The word blockchain has experienced several ups and downs in recent years, from cutting-edge technological concepts, hot words on the market, to symbols of excessive consumption. Many people believe that blockchain is a tool to solve the pain points of many industries, and has the potential to become a catalyst for the birth of the next generation of "super business carriers".

However, the fabled epic change has not yet come, it has been put under the spotlight. Those who are interested will profit from it, and those who seek profit will pay blindly. Falling into the vortex of public opinion too early will harm and test the technology in the growth stage.

The actual situation today is that there are very few landing applications, there is still a distance between technology and industry connection, and the noise of speculators has overshadowed the "backbone voice" that really cares about technology and the industry. Odaily joins hands with the top new business media 36Kr, top technology leaders and academic elites to discuss how to embrace regulation, promote the industry to get rid of the dross and extract the essence, hand over traffic and voice to those who do things seriously, and use strength to let the blockchain land.

The word blockchain has experienced several ups and downs in recent years, from cutting-edge technological concepts, hot words on the market, to symbols of excessive consumption. Many people believe that blockchain is a tool to solve the pain points of many industries, and has the potential to become a catalyst for the birth of the next generation of "super business carriers".

However, the fabled epic change has not yet come, it has been put under the spotlight. Those who are interested will profit from it, and those who seek profit will pay blindly. Falling into the vortex of public opinion too early will harm and test the technology in the growth stage.

The actual situation today is that there are very few landing applications, there is still a distance between technology and industry connection, and the noise of speculators has overshadowed the "backbone voice" that really cares about technology and the industry. Odaily joins hands with the top new business media 36Kr, top technology leaders and academic elites to discuss how to embrace regulation, promote the industry to get rid of the dross and extract the essence, hand over traffic and voice to those who do things seriously, and use strength to let the blockchain land.

On September 5, at the blockchain POD conference hosted by Odaily and co-organized by 36Kr Group Strategy, Tan Dai, chief architect of Baidu and head of the blockchain laboratory, delivered a speech entitled "Building a Credible Ecosystem Together".

But if we look at the reality, the reality is actually very skinny, and there are very few excellent DApps. To bridge this gap, there are two key problems that need to be solved:

1. On the bottom layer of the entire blockchain, we need an operating system and solutions that are truly usable and practical in terms of trust and functionality.

2. We need to emerge such benchmarks in all walks of life, which can create real user value and attract mainstream users. Such blockchain applications.

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The following is the speech transcript of Tan Dai, chief architect of Baidu and head of blockchain laboratory:

I am very glad to be able to come to the P·O·D conference to discuss the blockchain, especially the opportunities and challenges of the blockchain developer ecosystem with various industry experts at home and abroad.In fact, the opening of the host just now, I think it is very vivid, the blockchain as a whole is still in an early stage, but the blockchain has now reached a very fanatical stage. Everyone from all walks of life is talking about blockchain now, but not many people actually know how to do blockchain? But everyone thinks that others, especially other competing companies, must be doing blockchain, so everyone claims that they are also doing blockchain.

I don't say this for ridicule, because the last ones who enjoyed such treatment were big data and artificial intelligence, so looking at the development of these predecessors, there are reasons for us to have a better understanding of the future prospects of the entire blockchain technology. much confidence.

So next, I am very honored to introduce Baidu to you. As an Internet company and an artificial intelligence company, we have some thoughts and opinions on the blockchain:

What new value do we think blockchain can bring to the Internet? And in the process of promoting the development of the entire blockchain ecology, what kind of key role can the traditional Internet and emerging artificial intelligence technologies play?Blockchain is a cutting-edge technology, but the idea of ​​blockchain has actually existed since ancient times. We all know that traditionally, when a man and a woman get married, they will definitely set up a banquet for relatives and friends to witness their marriage. Isn’t this a very primitive idea of ​​sharing ledgers? In fact, the blockchain is equivalent to using information technology for the first time to digitize, online, persist and scale such an idea and such a process. Until now, the blockchain is not limited to the field of encrypted digital currency, but has become a general mechanism to solve problems in various industries.

