"No one predicted that in the first two decades of 2 1 century, the development curve of quantum technology, blockchain and encrypted digital currency and DiFi curves showed an intersecting trend. However, all this has really happened, and it is really changing people's traditional concept of wealth, transforming the wealth structure and reshaping the wealth form. "
Zhu Jiaming
Text:
Han Feng and his team's new work "The Wealth of Nations in Blockchain" will soon be published in Fu Zi, and the English version will also be published in the United States, with the title "Wealth in the Quantum Age" and the Chinese translation as "Wealth in the Quantum Age". I am very pleased with this and would like to make a recommendation preface for the Chinese version of "The Wealth of Blockchain".
The title of "The Wealth of Nations in Blockchain" connects "Blockchain" with "The Wealth of Nations", which is facing great challenges, because it needs to answer why "Blockchain" can lead to and create a new "Wealth of Nations". In this regard, this book does give such an answer: in the new era of interaction between digital economy and quantum era, that is, the new data wealth era, the "quantum mechanics big data reality view" will completely replace the "Newtonian mechanics small data world view". Wealth is no longer a thing, at least not just a thing. Wealth has become a form of the evolution of credit resources, and it is the blockchain that supports and realizes global credit knowledge. Therefore, it is necessary to update the traditional concept of "wealth". "Whether the concept of wealth can keep up with the times can determine a person's living conditions and social status, and even determine the future of a country and nation."
The author cites Adam Smith, Hayek and Brian Arthur, the founder of complex economics. Brian Arthur's thoughts are interlinked with Adam Smith and Hayek. From the whole history of human wealth knowledge, most of the time wealth knowledge was realized through decentralized free market. It's just that Brian Arthur realized that although the essence of market economy is the continuous extension and expansion of division of labor, which is a huge, scattered and random transaction, the market can eventually become the object of calculation, the computing body and the decentralized computing system. "From this perspective, the economy has become a procedural development system in a series of events, and it has become an algorithm-driven system." Although Brian Arthur did not directly mention blockchain, blockchain is a programmed algorithm structure, which can provide a technical credit foundation for highly complex economic activities.
Before 2008, it was proposed that wealth is a decentralized "credit knowledge". Although human economic history can provide many proofs, it is still difficult for people to accept it. The first generation Internet TCP/IP protocol established a large-scale barrier-free circulation infrastructure for data. More importantly, the breakthrough of private key signature technology has laid the underlying technical foundation for solving the problem of data ownership. The birth of Bitcoin in 2008 proved that the "credit * * * knowledge" supported by blockchain can become the foundation of wealth, and even directly become wealth. Satoshi Nakamoto's historical position "lies in the discovery of a truly decentralized model to issue currency-Bitcoin, which uses a distributed computing to realize wealth knowledge". "Bitcoin has set a new milestone in the history of human wealth." Further analysis shows that Bitcoin is a form of wealth based on blockchain, which meets the six basic conditions of "wealth * * * knowledge" proposed in this book: (1) assets are confirmed; (2) accounting information disclosure of the whole network; (3) block transactions; (4) Conforming to global geek values; (5) The total number of anchors is limited and scarce, and the whole network is digging; (6) Decentralized distributed computing.
In this book, readers are particularly expected to pay attention to "knowledge of decentralized financial DeFi to achieve wealth * * *", and to rely on distributed computing to provide financial services provided by the current banking system to achieve new wealth * * * knowledge, especially "DeFi Ecology on the Ethereum". "The rise of this wave of DeFi has made people see that in the decentralized computing world of blockchain, various functional applications corresponding to banking services have begun to develop like mushrooms after rain. Just like the huge wave of banking creating new wealth for the world after the British industrial revolution, it has already seen the clue. This time, the stage is the global digital economy. " This book also attempts to interpret the phenomenon of IPFS, and proposes that Filecoin is likely to become the "benchmark of decentralized storage" on the new Internet WEB 3.0 track in the future.
In any case, the concept of "data capitalization wave" proposed by the author and the analysis of "bear-cow cycle of global blockchain wealth" are of forward-looking significance. In the author's view, bitcoin from a few cents to tens of thousands of dollars (20 18) is a process of wealth formation, and people finally get used to the cyclical fluctuations of bear market and bull market. "It took almost thousands of years to form a wealth knowledge like gold in history, but Bitcoin took almost ten years to complete, so this is a brand-new era of wealth knowledge."
In the sixth chapter of "The Wealth of Nations in Blockchain", we mainly discuss what is the realism of Newtonian mechanics and the realism of quantum mechanics. In the author's view, the limitation of Newtonian mechanics lies in: "Newtonian mechanics thinks that the universe is composed of isolated atoms, and atoms have no other internal relations except interaction. They must be in the position of time and space, and their movement follows a deterministic orbit, which is determined by Newton's three laws." Newtonian mechanics laid the foundation for the industrial revolution. Later, the famous French mathematician Laplace elevated Newtonian mechanics to the supreme position. The concept of "Laplace demon" provides a theoretical basis for concentrated thinking, that is, "believing in the existence of a supreme god brain". Nowadays, the industrial revolution has gone far away, and mankind has quickly entered the information society after entering the post-industrial society, and the digital economy has become the main economic form. So the realism of Newtonian mechanics needs to be the realism of quantum mechanics. Because the realism of quantum mechanics is not only a theory to describe the micro-world, but also the basis for us to understand the whole universe in the future. Not only that, "quantum realism and big data can reveal the previously invisible part of the world for us, which opens up a very broad space for the new form of global wealth knowledge in the future." So, what is quantum mechanical realism? The author thinks that the core of quantum mechanics is nonlocal wholeness, and the representative phenomenon is the existence of quantum entanglement.
