Since 2015, blockchain technology has developed rapidly, and its application scenarios have become increasingly widespread. At the same time, the development of big data is increasingly restricted by issues such as data islands, data quality, and data security. Will blockchain technology replace big data technology? Will the two trade each other? This article will discuss this issue and explore the relationship between blockchain and big data.
The current development of the blockchain market
International data company IDC recently released the "Global Blockchain Expenditure Guide" that it is expected that the global expenditure on blockchain solutions in 2020 will reach 4.28 billion US dollars. Although it is a decline compared with the forecast before the 2019 new crown pneumonia epidemic, it is still an increase of 58% compared to 2019. In 2019, total global blockchain spending was US$2.7 billion, an increase of about 90% over 2018. In terms of regional distribution, the United States has the largest blockchain investment in 2019, accounting for 39% of global expenditures, followed by Western Europe and China, accounting for 24.4% and 11.2% respectively.
According to IDC statistics, similar to the global trend, the scale of investment in China's blockchain market will also decrease under the influence of the epidemic in 2020, but China is still the second largest country in the global blockchain market. As an emerging market for blockchain, China will usher in new opportunities in the next three years.
Challenges in the era of big data
The development of the big data era seems to have entered a bottleneck period. How to surpass the three mountains of data islands, data quality, and data security has become the biggest problem whether big data can have greater achievements and a more ambitious development prospect.
One is that for different data sources, only open sharing can finally achieve the goal of "big data". However, in actual work, the resistance to open data sharing is quite large. For example, for companies, data contains their own business secrets, as well as huge commercial value and opportunities. They are often cautious about opening and sharing data.
Second, in the era of big data, people have unearthed a lot of high-value information and generated more invalid or spam information. Spam not only does not bring any positive value, but consumes more social resources and energy to distinguish the quality of information, and even covers up effective information, triggering the phenomenon of "bad money drives good money".
The third is that data is collected and used without the owner's consent, which will cause problems for user safety, corporate safety and even national security. For statistical work, the fact that the surveyed users are worried about privacy leaks and are unwilling to provide sensitive data is also a long-standing phenomenon, and this concern is still growing.
Blockchain and big data grow together
The famous American economist, futurist, and "one of the three thinkers in the digital age" George Gilder (George Gilder) in his best-selling book "Post-Google Era: The Decline of Big Data and the Rise of Blockchain Economy" , The point of view clearly pointed out that the era of big data will be iterated by the decentralized blockchain economy. Lack of trust and security is the Achilles heel of the current era of big data, and the current technological level and network system cannot solve this crisis. The new structure of the blockchain and its derivatives, the "secret calculation system", is the key to the future development of human society.
However, there are also more economists and Internet technology experts who believe that "blockchain + big data" will break through the bottleneck and open a new era. The rapid rise of blockchain technology will inevitably help big data break through the dilemma. The two technologies coexist and grow in mutual integration.
One is data fusion. The traceability of the blockchain enables data to be confirmed and establishes a data sharing mechanism and process. At the same time, differentiated encryption technology is used to ensure the different confidentiality requirements of different subjects for data, and on the basis of ensuring data security, sharing and opening to the chain for use by all parties, solving the problem of data islands. The second is to improve data quality. Blockchain technology ensures the authenticity and accuracy of data on the chain through the development of data standards and consensus verification, and improves the credibility of data through a data traceability mechanism, so that data can be endorsed by strong trust. The third is data security. Blockchain is a technology based on cryptography, and encryption and security are the basic prerequisites for blockchain applications. Digital signature, private key, "time stamp" and other technologies ensure the safety and reliability of data.
Therefore, the main difference between big data and blockchain is that blockchain is more of a technological ecological change as an underlying technology, advocating "code is law"; big data allows data to speak, through the depth of data Digging to find problems and then formulating rules, claiming that "data is the right to speak". The scale of big data will become more and more spectacular with the rapid development of blockchain technology. The integration of blockchain data in different business scenarios will further expand the richness of data. The advent of the blockchain market is not the end of the era of big data, but will effectively break through the dilemma faced by big data and help big data exert greater value.
(Source: China Information News)