Xiao Lei: Blockchain is "nuclear energy", bitcoin is "atomic bomb", who is the opponent?

Author: Xiao Lei

Source: Xiao Lei sees the city

The origin of the word "blockchain" is the "chain of blocks" in the original English version of the Bitcoin white paper. When the Chinese market translates this sentence, the word "blockchain" is used directly, and then the word is written directly. The "blockchain" has become the proper term for the entire blockchain technology level in the world today.

So, no matter who is going to explain the blockchain, you can't get around Bitcoin. It's like you have to introduce the history of the car, you can't get around Karbenz. If you want to introduce the history of the plane, you can't get away with the Wright brothers. .

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Bitcoin "invented" and confirmed the feasibility of the blockchain technology. Bitcoin is not the whole of blockchain technology, just one of the applications. But assuming there is no bitcoin, or the bitcoin application is unsuccessful, the blockchain may not appear, or at least postpone it for many years. Therefore, the blockchain has been difficult to "separate" from Bitcoin for a long time.

This is not the status of I want to raise Bitcoin, but the whole market wants to make the blockchain a classic, concentrated type, and everyone will understand it at once. The best way is that "Bitcoin is adopted." Blockchain technology." If someone doesn't know Bitcoin, continue to ask what Bitcoin is. Just answer him. Bitcoin is now worth RMB 70,000.

If you use other theories or case studies, it takes at least five minutes, and you have to throw a lot of very professional vocabulary, such as distributed data storage, peer-to-peer transmission, consensus mechanism, encryption algorithm, etc., but these words may need Further explanation.

Maybe in a few years, everyone has a bank digital currency wallet in their mobile phones. At that time, when you introduced the blockchain, you would no longer use bitcoin. You will say that your digital wallet is using a block. Chain technology.

As for the blockchain technology used in local businesses such as Tencent and Ali, it is difficult to form a common understanding of the society. You tell others that Ali's public welfare adopts blockchain technology, and everyone may be even less aware of blockchain technology. What the hell is, because you not only have to explain what is the blockchain, but also explain how Ali is doing.

Before the central bank’s digital currency was released, or before the new world-class digital currency led by Facebook, Libra, we might still need to understand the historical role of the blockchain from the bitcoin with strong financial currency attributes. Aside from the application of the financial and monetary level, the application at the entity level has no “original intentions” and boundaries.

This is like the invention of the atomic bomb. The original driving force for the development of this technology is military demand. As for the ultimate role of nuclear energy in this field, this will not affect the significance of the atomic bomb.

If we compare the blockchain to nuclear power, bitcoin is an atomic bomb. The physical application is similar to nuclear power plants, nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, submarines, nuclear-powered icebreakers, and even nuclear-powered trucks.

Then the question is, is the "atomic bomb" of Bitcoin used to "deter" what?

This is going back to more than a hundred years ago.

There is a man in the history of the United States named JP Morgan. This man "save" the United States twice in 1895 and 1907, because at that time there was a major financial crisis in the United States, the economy was facing a collapse, and JP Morgan recruited it by one person. Capital and power to turn the tide, ultimately stabilized domestic finance and economy.

In its heyday, JP Morgan had 25% of corporate capital, 33% of financial capital, and 65% of insurance, controlling 65% of all US steel production and 30% of railways. JP Morgan was called "banker's banker" by financial bankers on Wall Street.

Of course, JP Morgan is a very patriotic person. When JP Morgan is the most brilliant, when the total economic output of the United States exceeds that of the United Kingdom, JP Morgan is considered to be the representative of the United States, and the United Kingdom is still the world’s most Influential political empire, JP Morgan in the process of expansion, especially in the economic lifeline, such as finance and shipping, and the United Kingdom launched a lot of games, the game of the year, similar to the current Chinese companies to buy the United States The company, the United States directly ordered a ban, when Morgan-controlled companies went to acquire British companies, and the United Kingdom was also vigilant and blocked.

JP Morgan's huge influence, the White House is in his eyes. If JP Morgan died, if the successor is not a person who loves the United States, even if the successor still loves the United States, its influence must not be comparable to JP Morgan. So what happens if the US financial market is in crisis?

Coincidentally, it happened. On March 31, 1913, JP Morgan died. On December 23 of the same year, the Federal Reserve (US Central Bank) was formally established. To know that before the death of JP Morgan, the United States did not have a real central bank, JP Morgan once played this role.

It can also be said that after the death of JP Morgan, the United States immediately established a central bank to fill the "power" vacuum left behind.

