In the discussion of many application scenarios of blockchain, the reconstruction of trust relationship and social network is a popular direction.
On September 5th, at the POD conference hosted by Odaily and co-organized by 36Kr Group Strategy, Eric Ly, the co-founder of the world's largest workplace social platform LinkedIn and the founder of the blockchain start-up company hub, discussed how blockchain can be applied to social networks. , explored new possibilities of interpersonal relationships, and delivered a keynote speech on "Mainstreaming Blockchain".
Eric Ly shared his impressions of working at LinkedIn: the development of the Internet has allowed people from all over the world to connect, and LinkedIn, as a workplace social networking platform, has brought closer connections between professionals in the workplace, but its weakness is that false Resumes and spam are inevitable.
The arrival of blockchain makes it possible to solve such problems. Its significance is that it can transform an Internet of information into an Internet of value. In the Internet of Value, personal data cannot be tampered with, can be trusted, and can be exchanged. This is why Eric Ly chose the hub of the entrepreneurial blockchain project.
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The following is the transcript of Eric Ly's speech (translation):
good morning everyone! My name is Eric Ly, and I am very happy to be in Beijing today. Here I will tell you some of my thoughts, especially the question of "what does the mainstream blockchain mean?", and describe a project for you. Called Hub, Hub is a new project based on blockchain.
Before we start, let me introduce myself to you. My name is Eric Ly, and I am one of the co-founders of LinkedIn. LinkedIn is also the most famous workplace social platform in the world. I will introduce Hub to you later. This project is also headquartered in Silicon Valley.
What have I learned about blockchain during my work experience at LinkedIn? First of all, let me introduce LinkedIn to you. LinkedIn was established in 2002. We are actually in a garage (not a real garage). contact each other. So LinkedIn came from the idea that we could track down our friends, contacts, especially some friends and contacts in the industry. In Silicon Valley, there are many people who change jobs frequently. They call it job mobility. In this way, it is very important for you to know, where did your friends go to work? And some of your partners, where are the partners of other companies, etc.
LinkedIn users have reached 500 million, and it was acquired by Microsoft in 2016 for $26 billion. LinkedIn is a professional networking platform for working professionals. LinkedIn has its own advertising model, as well as other monetization models. For example, some recruitment companies will look for user information on LinkedIn, and LinkedIn can help sell some advertisements about recruitment.
When we developed LinkedIn, everyone knows that there are some very good development jobs, but after 15 or 16 years, we will see that there will be some weaknesses, and LinkedIn also has its own problems. One of them, such as fake resumes, has affected our LinkedIn and the entire social network. In addition, there are some spam messages sent to unwanted people. Next, I will talk about how the blockchain solves this problem in more detail later.
Blockchain is a trend that contrasts the shift in technology that has occurred over the past few decades. We want to see the origin of modern computers. In 1943, there was a milestone event. The ENIAC computer came out. It was as big as a room, but it could only do more than a thousand operations. Even so, it was impressive. Shocking invention, and also supported by the US government. And in 2018, everyone has a smartphone, and my smartphone iPhone is more than 4,000 times more powerful than a computer in 1943.
Another invention is the Internet. In 1993, we had a search browser called MOSAIC, and people got some information through it for the first time. Later, we have a lot of information transfer tools such as WeChat, which allow us to contact our friends, and help us obtain various services, information, and data that can be obtained in the world.
In the past few years, we heard a lot of news about the blockchain in 2017. It can solve many of our current Internet problems and change some of our data problems, such as being able to record information. We don't know what the future will look like, so we are going to find the future of the blockchain together.
Here, I'm going to talk about blockchain in my favorite way. This story starts with this man, his name is Don Tapsoott, he was a Canadian executive a few years ago, he went to the Davos forum and talked about the blockchain for the first time. In his speech, he talked about a transformation of the Internet: from an Internet of information to an Internet of value.
Here I want to tell you what this means. In the world we have lived in for the past 25 years, the Internet of information is our greatest platform, and we share content in it. But what the blockchain can do is to allow us to enter an Internet that can store and exchange value. Everyone will say what is the value? And what is the difference between value and information? Value is actually our future, and it is more valuable than information. Value is by definition, how do we express it? The blockchain is built to represent something of value to us, a cryptocurrency, so to speak.
We have seen that many blockchain projects today emphasize improvement, such as an underlying technology of the blockchain. You may think that this technology has been very popular in the past few years, but it has limitations. With technology, only 10 transactions can be executed per second, but in real-life applications, we hope that more transactions can be processed per second, reaching more than 10,000. So we still have a long way to go to further promote the development and popularization of this technology.
What I actually observed when I was working at LinkedIn and as a serial entrepreneur is that if a technology is going to disrupt the future, it has to become mainstream. That is, it must be used by many, many users in the world, be able to be used by millions and more users, and affect all Internet users and so on.This is what I want to tell you today, and I also want to tell you what the problem the Hub project is going to solve? At the beginning, I will tell you a story about this woman, she is a basket weaving person, she is from Kenya, I think this example is very good, because it actually answers the blockchain can help us do to what this question.
This basket weaving person from Kenya is very good at weaving baskets. But everyone knows that due to the limitation of the number of baskets sold and the underdeveloped local economy, the amount she can weave every day is also limited. The Internet can connect people and connect these people with better economic opportunities. In this case, there will be a big change. This basket weaving woman can sell more baskets through the Internet and gain a broad market.
As anyone can do, she started by setting up a website and putting her products on it to compete with basket weavers from all over the world. Because she can weave very good baskets, she has a good reputation, so that she can get more economic opportunities.
We need more trust on the Internet, and trust is actually one of the most important components of economic opportunity.In the blockchain, we often refer to trust. There are different types of trust. Here I am referring to trust between people. What this diagram shows us is some of the things that the Internet does to allow some people to connect with other people. And make this connection more extensive, making people contact with more users.
Before the Internet, due to the lack of technology, everyone could only establish contact with some people, and the contact was very limited. People in a village could only communicate with 150 people.But with this Internet, you can connect with unlimited people. So here, we hope to be able to participate in this infinite connection, and we must trust the other person.
The next thing to talk about is our project hub, we have many user cases. Frankly speaking, in the past 25 years, people have been very good at using the Internet to interact with other people, whether it is the sharing economy or social networking, or some financial technology scenarios,On the Internet we all want to find some way to interact with each other, and basically all of us hope to be based on a basic trust.
Why use blockchain? Because many people have heard of this concept, called decentralization,Decentralization is actually the core concept of the blockchain, which enables us to realize the idea that people can integrate data and services from different sources in one place. So, we can integrate some mutually trusted data in one place, and everyone has the ability to master our trusted data.
Another concept that may become more and more important in the future is that users can control their own data, especially their own reputable data.. As far as advertising is concerned, users cannot control their own data. The data is used by advertising companies and is used against the user's will. When the user is able to control the data, he can decide who to share the data with and how to use it. This is a concept that we will emphasize more and more in the future, and now we can establish such a trust through smart contracts, and we will also record the results of the execution, so that we can form some information representing our own reputation and data.
Our idea is to build a decentralized market similar to LinkedIn. For example, if you want to know what kind of person the other party is, when you want to interact with him, you can understand his trust degree. This is the Hub Trust Protocol What can help us do it, in fact, what we have to do is to build a more trustworthy Internet.
I will stop here, thank you very much for listening.
