Author: Zhu Jincan
Source: clever101's column
origin
I wrote an article " Some Thoughts on Blockchain Technology " last week. After that, I communicated with some friends and corrected some of my previous misunderstandings about the blockchain.
Rediscover the blockchain
In the previous article I questioned who will provide the computing resources and storage resources required to run the blockchain. My friend told me that there are miners for mining, that is, blockchain development. The so-called "mining" of blockchain development is to confirm the transactions that occurred in the Bitcoin system within a period of time and record them on the blockchain to form new blocks. Those who mine are called miners. In simple terms, mining is the process of bookkeeping, the miners are the bookkeepers, and the blockchain is the version. The bookkeeping rights of the Bitcoin system are decentralized, that is, every miner has the right to bookkeeping, and as long as they successfully grab the bookkeeping rights, the miners can get the newly generated Bitcoin rewards from the system. Therefore, the blockchain actually has three roles: blockchain maintainers, miners, and end users. The blockchain maintainer is the developer and operator of the blockchain, the miner is the provider of computing resources and storage resources of the blockchain, and the end user is the user of the blockchain. Let's think a little deeper: one of the key roles is the miner, and the current economic motivation that drives the miner to provide resources is cryptocurrency. So here comes the problem. Cryptocurrency is an application of the blockchain, but now it has become the underlying economic foundation of the blockchain. Isn't this a bit of a paradox? Also, what is mentioned above is only the economic driving force of public chains like Ethereum. How do alliance chains and private chains drive people to provide computing resources and storage resources?
How do ordinary application developers use the blockchain, and pay gas fees when friends introduce them. To put it simply, the gas fee is the fee paid to the miners. When you transfer money on the Ethereum blockchain, the miners have to package your transaction and put it on the blockchain to complete the transaction. In this process, the computing resources of the blockchain will be consumed, so fees must be paid.
Another problem with the blockchain is that end users use the blockchain to actually use the DApp in the blockchain (abbreviation for Decentralized Application, translated into Chinese as a decentralized application). However, these DApps are black boxes for end users, and in fact end users do not know what operations DApps perform. Let me make an analogy, DApp says to upload your data to the blockchain, but actually uploads your data to a certain central database (this is completely achievable technically). That is to say, who will supervise the DApp. From this perspective, how does the blockchain win the trust of users? Thinking a little deeper, if the user already believes in the application software, does the user still care whether it is implemented with or without blockchain technology?