Interview with FISCO BCOS Zhao Zhenhua: Meeting the distributed business with open mind

More than 400 organizations joined, 6,000 community members participated, hundreds of applications built, dozens of scenes covered, FISCO BCOS quickly rose in less than three years, becoming China's most influential open source blockchain community. At the same time, FISCO BCOS is constantly injecting new blood.

In April of this year, the co-chairman of the Hyperledger China Working Group, IBM senior technical expert and developer ambassador Zhao Zhenhua, who had worked at IBM for 12 years, officially joined the FISCO BCOS open source community to be responsible for community promotion.

What factors have led him to choose this domestic alliance chain open source project? How will his participation in the FISCO BCOS open source community rejuvenate? What other understanding does he have about open source and open source community building?

Faced with the above problems, Babbitt recently made an exclusive interview with Zhao Zhenhua.

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The core of the blockchain is accelerated value exchange

Babbitt: IBM has been paying attention to the blockchain since 2014. Did you come into contact with the blockchain at that time?

Zhao Zhenhua:

My contact blockchain is 2016. At the time, Hyperledger was officially launched, and the IBM internal website also appeared in the blockchain. At the same time, I also saw someone investing in entrepreneurship, doing the alliance chain, using Hyperledger Fabric 0.6, to solve some problems in the actual business scene, and I have been concerned about the alliance chain technology since then.

Babbitt: In your opinion, what is the core of blockchain technology?

Zhao Zhenhua:

Blockchain technology is still at a very early stage, in rapid evolution. At the core of blockchain technology, everyone's views are changing.

It turns out that decentralization is the core technology of the blockchain, because the center is a big "exploiter." But it soon became clear that the center is not only the center of power, the center of interest distribution, and the biggest profit winner. In fact, it is more important to the center of business traffic. It creates a lot of business. Without it, these businesses will be reduced a lot. Not even. For example, in the core business of the supply chain financial scenario, there is no such core enterprise, and the second-tier and third-tier enterprises do not exist. Therefore, in many scenes, the center is not allowed to go, and it cannot be removed.

Smart contracts are also not at the heart of blockchain technology. In the context of distributed business value exchange, can the enterprise's certificate signature really represent the true will of the company? Not necessarily! Business scenarios and business logic are difficult to implement entirely in code. There are a lot of companies doing smart contract security audits, and the business is quite hot. In addition, there are still people who are studying how to terminate a running contract.

I believe that the core of the blockchain is accelerated value exchange. It is like a train carrying business flow, capital flow, and information flow. It quickly and indiscriminately flies in a distributed commercial network to quickly complete value exchange. The blockchain is still in its early stages, but I believe its potential is endless! Babbitt: When did you join the co-chairman of the China Working Group of the Linux Foundation Hyperledger Project? What is responsible for?

Zhao Zhenhua:

Elected at the election of the working group in August 2018. The China Working Group is the first regional working group of the Linux Foundation. It is the bridge between the entire Greater China user community and the community. The main task is to promote the popularization of super-books in Greater China, develop community users and help everyone better participate. Come to the community.

Community building, FISCO BCOS is serious

Babbitt: When did you come into contact with FISCO BCOS?

Zhao Zhenhua:

I pay more attention to and care about the blockchain, especially the alliance chain. Therefore, the establishment of the Golden Chain Alliance, FISCO BCOS open source and so on will know.

The circle of the alliance chain itself is not very big. Everyone is in Shenzhen. On many occasions, everyone may have already dealt with it, but the formal contact with FISCO BCOS was in October 2018. At that time, I invited FISCO BCOS senior architect Li Huizhong to participate in Meetup. The technical architecture of FISCO BCOS.

At that time, the Golden Chain Alliance held a blockchain application contest, and the contest partner InfoQ asked me to write a FISCO BCOS technical analysis article. I took the documentation of FISCO BCOS very seriously and saw a lot of code. Later, FISCO BCOS opened the public number, and the article was also included. I am still very proud of this! Babbitt: When you first talk about FISCO BCOS as a Hyperledger technical expert, it should be November 2018. You mentioned at the time that the number of projects that FISCO BCOS landed was small, and some technical features were somewhat over-excited. Some places in official documents are more like technical blogs. What are the changes to the above deficiencies?

Zhao Zhenhua:

Thanks to the efforts of the FISCO BCOS development team and the collaborative construction of the community's partners and developers, FISCO BCOS has changed significantly.

First of all, there have been a lot of landing projects. More than 300 applications have been built using FISCO BCOS, and more than 50 have been put into production. There are still many unknowns.

