Viewpoint | Bringing into play the role of blockchain technology will promote the modernization of social governance

Editor's Note: The original title was "Chen Zhong: Playing the role of blockchain technology will promote the modernization of social governance"

Sina Finance News on December 17th, the 3rd China Internet Finance Forum 2019 was held in Beijing on the theme of "Fintech assists the construction of modern financial system", and Chen Zhong, director of the Research Center for Financial Informatization of Peking University, attended the event and gave a speech.

Chen Zhong, Director of Research Center for Financial Informatization, Peking University

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Chen Zhong believes that the blockchain itself is an information system with its technical connotation. The key is how we map this technical connotation to the recorded facts, programmable, and stimulating in the digital economy. This is a very important social governance. Meaning.

In Chen Zhong's view, blockchain is more focused on restructuring production relations among all new technology developments. Therefore, the role of blockchain infrastructure will definitely promote China's fifth modernization, which is the modernization of social governance .

The following is the actual record of the speech:

Chen Zhong: Ladies and gentlemen

good afternoon everyone! I am very pleased to be invited to participate in the 3rd China Financial Internet Forum, especially the sub-forum of the application and development of blockchain in the financial field. The topic I chose is "Innovation and Development of Alliance Blockchain Technology and Its Application in the Financial Field", which I will share with you from three aspects, including the important directions proposed by the general secretary of the internship, the development of alliance blockchain technology, The potential of blockchain to integrate innovation in the financial field.

On October 24, General Secretary Xi made important instructions on the blockchain during the eighteenth collective study of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee, referring to the important role played by the integrated application of blockchain technology in new technological innovation and industrial transformation. It is necessary to regard blockchain as an important breakthrough in independent innovation of core technologies, and to specifically clarify the main attack direction. It is also mentioned that comrades and leaders of relevant departments should pay attention to the current status and trends of blockchain technology development and improve their ability to use and manage blockchain technology. It makes the blockchain technology play an important role in building a network power, developing a digital economy, and helping economic and social development. Of course, it was mentioned that the rule of law network should be implemented in the blockchain management. At the same time, we must also pay attention to strengthening basic research, giving play to the role of blockchain in promoting data sharing, and exploring the application of "blockchain +" in the field of people's livelihood. We also noticed that the modernization of the national governance system and governance capabilities mentioned in the Fourth Plenary Session of the 19th Central Committee also has a clear plan, which not only involves how to adhere to and improve the socialist system with Chinese characteristics, but also promotes the national governance system and governance capabilities. Modernization as an overall goal. In this regard, how the role of blockchain, especially smart contracts, in social governance also deserves our attention.

Speaking of the blockchain of the alliance, we will also see that the blockchain is a shared distributed ledger that is used in commercial networks to facilitate transaction records and asset tracking, including transactions, data, time stamps, and so on. Blockchain technology is a distributed ledger technology. There are three basic questions in the middle: participation, collaboration, and record of transaction history. There are three basic questions in the middle: who will record, public, alliance, or private; how to ensure the correctness of the account , Anti-tampering and consensus mechanisms; who can access issues such as access management and privacy protection. We have seen that turning a centralized ledger technology into a distributed ledger technology has changed from centralized, backup-requiring, tamper-resistant, and opaque to point-to-point, anti-destructive, tamper-resistant, and fully transparent. This is also a fundamental basis that we can use to do social governance. Without such a foundation, it is impossible to talk about blockchain and blockchain technology.

From the perspective of technology, the development of the Internet from 1994 to today has experienced host interconnection, information interconnection, interconnection of all people, interconnection of things, and then value interconnection. The biggest difference between value interconnection and previous information interconnection is that data and information cannot be copied and shared at the same time, and there is no blockchain service without the Internet as the foundation. Of course, we also see that the proportion of people with no Internet access, including China, is still very large in the world. During the ten years of development from 2009 to 2019, there are three major projects: including the Bitcoin system, the Ethernet system, and the hyperledger system. Ethernet is a technology that strips blockchain technology from the bottom of an application like Bitcoin. Its biggest innovation is to support smart contracts and build a variety of applications. In fact, the super ledger has further expanded the language system written by smart contracts, enabling it to further support enterprise-oriented information applications. Why does Libra attract the attention of regulators in various countries? We must not see that Libra is a functional thing like Facebook to be an Alipay or WeChat payment, propose to build a simple, borderless currency, and a financial infrastructure that serves billions of people, and work together with the financial sector , Including regulatory agencies and experts from various industries to cooperate and collaborate on innovation. After ten years of blockchain development, it has decided to rely on the technology of the alliance chain and the collaboration of the alliance, and believes that this is to ensure that this new system can be established, sustainable, The only path to a secure and trusted support framework, so that we have to reflect on the development of blockchain technology.

From the perspective of social governance and economy, blockchain is a fundamental innovation of bookkeeping technology, that is, we saw that the double-entry bookkeeping method invented in 1490 established today's banking system and modern enterprise system until 2009. This system has not changed in the past year, and the computer has only realized its limited computerization. After the emergence of the Bitcoin system, the method of bookkeeping has changed, and the content of the bookkeeping has also changed. Now we can record the rules on the ledger, and the rules can be automatically executed under a historical condition that cannot be tampered with. The ledger technology and blockchain technology are an important innovation in the sense of accounting.