However, the establishment of the Fed only found a replacement for the “last borrower” at the national level. It was originally JP Morgan and is now the Federal Reserve. This does not completely subvert the entire operational logic of the US financial industry. The United States, as a financially-developed country, has a strong dependence on the financial industry, surpassing any country in the world.

Today, among the top 10 most profitable companies in the United States, four of them are banks, with the largest share of the industry. Perhaps everyone thinks that China's most profitable companies are also banks. This is not surprising. The problem is that China's most profitable banks are state-owned enterprises, and the final profits will flow into the country's fiscal system.

JPMorgan Chase, still controlled by the Morgan Consortium, is second only to Apple in profit, and second in the United States, with Bank of America and Wells Fargo ranked fourth and fifth, meaning that the United States is the most profitable. The top five companies, three are banks.

Top 10 US company profit rankings

If you want to count the most profitable companies in the United States for more than 100 years, the position of the bank is almost unstoppable. Other industries are only occasionally on the list. Companies like Apple Google are not as established as JP Morgan Chase. The Morgan family's bank was founded in 1860, Apple was founded in 1974, and Google was founded in 1998. If the Internet giant does not pay close attention to finance, it may disappear in the profit list in the future.

Seeing this, everyone may be a bit confused, what does this have to do with the blockchain bitcoin?

In fact, the relationship is great.

American commercial banks, in order to gain control over the financial industry and other industries, have set up a number of procedures, and these procedures themselves are always ready to meet the financial sanctions needs of the White House for other countries, so if anyone dares to challenge these procedures, The financial consortium will tell you that you are challenging the US killer financial weapons.

This time, Zuckerberg suffered from the indiscriminate bombing of financial industry agents in Congress. One of the most important reasons is that the traditional banking system can guarantee financial security and ensure the US sanctions against other countries. Facebook's release of libra will pose a threat to these tools.

But the problem is that these procedures and control systems in the US banking industry itself bring very high financial operating costs, and almost all of these costs have become the profits of the banking industry. In other words, challenging the US financial industry is to challenge two forces at the same time, one is the White House and the other is the financial consortium.

Can the blockchain and Bitcoin have the ability to challenge these two forces?

Let me give you an example. If you go to a commercial bank in the United States to open an account, you have multiple choices, such as commonly used check accounts, savings accounts, money market deposit accounts, time deposit accounts, and so on. Some accounts can only be consumed. If you don't have enough money, you will still receive a certain fee for each month. Some accounts are only used to save money, you can't consume online, you can't swipe your card, you can only take it out; there are some It is a special function account.

That's why Facebook's digital currency, libra, is published in the first sentence of the entire white paper: "Libra's mission is to provide a simple global currency and financial infrastructure services for billions of people."

In many parts of the world, people living far away from financial resources, if their income in the US banking industry to open a consumer account for payment, may not even pay the monthly account management fees (large Some banks have a minimum deposit requirement of hundreds to thousands of dollars for management fees.

At the same time, under the existing financial mechanism of the United States, the financial industry is completely linked to politics, and even more practically deterrent than the US aircraft carrier, because the United States “learns” that many countries’ primary choices are financial sanctions, not Send a fighter or launch a missile.

In the past two decades, the rise of Internet technology has been challenging many industries, but in the United States, the financial industry has been minimally affected. We can see that the Internet revolution has been brought to the world, and that the US market, such as Apple, is far behind China in the field of mobile payments. There are many reasons for this, but the fundamental point is the suppression of the political level and traditional financial forces.

In 2008, the US financial crisis broke out, the dissatisfaction with the US financial industry reached its peak, and Internet technology also developed to a certain stage. Therefore, with the support of the Internet giant (later slowly decrypted for everyone), Anonymous Satoshi invented the bit. The concept of coin, blockchain has emerged.

Ten years later, in 2019, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that survived the US financial industry system had a market value of more than $250 billion, the highest of which was equivalent to the market value of JP Morgan's $400 billion. Despite the "encirclement and suppression" of the US financial consortium and the White House, this has not affected the determination and will of Facebook to launch the digital currency libra.

If you want to ask what the initial heart of the "nuclear bomb" of Bitcoin is, it may be aimed at the financial system in which the United States has become politicized and giantized. (Simple politicization or pure giantization is not terrible. What is terrible is the combination of the two. ). As for what role the blockchain can play, I am afraid it depends on who is in control. Judging from the situation in China, China is always able to tame what is regarded as a beast and a beast.

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