The British "Economist" magazine published an article "Trust Machine-How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Changes the World" on the cover, proposing that "the extension of the meaning carried by the technological innovation of blockchain goes far beyond the cryptocurrency itself. . Blockchain allows people to cooperate with each other without mutual trust and without the endorsement of a neutral central authority. Simply put, it is a trust-creating machine." This article has been widely cited by people in the blockchain industry, and combined with the views of "Blockchain is the Internet of Value" and "Consensus is Value", it constitutes an important cornerstone of the blockchain business logic.
Although Bitcoin is earlier than "blockchain", Bitcoin is the first application of blockchain, a perfect integration of theory and practice. Bitcoin is not a blockchain, but if the two are separated, no one will exist.
The question of why Bitcoin is valuable is widely debated. Believers point out that “consensus is value” and there is no need to question its intrinsic value. They believe that from this perspective, gold, which is sought after by traditional secular society, is similar to Bitcoin and has little value in its use. Buffett has never recognized the value of gold, but some people believe that gold has the value of storing value, which represents distrust of other values. Opponents believe that Bitcoin is not currency and has a value of 0. The author does not agree that the value of Bitcoin is zero, but does not agree that this value comes only from blockchain technology, let alone that it comes from blind consensus. Bitcoin is an upgraded version of information transmission on the Internet, subversively realizing borderless and convenient value transfer and flow. With the widespread recognition of Bitcoin and the continuous emergence of application scenarios, the liquidity of Bitcoin will gradually penetrate and change all aspects of society. This is not an illusion, nor an ideal. If you do not participate in it, you will be the out of the future.
The philosopher Socrates tried such a consensus. The view of "consensus is value" is sloppy and charming, combined with the populist spirit, with more than excitement and lack of rationality.
However, Satoshi Nakamoto geniusly integrated these technologies and created the most successful application of blockchain technology to date --- Bitcoin. Bitcoin creatively provides a payment clearing settlement solution, which relies on participants in the commercial network to verify each other and maintain together without the involvement of a centralized organization, and finally realize distributed accounting. Compared with the traditional payment and settlement system, this new system claims that it does not require an independent third party besides buying and selling to join, directly simplifying the traditional four-party model to a bilateral model, and the transaction information is open, transparent and traceable. This is the Internet of Value (perfect trust endorsement-perfect contract design-perfect value flow-perfect anti-humanity).