Technically, FISCO BCOS 2.0 was launched in March this year, which not only brought about a major improvement in the "one-two-wing, multi-engine" architecture, but also detailed documentation of more than 100,000 words. Now the underlying platform is very easy to use, and the ease of use is the ultimate. I have a deep understanding of this. In competitions or activities such as various application contests, hackathons, and practical training held by partners, I usually provide technical guidance as a tutor or lecturer. Students with technical backgrounds pass through for a few minutes. The fast chain can get started to write business intelligence contracts. Even students with weak technical foundations can start using FISCO BCOS to develop applications in a two-hour workshop. Based on FISCO BCOS 2.0, a corporate or developer group chain is as easy as "building a chat group." In terms of performance, the single-chain TPS is over 10,000, and parallel expansion of parallel multi-chain is supported, which is sufficient for business needs.

In the document, the FISCO BCOS development team has done a lot of work, and now the entire document has more than 100,000 texts, and all of them are translated into English. The application of each feature, the documentation has a very detailed description, and often the development of the mental journey outside the document, team treading experience, etc., to share on the public number. Therefore, the cost of learning and using should be said to be lower and more convenient. Babbitt: When did you decide to join FISCO BCOS?

Zhao Zhenhua:

After the application of the Golden Chain Alliance. In 2018, the China Chain Block Application Competition of the Golden Chain Alliance left a very deep impression on me. Nearly 300 entries attracted not only the famous companies such as China Life Insurance, Xiamen International Bank, Sichuan Changhong, etc., Peking University, Tsinghua University, etc. Top-level students, as well as start-ups and individual developers in various industries, have also demonstrated extremely high technical standards and application ideas in the competition. The competition has a total prize pool of 2.15 million, which can also be seen in the gold chain. The importance of blockchain and the strength of support for applications.

The winning entries are excellent and are developed using the underlying platform of FISCO BCOS. For example, the special award winner and the technology through the blockchain standardization legal service can shorten the traditional arbitration process of several months to about 7 days, and the arbitrage fee of tens of thousands can be reduced to several hundred yuan. First prize winner Yunzhidao and Sifang Jingchuang, combined with FISCO BCOS to develop JustKey white-box cryptographic algorithm to achieve "mobile phone is U shield", which solves the limitation of traditional CA compatibility, can not protect key security and data concentration on mobile terminal. Storage is vulnerable to attacks and other issues, and the implementation of trusted electronic contract blockchain deposits. The second prize winner Sichuan Changhong based on FISCO BCOS proposed the IoT Trusted Interconnect Solution, which is the first blockchain + IOT solution that impressed me a lot, realizing the rights of smart home appliances of different brands. Efficient interconnection and collaboration under the premise of user privacy protection.

After the game, Fan Ruibin, the leader of the Golden Chain Alliance open source working group, had an in-depth exchange with me, which deepened my understanding of the Golden Chain Alliance and finally decided to officially invest in the FISCO BCOS open source community construction in April 2019. Babbitt: Can you tell us about the basic situation of the FISCO BCOS open source community?

Zhao Zhenhua:

The FISCO BCOS open source community is a very dynamic, very open and efficient open source community. There are more than 6,000 members in the community, active in various technical exchange groups, the entire core developers of FISCO BCOS are inside, and questions can be answered in time.

In addition to the WeChat group, the community has organized a number of offline activities, such as Meetup, which are available in major cities across the country.

(Zhao Zhenhua is a technical tutor in the first financial technology university technology competition of Weizhong Bank, and the middle yellow is Zhao Zhenhua)

In addition to the online community, FISCO BCOS also held a large-scale offline event such as the Hackathon Competition. This year we have held two games in Beijing and Shenzhen. Beijing Stadium has gone to 22 teams, nearly 100 developers. Within 36 hours, the team based on the FISCO BCOS platform developed blockchain applications in various fields such as trade, security, medical care, and express delivery. Shenzhen is mainly facing college students, and has emerged an excellent blockchain with innovative and commercial value based on FISCO BCOS design and development, such as the blockchain trading platform for the emission rights permit, the loan risk control platform, and the academic certificate system. system.

FISCO BCOS has more than 30 code repositories on Github, including the underlying FISCO BCOS platform, a variety of supporting tools and middleware. Babbitt: What plans do you have in the second half of the year?

Zhao Zhenhua:

In the first half of the year, he was mainly engaged in the promotion of FISCO BCOS. He held several Meetups, trainings, and two large-scale hackathon activities. In the second half of the year, he will continue to cooperate with some famous universities to open blockchain courses and cultivate blockchain talents. Many open source community activities are also being launched.

Babbitt: After the completion of these courses, students will receive incentives in addition to credits.

Zhao Zhenhua:

Each school pays different degrees, most of them are elective courses, and you can get credits after you finish.

We are still doing FISCO BCOS certification here. After learning the course and participating in the innovation practice of the blockchain industry, students will get the FISCO BCOS blockchain engineer certification. This certificate can be used for job recommendation of college students. Excellent graduates have the opportunity to obtain internship opportunities for more than 110 alliance companies in the Golden Chain Alliance. The outstanding candidates have the opportunity to be officially hired.