Today we see that the public chain, that is, the non-permissive chain, is open to the public, and everyone can participate and withdraw freely, which has created today's Bitcoin system, but because it is open source, it has created tens of millions of various Variants of encrypted digital currencies, of course, their appearance and functional differences have also caused regulatory differences. Ethernet can support multiple projects through smart contracts. It is also a public chain technology. The social governance challenges brought by these public chain technologies are self-evident. At the same time, we see that the alliance chain can be managed, and real-name access is controlled to a certain extent, so it is a chain with certain prerequisites of trust. And we have seen that this public chain of Ethernet has also started to use EEA to the alliance chain in recent years. Convergent development, Libra's network-type alliance chain is a manageable, manageable, and jointly participate in supervision chain.

The largest community of the alliance chain is the super ledger. Currently there are more than 250 members, and the number of Chinese members exceeds 50. The application of Fabric in China's financial sector is more than 50%. Peking University is also a university member of the super ledger, and we are paying attention to the development of the entire technology itself. The core technology architecture and industrial layout of the blockchain are still evolving, and there are many specific technical aspects that we are beginning to pay attention to, but how to integrate innovation is still a challenge. The characteristics of blockchain applications are multi-party participation, distributed anti-destruct, traceability of the entire network, and smart contracts. What do we use it for? In fact, it is to achieve programmable incentives, value storage and delivery of the digital economy, multi-party collaboration to improve the quality of government services and reduce costs, and use smart contracts to automate social governance rules, including data assetization and confirmation of rights.

Blockchain itself is an information system with its technical connotation. The key is how we map this technical connotation to the recorded facts, programmable, and stimulating in the digital economy. This is a very important meaning in social governance.

In June 2018, two months after the establishment of the Blockchain Research Center at Zhejiang University, we also established the Blockchain Research Center. Its basic research focus is on the underlying blockchain technology that supports government services and regulatory technology. , How to coordinate and supervise across departments, and how to use regulatory language to support it. Then there is the research on the Libra support of the alliance chain. The technology of an alliance chain can support billions of real-time payment transaction applications.

We see the integration of business and regulatory alliances. The design goals of blockchains need to be efficient, secure, compliant, and flexible, and because they are alliance chains, their optimization can be applied to many existing information technology development results. Our alliance chain, named Boya Zhengchain, can implement the overall architecture of the alliance chain for regulatory technology and financial technology. The difference between the global innovation and the innovation is that the regulatory layer is an important and indispensable layer in the alliance chain. Really integrate regulation and business.

The Reg Language we define is to digitize and intelligentize regulation. In the structure of the blockchain, we see that Libra has been moving forward. For example, the Move language used can support the corresponding features, and the Reg Language is more to support regulatory technology. The biggest difference embodied by Move is based on resource first, and resources cannot be copied and removed. Our Reg Language mainly implements digitalization, automation and intelligence of supervision. Therefore, we see that the potential of the alliance chain to integrate and innovate in the financial field is still huge . For example, we all know that the Ministry of Finance ’s poverty alleviation funds are close to 10 billion yuan, but our books are often cut off at the most basic level of county finance. As for whether this money is given to poor households, they What exactly was done with the money is unclear. and so. We often rely on post-mortem supervision, supervision, filing, investigation, and sentencing to resolve such problems. When we were in Guangxi, we extended the ledgers in three different dimensions: assisting contacts, cadres in the village, and leaders in getting rich. The books were distributed and distributed to supplement the entire fund.

Let's look at the notarization and docking financial business again. In the early stage, everyone also advocated, so that if there is an abnormality, they can be easily connected, upstream docking bank, downstream docking court. At present, local blockchain applications have been developed, and there is still a corresponding distance as a whole.

In addition, there are more blockchain application scenarios, and the future application potential is still very large. Our country has established a filing system for blockchain information services. There are close to 500 filings in the two phases. Especially in the second phase, we saw that Shenzhen Municipal Taxation Bureau and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange also participated in the filing as government agencies. . However, we still need to note that the blockchain service is still in its infancy, and it is particularly important to note that the Central Internet Information Office emphasizes that the filing is only a registration of the main blockchain information service, and does not represent the Internet Information Office for its institutions and products. And the service is recognized, the main body that has been filed will be subject to the supervision and inspection of the Cyberspace Office and related departments. This also further proposes a very important management method for how we can standardize the application of the blockchain.

As early as in the 2016 World Economic Forum report, it was said that blockchain will reshape future financial services. We see six important discoveries and six values. Among them, the conclusion given in the report on the improvement of regulatory efficiency is that regulatory innovation can turn on-demand instants after the fact. The main principle is to use distributed ledgers to share data records between regulators and regulated objects, Breaking the organizational barriers can potentially and easily share a subset of transaction data with supervisors in real time, and enable supervisors to use smart contracts to verify transactions in real time. This inspired us not only in the business field, but also in social, environmental protection, and government affairs. We need to consider how to turn regulatory innovation into real-time on-demand through blockchain.

In the end, I want to say that the blockchain is indeed paying more attention to the reconstruction of production relations among all new technology developments. Therefore, the role of blockchain infrastructure and the transformation of incentives and regulatory mechanisms and media will definitely promote China's fifth modernization That is, the modernization of social governance, we also very much expect that China's blockchain in the next decade will be at the forefront of the world in government services, financial technology and regulatory technology.

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