A week ago, Facebook, the world's largest social networking platform, officially launched Libra, once again driving the global financial infrastructure services built on digital currency and blockchain technology.
Within a week, whether it is the elderly people who are in the currency circle or the people who eat melons, the interpretation of Libra continues to ferment and spread in the circle of friends. Most of the arguments about Facebook's currency are directed at its ambition to build global inclusive finance without borders, and today we hope to talk more about this hotspot from the perspective of technology that Libra brings.
Social networking is the first impression people have on Facebook, and from a revenue perspective, Facebook is an advertising company because more than 90% of its revenue comes from advertising revenue. This centralized profit model constrains Facebook's further growth. What is even more worrying is the advertising cash flow, which is now under the pressure of user data privacy protection. This is why Facebook recently announced that “building a privacy-first social network” will be its new strategic direction.
In fact, we have seen that in recent years, "classical" Internet companies have quietly transformed or expanded their business scope in the new era. The growth logic of Internet products that have been driven by traffic has also changed. Amazon is supporting its rising valuations because of the growth of business lines such as AWS Cloud Computing. Alibaba and Tencent rely on the rapid spread of Alipay and WeChat payment to quickly expand their layout to the financial sector. Huawei was once considered a mobile phone company because of the good sales of mobile phones. However, it was the old business of 5G technology research that eventually led to the suppression of the United States.
And how could Facebook not be under the seemingly quiet appearance, the undercurrent?
When chatting with friends in Silicon Valley, many people are judged about Facebook's ambitions. The issue of currency is not surprising to them. Compared with Google's two founders, they have long been less involved in corporate affairs. Facebook's founder, Zuckerberg, has been a pro-initiative, fighting on the front line, and this has prompted the company to find a way forward in this era of social end, or the era of mobile Internet upgrades to the industrial Internet.
From the current point of view, Facebook seems to use his existing resources to play a best card, and is fully prepared and pragmatic.
After reading the Libra technical white paper, Feng Xiaodong, a blockchain technology expert and founder of Mixin Network, said that he is optimistic about Facebook's action: "Libra's solution is very important to let everyone know, not just government regulators, banks, Technical geeks or ordinary consumers, understand that the meaning of distributed ledgers lies in the fair and transparent technical supervision of finance. Projects such as Mixin Messenger, Telegram, Kik and MobileCoin that are now known are in this direction. Efforts, and Facebook's influence let more people know the correctness of this direction."
As a payment and financial product, Libra has enough thinking about security and compliance, and gives a solution: as a possession The giants of more than 2 billion users, combined with other large companies with the same social influence and technical capabilities, such as Uber, Visa, Paypal, eBay, etc., use the alliance chain model to manage. This approach is a good choice for system maintenance and a good choice for meeting compliance challenges. This is also evident from the technical implementation of Libra: in terms of privacy, Libra uses technology that matches regulatory requirements and does not support untrackable transactions like Monero.
When it comes to technology implementation, we will also be curious. For a payment product, in addition to safety and compliance, what technical indicators should we focus on?
That is the "final confirmation time."
Final confirmation time is a very important indicator for retail and daily high frequency processing. WeChat and Alipay basically provide real-time transaction confirmation, so if a payment technology needs to be retail-oriented, it must provide a short enough final confirmation time.
The final confirmation time does not exist in Bitcoin. Bitcoin only has the probability of double spend (double flower attack). It is generally considered that the probability of double spend after 6 blocks is extremely low.
Many blockchain projects tend to emphasize large processing power, ultra-high TPS (number of transactions per unit time), and there is no clear technical requirement for “final confirmation time”. At this point, Libra gives enough Pay attention, the implementation is almost 10 seconds.
For application developers, if the misunderstanding of the arrival time will lead to financial losses, just as a large number of EOS DApp developers mistakenly believe that EOS can be confirmed in 1 minute, in fact, the transaction is irreversible in 3 minutes.
And we see that, similar to Libra's design philosophy, the blockchain startup project Mixin Network has its own way of thinking about the final confirmation time. Mixin Network is a lightning network of digital assets dedicated to fast and free point-to-point transfers. Mixin achieves a final confirmation of less than 1 second without relying on the new algorithm. It only modifies the process of processing the transaction data by the node, first verifies that the transaction is valid, and verifies that the valid transaction can enter the DAG storage structure.
Such a modification, in fact, the bottleneck lies in the performance of the node verification transaction and the network transmission performance, that is, the performance of the existing Internet technology, so the white paper says that trillion tps means limited to the physical bottleneck, if the transaction verification algorithm can be improved, for example From eddsa multi-signature, to Schnorr multi-sign, the network transmission load is greatly reduced, which naturally improves performance.
For the user demand side, the final confirmation time is one of the most important criteria for the C-end consumer to consider whether to use this payment product. In the past, we may be used to swiping cards and paying cash. Nowadays, we are accustomed to using WeChat payment and mobile payment software like Venmo, in order to pursue faster and better final confirmation time.
In the past two days, at the Bitcoin 2019 Bitcoin Conference in Silicon Valley, we saw a lot of application scenarios similar to the “WeChat Payment Sweep” in the digital currency world: an engineer bought a sandwich for his friend, his friend Then immediately used a bitcoin lightning network wallet scan code to pay 50,000 Cong (one bite a billion), equivalent to 5.5 dollars.
Such a scenario will probably appear more in the future, and for Libra, the Bitcoin Lightning Network, and the Mixin Network, it will be a huge market opportunity.
At present, the entire network transaction data of Mixin Network has been very impressive, reaching 300 million. These trading volumes are mainly provided by Ocean One's matching engine. Ocean One's matching function is used by applications such as Coinview, Exin and Messenger. Mixin's chain exchange ocean.one also contributes a portion of the volume.
Mixin cuts in from digital asset trading, and Venmo and WeChat pay a very similar transfer from friends, and Libra has its own entry point. It's easy to imagine: WhatsApp's friends transfer money; Instagram gives Net Red V rewards Also, the people described in their promotional videos to help those who are unable to enjoy mobile financial services in underdeveloped areas can quickly trade with the help of smartphones and blockchain technology.
In summary, Libra's release is a sincere work of Facebook's blockchain application research for a year. Although it is only the beginning, we are very much looking forward to the world's largest social networking giant in this so-called social end era. A gorgeous turn.
