Author: Mu Mu / Vernacular Blockchain / Source:
In 2019, blockchain was selected as one of the top ten buzzwords of 2019. Once upon a time, the blockchain was as "hot" as this year's AI, and it was once synonymous with "crazy" a few years ago. Today, we suddenly found that the domestic media and people around us mentioned "blockchain" less and less, and some encryption enthusiasts even bluntly said that they had a "sense of resistance" when they saw these three words...
The blockchain is cold and abandoned? Nowadays, many people have such doubts, so what has the blockchain experienced in these years? What kind of state is it now?
01
"Blockchain"! Why not "blockchain"?
From popular buzzwords to "Goubuli", it is obvious that the popularity of the blockchain has gone down and cooled down. There is an old saying that "if the sky wants to die, it will make it crazy". For a long time, many people even equated the blockchain with the "crazy" Bitcoin. It is currently in the bear market of encryption, so people think that the blockchain is "involved", and it seems reasonable to attribute the "coolness" of the blockchain to this. Of course, the current "coolness" of the blockchain may not be the "coolness" that people think.
A classic Gartner technology maturity curve can well explain the current position of the hot blockchain concept a few years ago.
In the short cycle of recent years, if 2017 and 2018 were the peak period after the blockchain concept was put forward, then the crypto bear market in 2019 and 2020 is its underestimation period, that is, a kind of "goobuli" after the bubble burst. " state, almost no one pays attention to it, and not many people are willing to talk about it. In my impression, the "blockchain" at that time was in a more "cool" state than it is now. A well-known investor even said in the circle of friends that he wanted to The point of "spit".
Later, the bull market started by DeFi Summer from 2020 to 2021 brought it into a climbing period. During this period, people recovered from underestimation, discovered more application value of it, and began to explore other possibilities .
Technological development is often complicated, especially in this rapidly changing era. It is difficult to fully describe the current state of the blockchain with only a Gartner graph. The Gartner curve is not static, and its final direction will be affected by various influences. factors vary.
From the perspective of development, as one of the most important technical solutions of the public chain, the blockchain is naturally most closely related to the public chain. In the past few years, when people and market funds have focused on public chain technology, various optimization solutions including blockchain expansion and consensus mechanisms have been the focus of discussion.
Nowadays, with the birth of a bunch of high-performance public chains and Layer 2 expansion solutions, the public chain has no technical bottlenecks, and the ecological barriers of the public chain represented by Ethereum are getting deeper and deeper. The public chain, that is, the most important infrastructure structure of the blockchain, has almost been finalized, and the window for the new public chain is also closing.
As the concepts of DeFi, Web3, NFT, and metaverse have been sought after in recent years, we have seen the birth of some phenomenal Web3 applications, which have attracted more and more attention, and people have begun to realize that we have begun to enter the next generation of the Internet. In the application era, for ordinary users, there is no need to deeply grasp the incomprehensible underlying protocol, and the blockchain has moved from the front to the back.
To give a simple example, in those years when PCs became popular, the biggest piece of cake for the capital market was the infrastructure "operating system" market. Most people discussed whether to install Windows or Linux or buy an Apple computer. The operating system was also once "massive".
There are continuous technical teams to innovatively develop various operating systems to join the competition to solve the problems of the front-end products. Later, with the passage of time, the operating systems of Microsoft and Apple have become more and more mature, and they have established their own powerful with absolute advantages. Since then, few new operating systems have joined the competition in the market, and people have turned their attention to various application software running on the operating system.
Nowadays, people have long forgotten the topic of which PC operating system is easy to use, smooth, and not crashed in those years. The same is true for the blockchain. It is not "cool" to go from the front of the stage to the backstage to hide the merits and fame.
02
Does the blockchain have anything to do with ordinary people?
As "blockchain" recedes into the background, ordinary people may hear less talk about the word in the future, but it does not mean that blockchain will have nothing to do with ordinary people in the future. Just like the PC operating system, even if it retreats behind the scenes, people still need to use various applications based on it every day, which is completely inseparable from the environment provided by the operating system. The next-generation Internet is also inseparable from the cornerstone of the blockchain. When people operate web3 applications and enter the metaverse, the blockchain is playing a role in protecting our information and asset security and inviolability.
For ordinary users, although concepts such as "account abstraction" proposed by the encryption community will simplify wallet operations that seemed complicated in the past, for example, when Web3 users enter the application in the future, they can use mailboxes, text messages, etc. like traditional Internet users. For verification, you don’t need to keep the private key yourself, and you can use solutions such as social recovery to lower the threshold for users.
It seems that ordinary users do not need to know what blockchain is in many cases, but "convenience" is often obtained by sacrificing security and decentralization. It is really necessary to safely keep their own encrypted assets and identities, and pursue high security Level, it is still very important to have a general understanding of the basic principles and safe use of blockchain asset wallets.
For ordinary investors, based on the basic principle of "do not invest if you don't understand", even if the hot spots in the future market are all applied, the understanding of the underlying blockchain technology can still have a significant impact on various decision-making directions and opportunity mining. After all, the concept, original intention and basic principles brought by blockchain technology are the main reasons why most encryption projects can go to today.
In addition, one of the important reasons why Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. are called public blockchains is that everyone can participate and supervise together, and public blockchains are also inseparable from the consensus support of users scattered all over the world.
03
summary
The blockchain is really "cool", but this is different from what some people understand. It has gone from the foreground to the backstage , from the madness when the concept was proposed to the silent support of the bottom layer after the application was implemented, and completed a gorgeous transformation. The future blockchain will be closely related to our lives with the large-scale implementation of the next generation of Internet applications.
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