Everyone who has been on the Internet for many years can more or less personally experience the historical cycle of "the waves behind the Yangtze River push the waves ahead, and the waves in front die on the beach."
Every once in a while, there will be an overwhelming number of industry players, analysts and media, desperately hyping topics that may seem illusory, but are absolutely guaranteed to be closely linked to business speculation, among other things, like Grid computing, blade servers, cloud computing, Internet of Things, machine learning, fog computing, edge computing at the beginning of this century, and blockchain, which has become popular due to the crazy hype of digital currency recently, are all key points that you must be familiar with. After the word inexplicably occupied a large amount of media space, it was unknowingly submerged by more sensational technical marketing terms. "It's over before it even begins." Only in search engines such as Google, historical traces are left for future generations to look up to. .
To put it bluntly, everything remains the same. The development trajectory of modern information science is limited by a single computing container. After all, it has its limits. It cannot be separated from the distributed computing and many dazzling technologies that support huge services. Marketing terms, looking back in hindsight, are just a part of a blind man's approximation, a processed compound deliberately packaged by human beings' stupidity and greed.
"Internet of Things (IoT)" and "Blockchain (Blockchain)" have established a firm foothold on the stage of history. Almost no one dares to deny that "Internet of Everything" and "Decentralization" It will form the basis of "NewInter", but due to many factors, the application level of these two technologies has not yet reached the world's initial expectations. But when the two are combined into one, it will open up another brand-new application field, enough to change human life and the future. The Internet of Things has been popular for so many years, but its large-scale promotion seems to be standing still.
The craze of the Internet of Things is not a matter of just a few years, but it has not been widely seen around you and me. This factor is very complex, and it has both "technical threshold" and "business model" aspects, which prevents us from seeing the IoT world described in science fiction.
What is the technical threshold?
The Internet of Things is nothing more than the deployment of a large number of intelligent terminal devices, but the data collected by these terminals will ultimately serve human beings. This has triggered doubts about mutual trust between people and devices: human beings How to trust devices, how to trust humans, and how to confirm that the data between devices is correct and will not be tampered with.
If something goes wrong in the data transmission and exchange of the Internet of Things, many lives will be lost. I believe no one wants the Internet of Things devices in their home to be hacked and messed with and "suicided", for example. It’s a ridiculous scene to sleep with all the windows closed at night, all household appliances, bathroom gas stove and water heater turned on to maximum to kill you alive. Why do we need a business model?
Next, after obtaining data through the Internet of Things, for example, what is the current temperature in my home, and how are the crops in the farmland growing now? From data collection, data distribution, and data conversion into meaningful information, all the way Sharing data among multiple entities involves "ownership", "rights of use", and "distribution of value", and derives a series of "credit" and "value" issues.
It is one thing to collect a lot of data. How do you make this data generate corresponding value and have the credit foundation, business model and ecosystem to promote its operation? That is another Something happened.
Isn’t it true that over the past few years, there haven’t been enough “IoT platforms” that have been put out there but have been ignored for a long time? The Absurdity of Today’s Digital Currency
Fortunately, the blockchain is the best answer to kicking away these two stones blocking the road, ensuring the credibility and security of the data, and giving the data value. It is transformed into a denominated digital token (Token), so that the huge data produced by the Internet of Things in the actual application process becomes the credit basis of this token, instead of just wasting the earth's resources and wasting huge "mining" electricity. , and apart from the exchange between digital currencies, there are no "commodities" that can be purchased, which completely violates the original intention of "reducing transaction costs" in the nature of currency. This is really the biggest absurdity of digital currency.
Many tech nerds tend to sneer at "business" and hold a dismissive and disdainful attitude, but please think about it. Today, the Japanese anime and manga industry and fan products are so popular all over the world. What is behind the development of the industry? , definitely not otakus who stay at home, but "commercialization" that adds fuel to the flames. The prosperity of all industries in the world can also be traced. It is really not difficult at all to understand such a simple truth. 4 Development Stages of Blockchain Technology
Now when talking about blockchain, most people only think of Bitcoin and Ethereum, but blockchain is not that simple. Although there are different opinions, generally speaking It can be defined as the following 4 stages of development. Blockchain 1.0: Bitcoin not so friendly to polar bears. Blockchain 2.0: Ethereum’s smart contracts. Blockchain 3.0: Realize the integration and interoperability between refining and refining, and then conduct cross-refining contracts. Blockchain 4.0: Create an Internet of Things blockchain. Digital assets come from data in the physical world. Blockchain establishes mutual trust at the bottom of the Internet of Things and fills the trust mechanism for information use. On the one hand, we establish the Internet of Things ecosystem, and on the other hand, we establish business models and economic models. Create a trustworthy IoT blockchain ecosystem. Successful products will never advance by relying on technology alone.