For the Internet, it is essentially an open mind. The Internet is very good at solving the problem of information transmission, and is very good at acquiring a large number of users. But the Internet has always been not good at solving the problem of authenticity and integrity of information, so in the past, we often returned to the old way to build a centralized Internet platform. The difference is based on such a centralized The endorsement of entity and subject credit to solve the problem of Internet authenticity.Such an approach will actually bring many new problems and challenges:

First of all, we can see that in many fields, there is actually no time to build such a centralized platform. For example, everyone knows the chaos of P2P in recent years. Secondly, in some other fields, these ecological players are actually evenly matched with each other. Who is the first is also a question. On the other hand, it tends to monopolize and to obtain more commercial benefits, and the development speed and service level of the entire platform and the entire industry will be limited by the centralized platform. So in fact, if this is the case, it not only violates the open spirit of the Internet, but also does not give full play to the potential of the Internet.

Conversely, this is also a very attractive place for blockchain technology:Through the shared ledger, through the key system, through the consensus mechanism, smart contracts, etc., for the first time, we actually have the ability to build various industries and various letter application.

So this is the most fascinating part of blockchain technology, that is, we have the opportunity to build a new application ecology based on it. Through this decentralized DApp approach, we can more reasonably distribute the benefits monopolized by the original platform to various partners in the ecosystem and to users to build a new win-win relationship between users and the platform. Therefore, many optimists or believers in the blockchain also believe that the blockchain is likely to become an epoch-making product like the mobile Internet to create huge value and establish a brand new ecology.

If we look at the reality, the reality is actually very skinny,

There are very few excellent DApps. To bridge this gap, there are two key issues that need to be resolved:

1. On the bottom layer of the entire blockchain, we need an operating system and solutions that are truly usable and practical in terms of trust and functionality.

2. We need to emerge such benchmarks in all walks of life, which can create real user value and attract mainstream users. Such blockchain applications.

Let's look at the first problem first, which is the underlying problem. Let's take the mobile Internet as an example. In fact, everyone knows that the mobile Internet did not appear in Nokia, Motorola, or Symbian. It was born with the emergence of IOS and Android. The same is true for the blockchain. If our underlying operating system is not easy to use, there is no way to talk about the above application ecology.

For the current mainstream blockchain technology, there are actually several core challenges to be overcome:

1. Trust issues. No matter what kind of technology is now, its overall trust, blockchain trust is basically dozens, hundreds, or thousands. Such trust means that developers have no way to really create large-scale use of it. User Products or Security Products.

2. Safety issues.

3. Ease of use. For developers, the threshold for him to enter the blockchain is still too high.

Another problem that is often overlooked by everyone is that the cost of blockchain is very high for ordinary users. Although the private key we often mention looks good, for most ordinary users, they simply cannot understand and master these things.

Also to solve this problem, this year we launched our own self-developed blockchain solution, the Baidu Superchain. The purpose is to lower the threshold, help each developer build their own blockchain network, and at the same time better solve or balance blockchain trust and security issues.

In terms of design, Baidu Super Chain will natively support parallel chains, cross-chains, side chains, and blockchain networks. For each parachain, the developer can independently choose his consensus algorithm, which can solve practical problems in combination with actual scenarios, and each parachain will adopt a two-layer mechanism of supercomputing nodes and supervisory nodes to update Good play on blockchain trust.

In the entire trust, the super chain has three technical highlights:

1. The super node technology can maximize trust through a layered approach. Now the entire Baidu super chain can achieve the effect of 10,000 to 100,000 TPS in a single chain. Moreover, each super node can be expanded through a distributed solution, so that there is no need to worry about the data explosion of the entire blockchain network in the future.2. Parallel technology within the chain. Because the super node is to solve the TPS problem, we further scan and decompose the smart contract intelligently through the parallel technology in the chain, and decompose it into irrelevant DAG networks to further accelerate the trust of smart contracts.3. Three-dimensional network technology. For example, the three-dimensional network is equivalent to the multi-threading technology and multi-core technology in our current traditional operating system. For these business-independent and uncoupled logic, developers can further use the unique regressive withdrawal of the super chain. way to further accelerate parallelism.

With such a high-performance and usable blockchain underlying system, Baidu has also been exploring

, How to really play the value of the blockchain in various practical scenarios?

