three dimensions correspond to the logic of biological evolution: the earliest single-celled organisms should be only one kind, and then thousands of similar single-celled organisms must have appeared, each with its own different (this is the evolution of the first latitude).
In the process of cell division, there will also be mutations, some mutations will be eliminated, and some mutations will be selected. This kind of evolution similar to bifurcation is similar to the evolution of the second latitude; in the end, two single-celled organisms are naturally selected to become The basis of the present rich and colorful biological world is eukaryotes and prokaryotes. The subsequent evolution is carried out on the multicellular organisms composed of eukaryotes, which just corresponds to the evolution of the third dimension.
The digital currency market also follows the law of evolution, survival of the fittest. From this perspective, on the evolutionary path of digital currency, various differences and changes are inevitable. Who can become the future and who can become history, only the market has the final say. Just like biological evolution, I don't think a certain currency will evolve to be extremely complex, but multiple simple coins, or a combination of multiple layers of simple technologies to form a complex digital currency. Similar to eukaryotes, multicellular organisms have evolved because of the nucleus.
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three. Development of the digital economy
With the continuous development of the human digital society (Internet), people can move almost all exchange activities in the real society to the digital society. At present, the exchange of information can be achieved to the extreme (speed of light), and through digital currency, the exchange of currency and assets can also be achieved to the extreme (speed of light).
However, there is still one exchange left, which is still subject to the constraints of the real society, that is, the essence of exchange is to exchange commodities, and the exchange of commodities is also limited by the speed limit of cars, trains, planes, and ships. In the evolution of logistics, digital products have actually reached the extreme (speed of light). For example, we exchange a song, a movie, or a software product...
So, can we achieve the ultimate transaction speed through the digitization of physical products? The answer is yes. At present, the technology with the highest probability of realizing it is 3D printing technology. If 3D printing technology reaches the molecular level control, it can theoretically print out all current commodities. At that time, the total logistics of digital economic activities will become the transmission of production data, and the products will be printed on the spot through 3D printing technology, which will realize the ultimate production and logistics (speed of light).
In addition to the digitalization of physical goods and logistics, in the current economic model, there is another link that has not evolved to the extreme, and that is the creative production process. Because this process requires the condensation of human wisdom and labor. At present, digital music also requires a lot of energy and time from the creators, and it has not yet reached the extreme. Perhaps artificial intelligence (AI) can give us an answer in this direction. When AI evolves to a certain level, in theory, artificial intelligence can be used to complete product design and development that can only be done by humans, and finally realize the ultimate creative landing (speed of light) .
To sum up, we can boldly imagine a future digital economic and social model. The founder of the company has an idea and idea, and shows his idea and idea to the capital owner through Internet communication, and then raises digital funds by publishing the smart contract of the project, and the smart contract automatically fulfills the contract and pays the digital asset to AI through the Internet of Things Platform, which completes the R&D process through the consumption of resources to generate production data.
Consumers pay digital currency to purchase goods through the business smart contract of the Internet, and the smart contract automatically executes the contract and sends the production data to the 3D printer of the consumer who placed the order, and the 3D printer automatically prints out the product. At the same time, the smart contract automatically distributes the consumer's payment to the founders, shareholders (according to the proportional address of the digital token owned) and taxation agencies according to the contract.
So far, the ultimate blueprint for the evolution of a digital economy and society is presented, and all behaviors of human social exchange have reached the extreme (speed of light). Maybe we don't know when this day will come, but fortunately we are already standing at the gate of the times.