After integrating blockchain, will the development of the Internet of Things be smooth sailing? Of course not. Any successfully promoted products and applications in the world never rely solely on "technology" to achieve success.
If there had been no OSI seven-layer model thirty years ago, the Internet would not have evolved so rapidly. Without a "framework", which is the so-called international technical standard, everyone is "diversified and small in quantity", and there is no economy of scale. No matter how many new startups there are, they will die heroically. After all, the Internet of Things covers the information exchange needs of the entire world. Without an alliance or ecosystem, everyone will be working alone and unable to pool resources. Real implementation and application will only make the esoteric technology stagnant in the wild imagination.
Without a frame, it’s like a house without blueprints. If you only have bricks and cement, you still can’t build a stable high-rise building from the ground. 4-year-long international specifications war
After more than 4 years of specifications war, the ISO/IEC30141 "IoT Reference Architecture" (IoTReferenceArchitecture) promoted by China and assisted by Germany and Sweden at the end of 2017, Passed the international standard draft voting (DIS), and officially put China's "six-domain model (six-domainml)" national standard GB/T33474-2016 on the wave of IoT blockchain. The six-domain model plays a role similar to the OSI seven-layer architecture thirty years ago, and its importance to the future of the Internet of Things is self-evident.
How did this "international standard" take shape? How did the United States, Japan, and South Korea desperately block China's proposal? How many "international wars" are hidden behind the scenes of private wrestling and power struggles among major powers? It's scary, don't ask.
Is there already a corresponding implementation?
"SDChain (Six-DomainChain)", which launched the project in May 2017 and passed the blockchain technology test of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China in October, is the world's first implementation of ISO/IEC30141. The foundation is set up in Singapore. , its digital token SDA (Six-Domain Asset) opened for trading on January 8, 2018.
The "six-domain model" defined by ISO/IEC30141 and the "six-domain chain" created by SDChain, the former is a methodology for integrating the Internet of Things with all walks of life, and the latter provides a more robust decentralized public chain. The bottom layer, and establish practical applications and communities.
As for the "magical coincidence" between the initiator of the SDChain project and the editor-in-chief of the ISO/IEC30141 specification, please pray to the gods of Google yourself, and it is inconvenient to write about it here. Does the security algorithm of the Internet of Things really require blockchain?
This is a highly controversial topic, especially after the "blockless decentralized ledger" IOTA has attracted public attention, the relationship between blockchain and DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph, directed acyclic graph) The pros and cons are constantly being watched and commented upon by everyone.
From a financial point of view, compared with blockchain, DAG is not subject to block size and proof of work (POW), is free of transaction fees, and can save bandwidth and power consumption. In theory, DAG It has stronger scale scalability, but there are also concerns about double payment confirmation and the lack of "security knowledge" in the traditional sense. The canceled transaction fees are also regarded as important in the practical field to improve the security of the blockchain. links, so these characteristics may limit its scope of application. The lessons of history have proved that if there are already academic disputes, there will only be more problems in practical applications. These will need time to prove.
In addition, due to the negative influence of the unhealthy trend of currency speculation, public opinion these days has been distorted into "whoever looks more popular, whose digital currency price is higher, which technology must be more advanced", but The focus is on ecology, not currency. The application scenario should determine the algorithm. Whether it can be "mined" is even less valuable. It does not contribute at all to mankind. The Internet of Things is in the darkness before the dawn
From the time the concept of the Internet of Things was proposed to the popularity of blockchain due to Bitcoin, blockchain has gradually shown its potential to solve the chronic problems of the Internet of Things until The advent of international standards provides an overall architectural framework that can be followed, which is enough to help all walks of life truly clarify what the Internet of Things is. In this way, it took nearly two decades.
Looking further, from the OSI model thirty years ago to today's six-domain model, these thirty years have been an era of transformation from "communication automation" to "execution automation". , things will automatically communicate with each other and exchange what they need. How will we manage the "one trillion" connected devices we can expect? How to improve your life? How to create wealth? This is the greatest challenge of our time.
Companies that enter the Internet of Things industry at this moment and have the ability to provide perfect solutions will have the opportunity to become technology giants in the future. You may be lucky enough to witness the Internet of Things changing our lives and the birth of new technological hegemony. It is worth waiting and watching as we step out of the darkness and prepare to welcome the dawn.