On November 28th, the "2018 POD New BlockTrend New Area Blockchain Summit" hosted by Odaily and 36kr was held in Beijing.
At the meeting, Wei Kai, director of the Institute of Cloud Computing and Big Data of China Academy of Information and Communications Technology and secretary-general of the Trusted Blockchain Promotion Program, gave a keynote speech on "Building a Trusted Blockchain Ecosystem". He talked about the advantages of blockchain and the practical problems that need to be faced, and analyzed how blockchain technology can effectively reduce the cost of trust.
He talked about how to build a trusted blockchain and advocated transparency in four aspects: mathematics, engineering, management and application.
The following is the transcript of Wei Kai's speech:
Thank you for the invitation. The founder’s opening speech just now is indeed full of positive energy, bringing warmth to everyone when autumn is over and winter is very cold. In the first half of the year or since last year, the industry has developed too fast, which violates the law of technological evolution and development. Calm and pragmatic, our values are highly consistent.
The topic of my talk today is "Building a Trusted Blockchain Ecosystem". Why do blockchain practitioners flock to join this industry? It entrusts the ideals of many people. Using blockchain can greatly reduce the cost of building trust in the era of digital economy. It not only relies on centralized organizations, but also entrusts the trust to mathematics and systems. What is the support for this ideal? I speak from four levels.
First of all, the blockchain has changed the way of accounting. It turns out that every company keeps its own accounts according to the double-entry bookkeeping method, which is single-point bookkeeping. Multiple units of the blockchain perform multi-point bookkeeping on a large ledger. Because there is no need to do such things as reconciliation and clearing and settlement on a ledger, bookkeeping is equal to account.
Second, the role of accountants has also undergone great changes. In traditional centralized organizations, accounting is either authorized by law or designated by the leader. Now who is qualified to be an accountant is determined by an algorithm.
Third, from the perspective of data operations, the characteristics of the previous ledger can be added, deleted, modified, and checked, while the blockchain can only be added, and the existing history cannot be overturned casually.
Fourth, in terms of contracts, the information flow and capital flow of the contract were separated in the past, but now the information flow and capital flow can be integrated, which greatly reduces transaction costs. It is precisely because of the above four characteristics that we have full confidence in the blockchain.
Forty years before the development of the Internet, great achievements have been made, and information can be spread to every corner of the world in an instant. However, it is indeed difficult for the Internet to deliver value and trust. Because there is a very big difference between value and information. We have a trust machine like the blockchain, which makes it much easier to build trust and deliver trust and value on the Internet when the digital economy comes.
Now, we can see that there are already many landing cases in trade finance and supply chain, electronic evidence, invoices, product traceability, etc., and more and more cases will emerge in the future, which is worth looking forward to.
However, the development of the blockchain must be down-to-earth and face reality. The first question is that the blockchain is not a panacea. Its use cost is very high. When using it, it must be carefully screened out and the irreplaceable advantages of the blockchain must be brought into play. The second question is whether the blockchain itself is trustworthy. We have entrusted the trust to the machine and the algorithm, but whether the system itself is trustworthy also needs to be kept open. The third question, how to anchor on-chain and off-chain? It is very difficult for us to connect the digital world with the real world. We do transactions in the digital world, and data lives on the chain and dies on the chain. And when we want to link with the real economy, half of it is in the physical world, and half is in the digital world. There is no way for the blockchain itself to do this, and many external mechanisms are needed to ensure it, including traditional centralized authentication mechanisms, government supervision, and so on.
Fourth, how can the blockchain be effectively governed? The public chains are all facing the quagmire of governance, and may gradually drift away from the original ideal of decentralization. The alliance chain also involves the participation of many subjects. How to reach consensus on the rules is actually a big problem in governance.
Fifth, how does the blockchain adapt to the rules of the existing world? At present, there is no consensus on how to supervise the blockchain in various countries, and the regulatory rules are still unclear. This is a very troublesome thing for entrepreneurship. At the same time, contradictions and conflicts between personal information protection and blockchain shared ledger, non-deletable and other features are still fermenting, and so on. The ideal of the blockchain is full, but in the face of reality, it is necessary to solve the problem step by step and move forward.
In order to promote the rational and healthy development of the entire industry, we advocate the principle of "credibility because of transparency". The credibility here includes four levels: mathematical credibility, engineering credibility, management credibility and application credibility. Only by interlocking the trust mechanism can we dispel everyone's doubts.
We are also actively promoting the self-regulatory development of the entire industry. We advocate true and complete disclosure of information, and carry out testing and verification. In the future, we will promote online monitoring and open source code. Through these measures, the entire industry will be guided to improve transparency, and all sectors of society will have more confidence in blockchain technology, allowing more and more doers to devote themselves to this cause.
In order to do this well, we launched the Trusted Blockchain Promotion Plan in April this year. When it was launched, there were 159 units, and now the number of members is close to 300. All leading companies responded positively. Around the concept of trusted blockchain, we focus on promoting three things: one is to formulate technical standards to make blockchain technology more and more solid. The second is to organize everyone to study the pain points and difficulties of industry applications and build a chain of trust. The third thing is to carry out research on blockchain policy and regulation, provide decision-making suggestions for government departments, and act as a bridge between industry and regulation.
From June to September this year, we organized the first batch of trusted blockchain tests in accordance with the concept and standards of trusted blockchains. There were more than 40 applicants, and finally 20 companies' products passed the test. In terms of functionality, we have identified more than 40 mandatory test items, which are considered a qualified blockchain. On top of that, we have more than 50 optional tests.
In addition to functional testing, we also organized the world's first performance testing for commercial blockchain products. The result of the performance test is about 50,000TPS at the highest, and about 3,000TPS in the middle. In order to facilitate users and blockchain technology providers to test themselves, we also open source the benchmarking tool, TrustedBench, and welcome blockchain companies to participate in the development and maintenance of testing tools.
China Academy of Information and Communications Technology is also deeply involved in the formulation of international blockchain standards. I myself serve as the vice chairman of the Distributed Ledger Standards Focus Group under the United Nations agency - International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Our team, together with many domestic companies, actively participates in the formulation of international standards, leading ITU-T recommendations such as architecture and evaluation Book, contributing Chinese wisdom to international standardization.