So here are a few points to share with you.

1. The combination of blockchain and the Internet. I made an analogy just now. Many people think that the value of the blockchain is likely to be comparable to the development of the entire mobile Internet. In fact, you will find that there is a very big difference between the blockchain and the mobile Internet. For the mobile Internet, it is born with traffic and users. But as far as the blockchain is concerned, it is more of an underlying technology. The blockchain cannot directly acquire users. If the application of the blockchain is to acquire users, it still needs to be combined with the traditional Internet, whether it is the PC Internet or the mobile Internet. .

2. The combination of blockchain and emerging technologies. Because it can solve many problems for the blockchain, but it can only solve part of the problems. If we form a solution, we need other technologies to participate. For artificial intelligence, of course, is a very good point.

For the blockchain, it guarantees the security and integrity of data through algorithms and mechanisms, but if the processing of these data still needs to rely on vulnerable people and individuals to interpret and translate, then the entire The security of the system will also be greatly discounted.Through the combination of technologies, the combination of blockchain, the Internet and artificial intelligence, and the in-depth integration with specific industry applications, I think there is hope that we can make truly influential and attract mainstream users such trusted applications.

So here are a few examples:

The first example is Totem, a blockchain original image service platform launched by Baidu in the middle of this year.

. In fact, everyone knows that certificate storage is a relatively mature field for blockchain exploration, and copyright certificate storage is also a very good entry point. So this year, Baidu Totem has joined forces with Baidu Search, as well as rights confirmation agencies, rights protection agencies, and photo agencies in the picture ecosystem to build such a picture copyright chain. Through such a copyright chain, it is easy for individuals and organizations to store evidence, and then he can further conduct picture copyright transactions and distribution, including monitoring and rights protection, forming a very efficient and decentralized system as a whole plan.

But this solution alone is not enough, because for the blockchain, it actually solves the problem of copyright deposit certificates, but for real users, the producers of pictures, he not only needs to deposit certificates, but also we It is convenient to detect who has violated my rights, and it is very convenient to make transactions. As for the picture trader, he also needs an entrance to find the copyright of the picture very conveniently. So we not only built such an efficient picture network with blockchain, but also artificial intelligence combined all the Internet together to form a solution.

Let's first look at it. For the blockchain, it solves the fast copyright deposit and synchronization, which is the first step.

In the second step, it needs to do an infringement detection. It needs to know who is infringing its rights on the Internet. This piece is searched by Baidu, we can naturally capture and analyze the pictures on the whole network, and then rely on Baidu's top artificial intelligence technology, we can compare each picture, regardless of whether it is watermarked The watermark is still removed, so that all infringements can be exposed in a very timely manner.Finally, through Baidu's traffic, we can allow users to be guided to the content of these copyrighted image service providers when they search for images on Baidu, and further protect their copyrights.

Through such a combination, we have not only formed a complete solution, but also made it an application that is inherently endowed with users and traffic.

The second example is Baidu Baike.Everyone knows that Baike has always been a symbol of authoritative information on the Internet. Baike is edited by the entire Internet community. This year, we put all the editing history of the entire Baike on the blockchain. This traceable and non-tamperable feature makes the editing process of the entire encyclopedia more transparent and further enhances the credibility of the encyclopedia.

In the next step, what we will do is to say that we will directly connect the entire encyclopedia and the entire search to the public network of the blockchain built by various industries, and then use the algorithm of artificial intelligence to directly connect the blockchain network The data on the Internet can be turned into search content or encyclopedia entries to further reduce the risk of manual intervention in this, and then directly present it to users to create such an authoritative highland of Internet information.

The last example is that we have applied the blockchain to the field of certification and recruitment of personal educational information.

Because everyone knows that for recruitment, a big pain point is whether this person's resume is true? Is the certification information for his education true? So we launched the Baidu Huixue project this year, and together with various educational institutions, put the certification of educational institutions on the blockchain. At the same time, we also see that many people use Baidu search to obtain this kind of recruitment information. Whether it is a company or an individual, we will directly connect these blockchain certifications with recruitment to build a most credible resume database.