The future of blockchain

The rise of the digital currency market represented by Bitcoin and Ethereum has made people crazy. Everyone has flocked to participate in various ICOs. However, cryptography and blockchain technology have reshaped the world far more than Bitcoin, Internet finance, transactions and other digital currencies. Distributed technology has gradually evolved into decentralized technology, and decentralization is the redistribution of resources and a technical means to break the rigidification of classes.

A centralized system is prone to single point failure, lack of transparency and inefficiency. Its existence is based on lack of trust, so it needs a central node to endorse it. Therefore, the combination of consensus mechanism, cryptography and blockchain has become a technical means that does not require a centralized institution to endorse its trust.

As shown in the figure above, we divide all tokens into four parts: basic protocol layer, middleware, capital flow and application. The green line represents the time curve of market value.

Protocol Layer

Up to now, 10% of the market value of the entire digital currency is still occupied by Bitcoin and Ethereum at the basic protocol layer. The more applications and ecosystems are deployed at the protocol layer, the greater the value of the token at the protocol layer, just like the currently prosperous Ethereum ecosystem.

Tokens represent the smallest unit of a business model. Without specific scenarios, these tokens will be worthless.

As more and more leeks enter the market, this circle is full of good and bad people. How many of these leeks have the insight to identify dark horses? Here, Brother Gang provides several criteria for judging whether a project is valuable:

• github repository
• Code Contributors
• Code Quality
• Number of nodes and miners

Before these dapps can truly be available to the general public, the underlying protocol infrastructure needs to be more mature. Ethereum still has a long way to go in terms of concurrency, security and stability. However, we have also seen that Ethereum itself is also evolving, and new basic protocol projects such as Aeternity and EOS have emerged. Who will have the last laugh? This will take time, products, markets and users to test.

middleware

The dapp on the underlying protocol includes some middleware, such as Sia, Storj, IPFS/FileCOin, which appear in our field of vision as distributed storage projects. Data is redundantly stored in this network after being sharded and encrypted. File streams are freely transmitted in the network, and only those who have the private key are the real owners of the file. There is no backdoor problem, no server downtime problem, and no problem of being unable to be cracked.

In addition to the distributed storage middleware, it also includes:

• Distributed computing: Golem, Ethereum
• Privacy and digital identity applications: The uPort Project, civic
• Decentralized DNS
• Off-chain data providers: Augur, Gnosis, Oraclize, æternity
• Decentralized browsers: Parity, Metamask
• Crypto Payments

It will take at least a few years for these middleware to mature.

Fund Flow

The products in this area are mainly financial services, providing us with a faster and easier trading system. Their types include funds, wallets, exchanges, asset analysis, etc.

application

Dapps are mainly divided into the following categories:

• Law and e-government: Once we enter a programmable society, our lives will face major changes. Smart contracts can automatically execute according to trigger conditions. However, how to connect smart contracts with real-world data is an important issue.
• Attention: Perhaps we will be lucky enough to see a new era of transformation from data economy to attention economy. Basic Attention Token is a project that tokenizes user attention. Users pay the price of attention in exchange for benefits. This seems incredible in the traditional digital economy. We are used to being forced to watch ads, and have never thought that our attention to watching ads is valuable. Basic Attention Token gives value to users' attention. Watching ads itself is attention. There is also Steemit, which encourages people to pay attention to writing and producing content, and they will get Steemit tokens in return.

Payment

Although a bunch of speculators have poured into this field, perhaps these speculators do not know what blockchain is at all. They just chase the ups and downs every day and ask for news everywhere. It seems very prosperous, but in fact, from the perspective of value itself, whether it is from the basic protocol, middleware or Dapp, blockchain still has a long way to go.