According to the forecast in the August report of IDC, a world-renowned technology market research organization, global blockchain spending will increase by 80% in 2019 . Now let us take a look at this set of blowout forecast data:
The report stated that the overall spending on blockchain technology will reach $15.9 billion in 2023, with a five-year (2018-2013) compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 60.2% . Among them, IDC expects this fall that the US federal government will increase blockchain spending to US$123.5 million by 2022, while increasing by more than 1,000% within five years .
Although the above data is still an estimate, there are real scenarios behind these data.
Blockchain asset supervision, identity management and smart contracts have indeed become the government's preferred blockchain solution . Governments and legislators of various countries have realized that this technology can help improve the efficiency of government functions and simplify processes, and are vying to introduce blockchain-related uses and bills.
In May of this year, the Liechtenstein government announced the passage of a new bill on blockchain and used the term "trust technology-based transaction system" in the bill. The German government also plans to introduce draft regulations allowing blockchain bonds. In July, the United States approved the "Blockchain Promotion Act" and pointed out that the distributed accounting of blockchain can be used to prevent tax fraud, medical insurance tracking, social security welfare system, etc., to make the government file management system more efficient. Recently, the municipal government of Sao Paulo, Brazil also announced that it will use the blockchain registry for public works projects.
And the Chinese government has the most frequent response to blockchain and digital currency recently . After all, in August alone, the central bank has "voiced" four times to talk about digital currency. Moreover, the central bank has previously stated that it wants to enter the blockchain, believing that the use of digital currency will help the implementation of domestic monetary policy, and the use of smart contracts and other applications can enhance the effectiveness of monetary policy.
With the active attempts and explorations of blockchain technology by global governments, blockchain will not only bring about financial innovation, but also social institutional innovation. The application of government affairs scenarios is constantly being expanded, and more and more governments are beginning to try to apply blockchain smart contract technology to improve the transparency and efficiency of public administration. It is conceivable that in the near future, with the blowout of demand, smart contracts will help our daily lives in more scenarios to achieve automated collaboration. This technology is naturally an important cornerstone of the blockchain economy.
So, how can smart contracts be realized?
At present, the blockchain virtual machine is one of the most widely used ways of realizing smart contracts, and it is also the most critical and core technology for realizing smart contract systems. So in essence, virtual machines are also the cornerstone of blockchain technology. Among them, EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) is the most popular smart contract virtual machine. But like most new things, EVM has many shortcomings. Its design is relatively non-mainstream, which makes it difficult for mainstream programming languages to be ported to EVM. This design is too unfriendly for most programming paradigms in the past 50 years. Take a look at the shortcomings of EVM:
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Programming language limitations (Solidity)
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Lack of standard library
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256bit integer, most processors cannot natively support it, reducing operating efficiency
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The Gas model is unreasonable, and it is difficult to estimate Gas consumption
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The generated bytecode is large, which wastes block storage resources
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Difficult to test and debug
Qtum not only recognizes the importance of blockchain virtual machines, but also has insight into the limitations of the future expansion of EVM. So in September 2017 after the main Internet line, Qtum quantum chain will elaborate a new generation of mainstream programming language support Qtum-x86 VM as to block chain to support future business economics actual landing infrastructure concept.
In June 2018, Qtum Qtum released the Qtum-x86 virtual machine prototype. Its features include:
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Support multiple mainstream programming languages: C/C++/Go/Rust, etc.
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Rich standard library, improve development efficiency
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Set a reasonable and optimized gas model for standard library functions, and accurately estimate gas consumption
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Blockchain dynamic analysis: a more comprehensive analysis of the blockchain state
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Selective data storage: save valuable resources on the blockchain
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Clear dependency tree: it is possible to run smart contracts in parallel, reducing gas costs
The Qtum Qtum team also always urges itself to continuously update the x86 virtual machine, hoping that it can have a longer-term future.
For example, in order to prevent the need for storage space to exceed the storage capacity of computers and servers in the future, the Qtum development team also put forward a new technical proposal- "All storage areas in the Qtum-x86 virtual machine can be leased" , thereby efficiently saving virtual Machine memory.
As blockchain technology continues to be adopted and implemented by governments of various countries, the virtual machine as the basis for the implementation of smart contract technology also needs to be updated and iterated continuously. The Qtum team will continue to improve the development of the Qtum-x86 virtual machine, help more mainstream developers join the ranks of blockchain development, use better blockchain infrastructure to build the cornerstone of the programming economy, and accelerate the continuous innovation of social systems.
The latest development of Qtum-x86 virtual machine development:
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Continue to implement Qtum X86-rs
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Implement DEC/INC module
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Extend Opcode prefix and update x86 related technical documents, and publish to: https://x86.qtum.org/
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x86 virtual machine development task list (continuous update): https://github.com/qtumproject/x86-stories/issues
To learn more about the development of Qtum quantum chain technology, you can follow our Qtum quantum chain weekly report released every Monday to capture the latest developments.