In this year's "14th Five-Year Plan" and the 2035 long-term goal outline, a separate chapter focuses on planning the digital development of my country's future economy, and proposes to promote digital industrialization and industrial digitalization, promote the deep integration of digital economy and real economy, and create a Internationally competitive digital industry clusters. As the main body of economic activities, enterprises will face a major transformation from the era of industrial economy to the era of digital economy with the rapid development of the current digital economy on a global scale.

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Efficiency and Security of Distributed Database

From the perspective of data, blockchain technology is essentially a distributed database. The opposite is the centralized database, which is also the most common type of database in our Internet age. In the traditional Internet era, whether it is corporate data or personal data, its storage carrier is a centralized database, and its biggest advantage lies in the continuous improvement of transmission efficiency. It can be said that in the past 30 years, with the ever-changing market demand, the centralized database has undergone many changes and iterations.

The earliest database was called a two-dimensional flat database, which was pioneered by Yahoo. We can understand it as a "table". Because many web pages appeared in the early days of the Internet, Yahoo used this "table" to classify web pages for users to search. However, as the number of web pages becomes larger and larger, the two-dimensional flat database cannot support the huge demand. Later, mathematicians invented the search database, such as our common Google, Baidu, etc., through the search database, a large number of web pages Stored in the search database to realize the retrieval function.

With the rise of e-commerce and Internet financial services, the application of relational databases is gradually rising, which can accurately store every data without errors. It can be said that the electronicization of the banking system and electronic shopping can now be realized, and the underlying layer is guaranteed by a relational database. Later, with the iteration of Internet applications, we need to store a large number of pictures and videos. Based on this background, file-type databases have gradually been widely used, such as the emergence of typical applications such as Douyin and Youtube.

It can be said that every iteration and breakthrough of the database has brought about the rapid development of Internet applications. However, although the centralized database has solved the problem of data transmission efficiency, the topic of "data security" is still a sword of "Damocles" hanging over people's heads. To the importance of distributed database represented by blockchain.

Unlike traditional centralized databases that store data in a centralized manner, the data of distributed databases will be synchronized and completely stored on multiple servers scattered in physical space. If we infinitely magnify this concept to every computer in the world, then every computer can be understood as a server. This also means that even if the data of one of the computers is attacked and tampered with, the integrity and security of the data will not be affected. This is a fundamental change brought about by the blockchain distributed ledger for data storage.

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Data Privacy Protection and Right Confirmation

Based on the above, we can see that the distributed storage of the blockchain still needs to solve a major problem: data privacy protection. We often say that everyone's data is "streaking" in the Internet age. How can blockchain technology protect the data privacy of individuals and enterprises? This refers to the asymmetric encryption technology of the blockchain.

The most commonly used encryption method in the Internet age is symmetric encryption, which uses the same key for "encryption" and "decryption". The biggest problem with this encryption method is that once the secret key is leaked, the data will be completely exposed. In asymmetric encryption, one key is used for encryption and another key is used for decryption, and the public key cannot be deduced from the private key. This also ensures that the distributed database maximizes the protection of data privacy during data transmission, and for enterprises and individuals, only authorized privacy can be disclosed or used.

Taking personal data as an example, we usually use the data generated by Weibo and the shopping data of Taobao and JD. For companies such as Sina and Taobao, the data is public and the ownership belongs to the company. Under this premise, if Taobao, as the central organization, takes the initiative to "do evil" or its database is hacked, it means that our data and data privacy will be leaked. Distributed databases and asymmetric encryption effectively avoid such problems.

Since, based on blockchain technology, data privacy is protected and authorization is required for use, does it mean that a large amount of "ownerless" data in the traditional Internet era now has the concept of ownership? In other words, data has also become an asset of the enterprise "clearly priced"?

Let’s take enterprise data as an example. At present, many traditional Internet giants are able to form effective competitive moats in various fields. In the final analysis, it comes from the mastery of a large amount of user data. It can be said that in a certain sense, clarifying the ownership of data through the blockchain can make the competition between enterprises more fair in the digital economy era to a certain extent. For data elements, in addition to confirming their ownership rights, blockchain technology, for example, currently allows many foreign institutions to use the ERC 721 protocol of the Ethereum network, which not only opens up the imagination space in the field of data ownership, but also makes data a corporate asset. possible.

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non-technical issues

Returning to the technology itself, blockchain technology provides the best solution for data protection, confirmation, management and transactions. However, there are still many problems to be solved and considered urgently.

First is the question of attribution. Returning to the topic of the data elements themselves, how to resolve the contradiction between data ownership and allowing data to participate in market allocation? We divide data into two categories: public data and personal and institutional data, so whether the data ownership of the latter should belong to producers or operators is still a controversial issue.

Some experts pointed out that the object of data rights should be divided according to the inherent level of data. Information is presented as a data file on the symbol layer, while the information content in the data file is data information on the content layer, and the two should be distinguished as different objects. Others believe that data and information are "the relationship between tools and ontology". Data refers to the bit stream in physical technology, which is a tool for transmitting information and depends on code.

In addition to the identification of attribution, there is also the issue of time lag between new technology iterations and regulatory development. At present, we do not have a specific legal basis for data ownership and data assets. Regarding the confirmation of data rights, we can generally rely on the "Property Law", "Contract Law", "Intellectual Property Law", "Competition Law", "Personal Information Protection Law", etc., but there are applicability issues here.

For example, if the "Property Law" is to be applied, the judgment of data attributes must first be involved, that is, the issue of data sharing or private ownership, while data public ownership will ignore the protection of private interests, and data private ownership will violate the principle of property rights. In fact, data right confirmation does not emphasize a unique exclusive right in essence, but emphasizes the right to access and utilize data. Other situations are roughly similar.

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epilogue

In general, the development characteristics of the digital economy era undoubtedly determine that data elements will become the basic resources of the future society. The rapid growth of data elements and the characteristics of the total amount tend to be infinite, which itself contains huge value. At the same time, its great liquidity and extremely low marginal cost allow data elements to further generate more data, greatly improve the production efficiency of other elements, quickly release dividends, and cultivate new growth points for the digital economy.

For business operations, the future will definitely face huge changes, and the importance of data elements cannot be ignored. Wanglian Technology believes that the only constant is change itself. Only enterprises with the courage to try, explore and innovate can seize the opportunities of the times in the digital economy era and form their own effective competitive moat. Although this road seems to be not so simple now.