Back to 2008: The origin of the blockchain, where the dream begins

[My great achievements shall be cast on bronze, carved on marble and engraved on wooden boards forever. When these deeds are circulated in the world, the age of happiness also come.

Cervantes Don Quixote]

On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the birth of this bitcoin, I sent this sentence to Satoshi Nakamoto, paying tribute to this great era.

01

The clock goes back to 2008, and the world is struggling with the worst global economic recession in half a century. This extraordinary shock has caused serious trade shackles and led to the collapse of several large financial institutions. Due to the global integration and the development of various well-designed financial products, the world financial system has expanded into an interdependent, closely-knit ecosystem. The crisis has developed like a fire, and central banks and policy makers seem to be unable to do anything.

The crisis was caused by policy makers. In order to stimulate the economy, governments implemented loose monetary policies and deficit finances to stimulate residents to increase leverage and excessive consumption. Financial institutions also ignored high-risk operations and created asset price bubbles. Policy makers and supervisory authorities disregard risks, subjectively causing the lack of financial supervision and laxity; financial institutions intensified and amplified risks in order to pursue short-term interests.

Film The Big Short is drawn from the global financial crisis in 2008

The irony and helpless thing are that global policy makers tried to quickly start the economic recovery after the financial crisis, and all countries entered the era of monetary easing, and the currency issued by most countries in the world far exceeded the historical average. In this unprecedented campaign of printing money, global asset prices started a new round of skyrocketing, causing severe inflation and overcapacity. So far, it has not been cleared, and it has become an unsuccessful shackle that has kidnapped economic policies.

No one is satisfied with such a robbery policy with money in the bank enduring the actual negative interest rate exploitation. Who wants to see that money earned by his hard work is diluted by inflation? It’s time to change the rules of the game and make some new attempts. FMZ

02

The popularization and application of computer technology and modern communication technology is the fifth information technology revolution defined in the book. It has promoted human society into the digital information age, which has brought about tremendous changes in our production and life style. We benefit from this, chatting, reading, playing, shopping, socializing, completing work and life on the Internet, killing boring and lonely time. Some excellent and great companies were born, as well as some opportunistic generations.

Those who are accustomed to the network, in the harsh content review and speech control environment, are familiar with the 404 page, which is the characteristic daily page under the authority system. An HTTP 404 error is a page that the server returns if it cannot provide information properly or cannot respond not knowing the reason when a client browsing a web page. The HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the most widely used network protocol on the Internet. All WWW files must comply with this standard. Although the TCP/IP protocol is the most popular application on the Internet, the HTTP protocol does not stipulate that it must be used and based on the layers it supports. In fact, HTTP can be implemented on any other Internet protocol, or on other networks.

Take a closer look at the HTTP status code, not far from “404 Not Found”. We can find the “402 Payment Required” that is rarely seen is described as “for later use” and is marked as “need to pay” to access. In fact, at the beginning of network design, creators hope to provide a way to transfer value. Different from the free sharing of information, it is not an easy task to exchange value freely on the Internet. Value is not data that can be “copied and pasted”. This dream can only be shelved indefinitely, and it is marked as “for later use”. The problem is left to those who have enough wisdom to solve. FMZ

03

The seeds of the cryptocurrency have been planted early. In the 1980s, cypherpunk had the original idea of ​​cryptocurrency. Some people dream of building a market full of government secrets, and those who leak news can get untrackable electronic cryptocurrency rewards. The difficulty in designing rewards is how to build a consensus that everyone recognizes, namely the Byzantine Generals Problem, which was proposed by Leslie Lamport et al in 1985 — let the local forces reach a consensus and decide whether to send troops. Extending to the computing field, establishe a fault-tolerant distributed system. Even if some nodes fail, it can ensure the normal operation of the system. It can allow multiple nodes based on zero trust to reach consensus and ensure the consistency of information transmission.

I have to admit that the earth-shattering history is sometimes made by a small number of people. In 1993, Eric Hughes and a group of cryptography enthusiasts created “Cypherpunk mailing list”, and he wrote in the Cypherpunk Manifesto: “We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money”.

In 1998, another cypherpunk, Wei Dai, proposed the anonymous, distributed electronic cryptocurrency system B-money. The idea of ​​distributed thinking has emerged as the spiritual leader of the new generation of cryptocurrency. Thought collide and surging years go by, cypherpunks diligently seeking and researching, from asymmetric encryption technology, peer-to-peer network technology, hashcash algorithm, to reusable proof of work, technology is maturing.

On November 1, 2008, a new post appeared in the “ cryptography mailing list” titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”. It is Satoshi Nakamoto. FMZ

“A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.” He wrote in the Bitcoin white paper.

“The most fundamental problem with traditional currencies is trust. The central bank must be trusted to not let the currency depreciate, but historically this credibility never existed. The bank must be trusted to manage the money and let it flow in electronic money, but the bank But using money to create a credit bubble makes private wealth shrink,”

On January 3, 2009, Nakamoto published the first version of the open source Bitcoin client, announcing the birth of Bitcoin. He got 50 bitcoins by “mining” on a small server in Helsinki, Finland, and the first bitcoin block was called “Genesis block”. Nakamoto put the headline of the “Times” on that day — “The Times 03/Jan/2009, Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks” in the Genesis block, making a mockery of the monetary authorities, which will always be in the annals of history.

04

The bitcoin that appeared in 2009 has changed all the issues related to money, the Internet and the transfer of value. The knotty problem that plagued the network creators seems to usher in a solution. Bitcoin, which integrates P2P network, cryptography, consensus algorithm and other existing technologies, elegantly solves the problem of generating, storing and transferring exchange value on the Internet. In this system, data is generated and stored in blocks, and is chained in chronological order. Nodes that are independent of each other participate in data verification, storage, and maintenance, and are non-tamperable and transparent. specialty. Blockchain is translated into blockchain technology, which establishes a trusted mechanism for information and value transfer in untrusted networks. FMZ

Satoshi Nakamoto predicted that bitcoin would be either zero or extremely powerful in 20 years.. After the promotion and development of geeks, technical evangelists, cryptocurrency enthusiasts and even keen capital, Bitcoin that was rarely known by people at the beginning has become known to all, and its blockchain technology has spread its genes and led into a new era. For the blockchain technology, governments, big capital, technology pioneers and even the general public have gradually established consensus — after the steam engine, electricity, and the Internet, the blockchain may be the next generation of disruptive core technology, and the Internet is moving toward value Internet from information Internet.

Although the development of the Internet is changing rapidly, the breakthroughs in information dissemination and value transmission are not accidental events. From the day-to-day exploration of researchers and enthusiasts to the application feedback of ordinary users, they have to go through a long and arduous process of evolution. As technology and demand become more stable and mature, each new stage can build something new on the basis of the previous stage. Through heavy fog of thistory, looking back at the development of the information Internet, we should have sufficient psychological preparation for the construction and use of the value Internet. Although the technology is ready-made, the large-scale popularization and application can not be done overnight. If history has a reference, our optimistic expectation is totally reasonable. The application and popularity of the value Internet will radiate energy far beyond our expectations.

FMZ