The title of the seventh chapter of this book is Wealth Understanding and Calculation from the Perspective of Distributed Computing Thinking. The first section discusses "Maxwell's demon element calculation can suppress the entropy increase of complex systems", and the questions raised are particularly profound and creative. 187 1 year, the British physicist Maxwell assumed the physical demon (Maxwell demon) to detect and control the motion of a single molecule according to the second theorem of thermodynamics. It is generally believed that Maxwell's imaginary experiment is a direct challenge to the principle of entropy increase. On the surface, Maxwell's demon is impossible to realize in the real world. But if Maxwell demon is understood as a typical "calculation" process, entropy reduction can be realized. The author introduces a paper by Academician Sun Changpu, Research on Some Problems of Quantum Statistics and Thermodynamics Inspired by Quantum Information, and points out that Maxwell's demon mechanism and Randall's principle are universal meta-computing mechanisms. If the sun is used as an external source to drive dissipation, the uncertainty of quantum nonlocality can be overcome and entropy can be reduced. That is to say, if the whole universe is a quantum computer, which is driven by a certain amount of energy like the sun and dissipates heat at the same time, a locally ordered low-entropy world can be realized through calculation, and the most fundamental calculation mechanism comes from Maxwell demon.
Therefore, the author infers: "The mining system of Bitcoin blockchain is obviously such a distributed Maxwell demon computing system. Every miner's mining machine is a Maxwell demon. They found the correct solution through the calculation of astronomical random number (the hundredth power of 2) while accounting for the whole network. Although this Maxwell demon process consumes a lot of energy, the calculated knowledge can support the market value of Bitcoin on a global scale (unlike banks that can only trust a centralized institution, it is difficult to calculate global knowledge).
The author reinterprets "Maxwell Demon" from the height of quantum mechanics, providing a train of thought and even a framework from quantum science to blockchain to "credit * * * knowledge" wealth. According to this idea and framework, we will naturally re-understand Shannon's concept of information entropy and why the more uncertain signal number set contains more information. To interpret Shannon, it is necessary to introduce Professor Weiner's view that the principle of entropy increase is actually a process of reducing the order level of energy information.
Human beings long for a low entropy world. So far, human economic activities and all technological progress are precisely the process of entropy increase. This situation needs to be alleviated and ended. In the quantum age, Maxwell's demon element calculation, whether blockchain is a hope and possibility, needs more theoretical and empirical support. But if the blockchain has the function of "entropy reduction" instead of "entropy increase", it will be the revolutionary significance of the blockchain.
20 19, 165438 I said in South China University of Technology: "The quantum age means that quantum science and quantum technology have influenced and changed other scientific and technological disciplines." Han Feng later said that his concept of "quantum age" was inspired by me. In fact, in the field of blockchain and digital currency, Han Feng is a rare doctoral background in quantum physics in Tsinghua. He has been immersed in quantum science for many years, which undoubtedly helps him to combine quantum science with digital economy. In this book, Han Feng expounds the characteristics of the quantum age: the basic feature of the quantum age is the existence of quantum whole reality, and accordingly the world must be described by big data. At the same time, big data shows the so-called "invisible" relationship, creativity, community vision, future value and so on. Those things that were originally ignored by the atomic world in the economic society will become the wealth of the future quantum era through technologies such as blockchain and encryption. Because of the development of quantum technology and blockchain, the digital economy 1.0 with vague property rights will be rapidly upgraded to the digital economy 2.0 with clear data property rights, which is the general trend. It should be said that whether it is 1.0 or 2.0, the protagonist is big data, which is a big data description of quantum whole reality, far exceeding the small data reality of Newtonian mechanics. In the postscript, Han Feng introduced the situation of the credit forecasting machine that cooperated with Fuzhou Municipal Government, wishing them a new situation in the practice of Digital Economy 2.0.
Finally, behind the evolution of quantum science and technology is a philosophical question, whether it is so-called "determinism" or "indeterminism". Han Feng thinks that the debate between Einstein and Bohr about "whether God still rolls the dice" actually leads to the same goal. 1933 Einstein clearly pointed out in his lecture at Oxford University that the essence of quantum existence is "nonlocality". In fact, the whole existence of nonlocality is "determinism", just as the whole description of quantum wave function is "determined" by Schrodinger equation (which is not essentially different from Newton's mechanical equation, which can determine the atomic orbit), but when we measure the wave function, it is localized.
What I personally want to say is that no one predicted that in the first two decades of 2 1 century, the development curve of quantum technology, blockchain, encrypted digital currency curve and DeFi curve showed an intersecting trend. However, all this has really happened, and it is really changing people's traditional concept of wealth, transforming the wealth structure and reshaping the wealth form.
If there is anything worth improving in this book, it is that some chapters are too personal and the words are complicated. Therefore, in future revisions, the author should consciously pursue conciseness and conciseness of expression, for writing is actually an art.