Author: Breeze
On May 23, Forbes reported that the Venezuelan central bank filed a lawsuit against the Bank of England. Because of the impact of the covid-19 epidemic, Venezuela hopes to sell part of its gold reserves in the Bank of England as funds to fight the epidemic, but the request is under pressure from the United States (the United States does not recognize Maduro as a Venezuelan leader and seeks Let it step down) was rejected by the Bank of England.
On April 10, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) released the “Global Financial Stability Report”. The IMF said that the global economic depression under the impact of the covid-19 epidemic was the most serious global crisis since the “Great Depression.” 9 trillion dollars.
IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said last month that more than 100 banks have so far sought emergency relief. Wells Fargo’s first-quarter profits shrank by 90%, JP Morgan Chase fell by 70%, and Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley all experienced a decrease in profits.
The deadly threat brought by the covid-19 and the secondary economic disaster will bring prosperity that lasted more than ten years to a turning point. Sovereign credit rescue, represented by interest rate cuts, used a strong medicine, but at the same time it also stretched the economic recovery period of the post-epidemic era to an infinite length. At the same time, some fundamental attributes of society, such as the trend of centralization and the accompanying sovereign financial (fiat currency) risks, remain entrenched and difficult to resolve.
It is gratifying that human society has evolved an adversarial system that can be immune to and hedge against the systemic risks of the entire human society. For more than ten years, thanks to the most ubiquitous mechanisms and rules, the core and stability of this system have not been destroyed, but have shown increasing robustness and richness, although richness means superposition, Derivation and risk. This system is Bitcoin.
Bitcoin’s endogenous power-decentralization
On January 3, 2009, Block No. 0 (Genesis Block) of the Bitcoin blockchain network was born. With the first block reward-the mining of 50 bitcoins, Satoshi Nakamoto was in creation. In the block, the title of the front page of the Times was written on January 3, 2009. The British Chancellor of the Exchequer was on the verge of implementing the second round of bank emergency rescue.
The birth of Bitcoin coincided with the global financial crisis. Bitcoin was created to be said to be an act of self-rescue by individuals in human society in the face of the vulnerability of the traditional financial system. Satoshi Nakamoto defined it as “a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.” From the moment it was born, the “decentralized” attribute was written into Bitcoin’s genes.
On May 25, 2020, more than 100 “elderly addresses” that held bitcoin dug up in 2009 and were not spent appeared. The collective signature of the owners of these addresses stated that “CSW is a scammer, and he has no private signatures for these addresses. Key, Lightning Network is a very important achievement, we will continue to expand the capacity, but the solution is not just to change a constant in the code or allow the strong to bully others. We are all Satoshi Nakamoto. “
The “Ancient Address” collective signature occurred in a case of Bitcoin ownership dispute with Craig Steve Wright (CSW), who claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, and Ira Kleiman, brother of former business partner David Kleiman. We are surprised that Bitcoin has such an independent community and a group of such spontaneous guardians. The core of Bitcoin’s “decentralization” has always been there.
Bitcoin’s “decentralization” is also reflected in the currency holding address and computing power distribution. According to Bitinfocharts information, the current total number of Bitcoin holding addresses exceeds 30 million, and over the past 24 hours, more than 790,000 addresses (accounting for more than 1/40 of the total addresses) have remained active;
Data from BTC.com shows that the overall computing power accounts for the leading fish pond F2Pool, and its computing power only accounts for 8.6% of the entire network. In the Bitcoin mining map released by the emerging financial center of Cambridge University, Bitcoin computing power is spread across six continents , Geographically distributed.
Source of information: https://www.cbeci.org/mining_map
Although there are still claims about the concentration of computing power and the concentration of currency in the industry, in the trend of social development-the trend of wealth and power gathering, the Bitcoin network has been developed for more than ten years, and mining investment activities can be so scattered. It is a miracle that participants can break the borders between countries and regions and pursue a common belief and cooperation on “freedom”.
Decentralized bookkeeping, transaction verification, economic rewards and punishments have allowed Bitcoin to exist as an “honest chain”. At present, this development is not limited to the “chain” category. The rules are still originally created by Satoshi Nakamoto The “wheel” (code), but the influence has long spread to the spiritual and human level, including community culture, freedom pursuit, geek spirit, and even the pursuit of wealth and scams.
The connotation of Bitcoin has long been rich and even savage, and richness is also a kind of “decentralization” in a sense.
The great freedom granted by Bitcoin-information disclosure and identity privacy
Bitcoin handles the issues of information disclosure and identity privacy well. Different from the traditional centralized transaction system, every transaction on the Bitcoin chain is publicly queryable. The uniqueness of this network is also that the correspondence between the two parties of the transfer and the individual in the real world is protected, and the hidden door between the chain world and the real world has not been opened.
It is for this reason that so far, Satoshi Nakamoto ’s identity has remained mysterious; as long as the early participants of mining (or trading) in 2009 did not voluntarily announce their identities, we have no way of knowing who they are; Even for malicious attackers on exchanges and DeFi, all we can do is to combine the exchanges or nodes to freeze the stolen assets and prevent them from completing the money laundering process. In general, the hackers cannot be traced.
The Bitcoin network gives participants great freedom, freedom brings innovation, and it also breeds darkness, but the original intention of Bitcoin was not because of the evil of human nature, but was born with the desire to solve practical problems.
Although this market has spawned quite a lot of bubbles and scams, these have not affected the fact that Bitcoin is a good attempt to decentralize. So far, its consensus is still solid, its ecology is still strong, and its users are still Enjoy maximum freedom of speech and behavior.
Of course, we must admit that there are still some problems and challenges in the Bitcoin system. Although bitcoin was born under the name of “electronic cash”, it is still suitable for a small number of people because of its scalability. To process a large number of transactions in a short period of time, it is still unrealistic for the user experience to be silky and insensitive.
Even the current layer 1 and 2 layer expansion technologies commonly explored by community members, including block expansion, lightning network, sharding, etc., are ultimately not the fundamental solution to the problem. Other consensus mechanisms and cross-chain technologies that have not been implemented are essentially , Is not a perfect alternative to PoW.
Pareto optimality is always a trade-off and compromise between various checks and balances in a system. To truly solve this problem, perhaps we have to leap to a higher dimension.
In addition, the stability of Bitcoin is not without flaws. While the stablecoin represented by USDT connects fiat currency with bitcoin, it also inputs fiat currency risk and institutional credit risk into the bitcoin system; quantum computing may be in the future. One day through “computing power brute force” to break through the asymmetric encryption technology on which Bitcoin security depends.
Although this system currently has limitations and uncertainties in the future, since its birth, it has maintained the simplest and stable state. The current status of this system and its future development are ultimately the combined results of the participants ’thoughts and actions. .
And we also see that so many groups in the Bitcoin community are spontaneously acting to maintain their original intention. As the ancient address signer said, “We are all Satoshi Nakamoto”. Will guard it.