Mankind's largest collaboration, "epidemic" and blockchain thinking

Text: Yuan Shang

Source: Interchain Pulse

[Interlink Pulse] The "war epidemic" is a major event in China and even the world. The war between humans and viruses without gunpowder may have begun since the birth of human beings, but there are many tools in human arsenals, including blockchain. Mutual Chain Pulse explores the ability of blockchain to fight the epidemic from multiple dimensions. This is the fourth episode of the "Blockchain War Epidemic".

One may be the largest collaboration in human history is underway-in the beginning of 2020, almost 1.4 billion people will participate in the campaign against the new coronavirus, including many overseas related institutions, organizations, and the masses.

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One of the functions of the blockchain is to enable large-scale collaboration, and it has been practiced in a series of application scenarios such as Bitcoin. This series of practices has gradually formed some "blockchain thinking".

For a large-scale collaborative movement like the "epidemic", what kind of experience can the blockchain thinking learn and what methods can it output?

Centralization and decentralization

On February 5, the joint prevention and control mechanism of the State Council held a press conference in the press conference hall of the Xizhimen Office of the State Health and Health Commission, introducing the latest progress in the production, scheduling, and import of medical supplies. After the central government took over the public incident, it straightened out a lot.

But the same day, Dali detained Chongqing's medical supplies to detonate the Internet, highlighting the problem of its own politics.

From the perspective of a national system, the State Council's joint prevention and control mechanism is a typical centralized mechanism for handling problems, and Dali's operation is a typical decentralized approach. Dali's approach has undermined the nationwide game of epidemic prevention.

Previously, the Wuhan Red Cross had a huge controversy over the allocation of medical resources, and relevant leaders of the Wuhan government criticized autonomy. These two incidents highlight the problem of centralized decision-making.

Since the birth of the blockchain, there is a "decentralized" thinking. Under this thinking, the pursuit of removing all centers. However, the battle against the epidemic shows that decentralization is not always beneficial to most people, and often results in an uneven distribution of resources; centralization also has problems of slow execution and low efficiency.

In fact, dialectically, centralization and decentralization are contradictory and unified. The center in one system may be the edge in another system.

Therefore, many blockchain thinking pursue absolute decentralization, and the result is either failure or a new center formed.

However, from the "epidemic" of this war, the problems of decentralization and centralization that were exposed centrally can provide some references for the blockchain in practical applications, and amend the blind pursuit of "decentralization" thinking.

First of all, it can be seen from this war epidemic that if there is a clear direction, a credible central agency is needed to make decisions in this regard. In fact, whether it is Bitcoin, Ethereum-such projects that block God among blockchain believers, the central individual or organization sets the strategic direction.

In terms of tactics, the center and edges need to be combined with each other, and the method should be adjusted according to the actual situation. According to the development of the epidemic during the war, Wuhan has established a "square cabin hospital" to adjust the medication. The hard fork of Bitcoin and Ethereum is a tactical adjustment made by the center according to the actual situation.

With regard to the "epidemic" of warfare, the edge can exert its autonomy without violating tactics, and decentralized operation is often more efficient. For example, donation agencies directly give materials to the most needed hospitals, and volunteer teams formed by the private sector pick up doctors and nurses. In blockchain projects, community autonomy and self-organization are all the same.

In summary, the central organization is suitable for more abstract, complex, and groundbreaking work; the edge organization is suitable for concrete, simple, and stylized work.

Finally, we must emphasize that centralization and decentralization are relative and unity of contradictions.

Incentives and governance

Large-scale collaboration will not last long if it only relies on faith and no incentive. Bitcoin's design is clever, providing rewards for proof-of-work makes it run for almost 11 years in a situation with little central management, and shows no sign of dying.

How to unify individual goals and collective goals, and motivation is an effective means. The blockchain was used at the beginning and became part of the "blockchain thinking."

We have also seen incentives and governance in this war.