We also have a lot of large-scale events and will encourage these students to participate actively. Babbitt: The blockchain is open source. How do you understand the construction of open source and open source communities?

Zhao Zhenhua:

We have positioned the blockchain as a technology to solve the trust problem. At this level, if your code is not open, just like a black box does not open to others, it is difficult to convince others to use it.

The open source community is a place where elites are concentrated, and there is almost no barrier to participation. It is very convenient to participate in the community. The learning cost and use cost of open source software are also very low. But on the other hand, open source software evolution is very fast, bugs are quickly fixed, and poor code will soon replace code, leaving behind better software.

Successful open source software is completely autonomous by community developers, and development will be slower. It requires a lot of enterprises and developers to build together to better promote. For example, FISCO BCOS's important contributor, Weizhong Bank, open sourced entity identity and trusted data exchange solution WeIdentity, distributed event-driven architecture WeEvent, blockchain intermediate platform WeBASE, etc., contributed to the community Developers can greatly reduce the time-consuming and labor costs of building blockchain applications and performing operational analysis. Babbitt: What are the characteristics of the FISCO BCOS open source community?

Zhao Zhenhua:

FISCO BCOS has an obvious local advantage. Because there are great cultural differences, domestic open source and foreign countries are very different, FISCO BCOS is more in line with the habits and style of the people. Secondly, the language is different, which has led many domestic developers to fully participate in the open source community to communicate smoothly. In addition, the time zone is different, there is a time difference, and it is a lot of inconvenience for everyone to participate in online and offline activities.

Technically, FISCO BCOS has the following characteristics:

First of all, FISCO BCOS is very lightweight, it is very small, only 12M, and does not rely on third-party components. The requirements for the machine are very low, even a normal PC with only 1G of memory can run a full 4 nodes for testing.

Second, because it has no other software dependencies, the configuration is simple.

Third, as a coalition chain, FISCO BCOS has more comprehensive functions. Currently, it supports group (multi-chain), parallel computing, distributed storage and other functions, and provides more tools for development, operation and maintenance, governance and supervision. .

Fourth, the FISCO BCOS community is becoming more and more mature (as mentioned above) and can provide timely technical support.

The industry is changing rapidly and there is still a lack of benchmarking projects.

Babbitt: In the past year, do you think the changes in the blockchain industry are big?

Zhao Zhenhua:

Countries and localities have introduced many policies that encourage alliance chain technology. From the perspective of the entire industry, all parties are accelerating the development of blockchain innovation and industrial promotion. Blockchain performance has met the needs of most scenarios, and a large number of applications have landed, greatly stimulating the benign development of blockchain. What is missing is the benchmark project for reference.

Babbitt: Blockchain is not a panacea. It needs to be integrated with a variety of technologies. Before you have long focused on blockchain, artificial intelligence and cloud computing, in your opinion, these three areas have signs of convergence and development?

Zhao Zhenhua:

Distributed commerce will become more and more important, and the interaction between different economies will become more and more close. In a distributed commercial network, it can not only improve the speed of producing goods in the organization, but also quickly complete the value exchange and earn profits. Social wealth.

The role of information technology is becoming more and more important, including blockchain, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, cloud computing, 5G and emerging information technologies, all of which will be integrated. Information security and data security will be increasingly valued. How to use these technologies while ensuring the security of your organization's data is a problem that every technology needs to solve. At present, blockchain and artificial intelligence have perfect solutions. The blockchain mainly uses technologies such as cryptography and DID, and artificial intelligence utilizes federal learning technology. Babbitt: If the blockchain has been developed for 10 years since the birth of Bitcoin, what do you think is the current problem to be solved at this particular node?

Zhao Zhenhua:

10 years is a very short time for a technology. We should not use the current blockchain technology to compare with the current Internet technology. It should be compared with the current blockchain technology and the Internet when it was born for ten years. You will find that the development of blockchain technology is very fast and progressing. It is also very large, but in the next 10 years, there will definitely be a lot of technological evolution. How will it change? I can’t see it now. Just like the idea of ​​the Internet 10 years after its birth, it must be different from the original idea.

Currently, there are two issues that need to be addressed. First, a consensus on blockchain technology is believed. I believe that blockchain technology is basically achieved at this time. It is suspected that the blockchain is getting less and less. I believe that the blockchain is getting more and more, but I want to remind you. The blockchain is still in its early stages and there is still a lot of room for evolution. The second is to reach a consensus on the application of blockchain. It is to be generally convincing that applications that are sufficiently convincing and have sufficient influence are generally accepted. At present, this is not enough, but many participants in the industry are working hard, and I believe that this aspect will soon change significantly. Babbitt: In the early stage of blockchain development, it is a blessing for the industry to see FISCO BCOS's influential open source blockchain community to promote technology and better serve the society. Stand in your perspective and summarize your vision in one sentence?

Zhao Zhenhua:

We hope that FISCO BCOS will be an important part of the future distributed commercial infrastructure.

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