Comment: Developing an alliance chain does not mean giving up the public chain

Source: He Xiaoyang study notes , author: He Xiaoyang

On November 26, People's Daily published an article by Academician Chen Chun, entitled "Science Popularization" Blockchain "-New Momentum of Technological Innovation and Industrial Transformation (Open Book , Knowing New) . , Popular and vivid language, popularized the knowledge of blockchain to the public, and explained the blockchain from three aspects. The three aspects are that the blockchain is regarded as an important support for the Internet of Value and the Internet of Trust. The blockchain promotes the development of the digital economy and the construction of a social credit system. Specialization.

As a blockchain practitioner, we are very grateful to Academician Chen Chun for his ability to popularize the blockchain to the general public. He is also very grateful for his advice to the high-level and supervisory layers. Concerned, but some opinions in the article, I personally think that there are some questionable points. Of course, these questionable points are more from the perspective of people in the blockchain industry. From the perspective of Academician Chen Chun, he should write scientific articles from his position and give advice to senior and supervisory personnel. I should not be fault-finding. He should be prudent and rigorous, conservative and correct. In order to ensure progress and development, the purpose of writing this article is only as a reminder.

Most of the academician Chen Chun's article is to introduce the use of blockchain to non-professionals. We do not repeat it too much. In the text, there are two paragraphs that we need to think about:

Judging from the current trend, the development focus of western blockchain technology is public chain, and the focus of application and industrial development is mainly on financial innovation based on public chain, while the focus of China's blockchain technology development is on autonomous and controllable alliance chains, applications and industries. The development focus is how the blockchain serves the industrial economy, government services, and social governance. Since this year, the alliance chain has been applied in many fields such as finance, law, medical treatment, energy, and public welfare in China.

In the future, blockchain has a long way to go in terms of technology research, industrial applications, and regulatory services. We must strive for the initiative in the development of blockchain technology, especially to achieve breakthroughs in the core technology of the alliance chain with high performance, security privacy, high availability and high scalability, and vigorously develop domestically controlled blockchain technology platforms that are self-controlled In terms of the development and deployment of the blockchain system, it fully reflects Chinese characteristics, rather than being completely based on foreign open source platforms.

Combining the above, logically, Academician Chen Chun's point of view is that Bitcoin and Ethereum are public chains, everyone can participate, so it is difficult to supervise, and the alliance chain as a emerging technology has access Control, has excellent privacy protection, and high performance, so it should be vigorously developed. This view is undoubtedly correct, and it is also the correct way for us to implement regional blockchains. However, when the technology is implemented, we must also prevent the risk of insufficient basic research and basic technology capabilities.

As practitioners of the IT industry, I feel that we should not forget the lessons of history. In terms of self-controllability, we develop, customize, and provide technical services on foreign open source software platforms to serve domestic user needs. We Has been doing it, but the result of doing so for many years is that in the operating system, database software, middleware software and other core infrastructure layers, in the TCP / IP / HTTP and other protocol layers, has been monopolized by foreign countries; in the formulation of technical standards , Fully controlled by others. China's huge software market has not been transformed into strong technical capabilities. Even our university computer textbooks are in accordance with popular IT standards abroad. The teaching content is basically free from domestic software and hardware companies. From C language, Java Language, Go language, to Dos, Windows, Unix, Linix operating system, to Oracle, MySQL database, to Tomcat, Nginx server. From an industry perspective, domestic IT basic software companies have always done things based on open source software to repair Chinese culture and ease of use. For example, in order to fight against Microsoft's monopoly, we have supported Chinese Linux systems for many years. As a result, a group of IT brokers has been created. Many of our IT application companies are just a group of system integration companies, but they are constantly carrying boxes.

The alliance chain is modified on the basis of open source software in the United States, which essentially gives up the development of technology in its entirety. In the United States, apart from commercial closed source software companies such as Oracle and IBM, open source software has also been called a popular The business model, based on the open source model of Docker, Kubernetes, elastic, mulesoft and other companies, has a market value of billions of dollars. In our opinion, it is a cheap thing. Its essence is to achieve the de facto standard of others. In the field of artificial intelligence, in the field of big data, this is already the case. Technologies such as Tensor Flow and Spark have been proposed by American companies and teams and have been applied in China. In other fields, many times, even many are not easy to use open source software. Just using more people has become the de facto standard, which has also made these American open source software companies. In the field of blockchain, we are not lagging behind. We have the fact that we are leading in the world, whether it is cognition or technology, whether it is applications or communities. At this time, developing the alliance chain is equivalent to giving up completely. The existing advantage is that the development of the alliance chain is the development of the HyperLedger of the IBM Corporation in the United States, because this is the current major open source technology, and the domestic alliance chain is mainly modified based on this. At the same time, the main support for the alliance chain is tantamount to our indulgence in the development of technical standards such as Cosmos and Polkadot in the United States. Although there are many problems with public blockchains, is it the best solution to avoid them? The development of the public chain has significantly promoted the advancement of capabilities in areas such as mathematics, cryptography, computer storage and networking, and multi-party secure computing.

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We should still review the speech of General Secretary Xi, strengthen basic research, improve original innovation ability, stay at the forefront of theory, occupy the commanding heights of innovation, and gain new industrial advantages. Therefore, I personally believe that when developing the alliance chain and landing the industry, the development of the public chain should not be abandoned. After all, the public chain has passed the era of pure digital currency and is moving towards a wider range of computers and mathematics and cryptography. The future of learning.

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