On February 6, a document was issued by the People's Government of Hubei Province to reward the director of Jinyintan Hospital Zhang Dingyu and Zhang Jixian, the first person to report the epidemic. On the same day, Yunnan notified and criticized Dali's "requisition" of the Chongqing mask incident and dealt with the related responsibilities. people.

In addition, after the outbreak, local governments have introduced many incentives and punishment measures.

In terms of incentives:

The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security awards timely recognition to individuals and collectives who have made outstanding contributions in medical assistance, vaccine research and development, basic prevention, material assistance, and rushing to build facilities, especially the majority of medical workers and medical teams. A one-time bonus will be given to the staff of public institutions who have received commendation, merit, and merit, and the area or unit of the winner can be supplemented with other material rewards upon approval;

Zhengguo Town, Zengcheng District, Guangzhou, provided 20 masks for epidemic prevention and control, 50 masks from Foshan Nanhai, and 5,000 yuan from Dezhou Lingcheng;

Alipay released the “Top 10 Most Urgently Needed Service Development List” to developers from all walks of life, rewarding 500,000 yuan;

Guangzhou Development Zone rewards 200,000 yuan for enterprises that resume production of masks;

…

In terms of punishment:

The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security notified that staff of public institutions who did not obey command, dispatch or passive confrontation during epidemic prevention and control could be given warnings, written down, downgraded or dismissed according to relevant regulations, and severely fired;

Yangtze River Zhichao was removed from the Guangzhou Jiangcun Market for smuggling wild animals;

Shijiazhuang City Commission for Discipline Inspection notified individual party members and cadres that they did not attach importance to the prevention and control of the epidemic situation and did not implement it.

Comrade Wang Zengtian, Level 2 Inspector of the Tianjin Municipal Commission of Health and Health, seriously failed to perform his duties during the prevention and control of the pneumonia epidemic of the new type of coronavirus infection.

Dali City dismissed Yang Lichi, secretary of the Dali Municipal Health and Health Party Working Committee and director of the Municipal Health and Health Bureau, and disciplinary sanctions against party secretary and director of the Dali Industry and Technology Bureau Fang Hu;

…

However, most of these incentives and punishments are thick-lined, and there are a large number of individuals and organizations that have contributed to society and epidemic prevention and epidemic prevention without due rewards. For example, those volunteers, hotels that give up rooms for doctors and nurses, those who raise supplies for the affected areas, and workers who work overtime to produce much-needed supplies.

We need heroes, but we cannot let them suffer. The aforementioned people and enterprises are likely to be disadvantaged in some future competition. For example, volunteers have died.

Blockchain thinking is to unify the interests of all parties involved in the collaboration. Its current mature approach is to clarify the project's benefits and distribution methods, use the blockchain's trusted mechanism to record contributions and then achieve incentives, and this incentive value can be circulated to achieve value maximize.

In this "epidemic" operation, the blockchain cannot participate in it. But it gives inspiration to the application of the blockchain: build a social action chain, divide the roles of social actions, and describe the tasks as finely as possible, and use the technical tools such as the Internet of Things to implement the task record on the chain and use smart contracts It's better to motivate them.

What is blockchain thinking

In the industrial era, industrial thinking is process, standard, and scale; in the Internet era, Internet thinking is extreme, iterative, and traffic.

In fact, these thoughts are not unique to the emergence of industry or the Internet, they are already generated when humans engage in biological activities. It is only when new information and energy processing methods are generated that some of the characteristics of thinking are amplified.

For example, with the advent of the Internet, the cycle from product to user has been greatly reduced, and rapid trial and error iterations have become possible. The marginal cost of traffic is zero, and the cost of product imitation is extremely low. The ultimate product can generate greater network effects to obtain more traffic. A little better than other products is equal to all.

The advent of blockchain has greatly reduced the cost of trust, and people have collaborated with each other. Behind the so-called decentralization and motivational thinking are actually: equality, development, and collaboration.

The scale of industrial products, the efficiency of Internet products, and the cooperation of blockchain products. In this battle, "industrial" and industrial and Internet companies have participated in the battle. The blockchain has just entered the stage of history and may become the main force next time.

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