Recently, Roy Li was exclusively interviewed by block001.cn, expressing his views on the problems to be addressed by IoT, its integration with blockchain, applications and future development etc.
Reporter from block001.cn: From the perspective of blockchain technology itself, what do you think of the current stage of technology development? Someone said recently that, blockchain is a bubble. How do you feel?
Roy Li: In terms of the maturity of blockchain technology itself, it is still in a relatively early stage. After all, this technology was not introduced until 2009, and some scattered concepts did exist before 2009, but it was in 2009 that it really entered the view of the public. By that time, artificial intelligence had already been popular for five or six decades. Relatively speaking, blockchain is still an early technology and contains many technical obstacles. The biggest problem lies in that, it will take a long time for blockchain to be fully applied into projects
Blockchain has been attached with very strong economic drive. This economic drive has resulted in that, even if the technology is not mature enough at an early stage, which does not matter, with strong economic drives, we can discount future values and wait for the infrastructure to mature.
We are optimistic about the blockchain technology in the long term, and the problems of infrastructure can be concluded. When there are sufficient research and development capabilities, we can solve them.
This is similar to the situation in the 1990s, when we used to believe that the 21st century would belong to bioengineering, or artificial intelligence, or the robot’s world, but did not expect the Internet to develop so fast. Since it has a significantly strong economic drive, people have had huge imaginative space in the economic business of the Internet, so that the Internet develops even faster than robots. In other industries, such as bioengineering and robots, etc., due to their slow cycles, we have a lot of uncertainties in our imagination of its future.
We should look at the current blockchain in two ways. Indeed, it is technically immature. Each technology should undergo a process from immaturity to maturity. However, the most important thing is that, powerful economic drive propels blockchain to become mature faster than other technologies, and any small progress in blockchain will lead to huge economic value.
Reporter from block001.cn: From the very beginning, people say that the practical application of IoT and its integration with industries are consumer finance, and its integration with IoT is rightly the best scenario. Do you agree with that?
Roy Li: Finance and IoT are not in parallel, and IoT contains many financial elements. For example, equipment leasing is a kind of finance. We used to only buy a car, but now we can rent one or share one. The real right is divided, and the right to use is directly divided for sale based on the time and object of use. It is virtualized, which is, on its own, a technical innovation.
Technical innovations can be achieved through IoT plus blockchain. IoT addresses such a problem: real rights may be switched and transacted through IoT. Blockchain addresses liquidation of real rights, maintaining data consistency. For instance, you may pay and drive a car for two hours. You may pay and charge for one hour, and what comes next can be done with IoT+blockchain. Should blockchain focus on finance or something else? That depends on your return on investment. When it reaches a critical point, recognized by all on the market, the industry will naturally grow up.
Reporter from block001.cn: IoT is a highly broad concept, with tons of segment industries, such as agriculture, etc. Which segment industry is most promising with blockchain?
Roy Li: Asset-backed securitization and supply chain finance, i.e. related to IoT and finance. For example, a power plant may generate power; an investment of 6 million into a power plant may generate one megawatt, and it may generate power worth hundreds or over one thousand yuan each day …. This power generation itself can be securitized, as an investment into a power plant. However, from the perspective of personal investment, I may think the price is excessively high. Can the investment be made by one hundred persons? It is already like this on the market. But, is so much power generated? When the power kilowatt you tell me is different from what I say, there is an issue of trust to be addressed. At investment, we can calculate its expected annualized rate of return. For this reason, as long as something is related to finance and real right transaction, or close to money, it will surely be blockchained
Reporter from block001.cn: Can the blockchain technology be directly applied to IoT to achieve “integration”?
Roy Li: At first, IoT itself is quite complete. The first step of integration of blockchain with IoT is whether centralized databases can be converted into distributed databases. Do you adopt public blockchain, or alliance chain? Once data are adopted and public chains are applied, it should be guaranteed that there are large quantities of users at the terminal who are willing to be connected to your scenario.
Next, there should be many app developers willing to develop, based on your public blockchain, more interesting scenarios like those contracts related to things. Blockchain and IoT are still at different positions: IoT is just like Android in our mobile Internet, and blockchain is just like Android + mobile Internet system. How shall blockchains be stored indeed? In Oracle, or simply a centralized database for storage? Blockchains only address data consistency, instead of all the problems in IoT.
Only some data in IoT are applied in blockchains. You must guarantee its consistency if you want to solve the problem of trust among different users, parts and aspects in upstream and downstream sections in the industry. By solving the problem of mutual trust among them, you create huge values — trust is among the most valuable things among people.
Reporter from block001.cn: After your Ruff Chain project is integrated with blockchain technology, what do you expect to utilize this differential technology to continue project extension?
Roy Li: Currently, our goal still focuses on enterprise-level blockchains, and this road is very long. This road is rough, but, for Ruff Chain, we can not expect quick results. At present, I do not fancy very much ideas like creating one public blockchain in half a year or one year and then turning it into a huge ecology.
To be really firm in an industry, in particular, you must have thorough understanding of it. Seeing companies offering enterprise services, many people hope to turn them into those dealing with socialization and achieve rapid growth in three months. Is that feasible? You must understand the industry. Even if you’re dealing with document management in an enterprise, you must spend one year understanding what kind of things you need to do.
What we’re doing seems relatively complex, but, it is due to the depth of the industry that there are opportunities. Without a sufficient industry depth, it may turn out to be a purely money contest or industrial merger. The IoT public blockchain has not been well created; enterprises have not input enough time. We should make real efforts, in IoT, to discover the real demand of IoT. The real demand of IoT is, currently, “things” are highly fragmented, without relatively unified standards. We desire to connect these things together, allowing for use by my applications.
Finally, I developed an app, and this product aims to provide a corresponding driver for a camera or sensor. Currently, all these technologies are not mature, or in different modes. Under such circumstances, proper integration alone would consume 80% to 90% of my energy, which is desperate. If enterprises do not realize this and rashly enter IoT, that’s quite inadvisable.
Ruff Chain spent a large amount of time dealing in access. For example, with an Android cellphone, for any screen, camera or gyroscope of any brand, I can scan a 2D code with WeChat and the camera. There is no such a system in IoT, and we’ve spent a lot of time dealing in such a wise. For security or for entertainment, a camera, being the brand of Hikvision or any other, can be called for face recognition or code scanning. Only when “offline products are uniformly abstracted” in IoT can these data go onto the chain. Otherwise, without proper abstraction, even if it is a product with extraordinary performance, how can others access you? The majority of IoT developers have no powerful knowledge of blockchain or other underlying technologies.
The world will always belong to those people “without strong technical power, but with powerful force of implementation”. We might have a look at the mobile Internet. Look at companies such as DiDi and Uber. They do not need the most outstanding engineer from Huawei; they only need the creation of product first, followed by gradual optimization — long illness makes a patient a good doctor.
Only by lowering the development threshold for developers can these things be well done. The development threshold of IoT is the highest, which requires understanding of protocols and all the knowledge. What Ruff Chain did in the past few years was about this matter, lowering its threshold. We did not encounter the blockchain technology in the past few years. We have become an industry pioneer in this field. Our knowledge of “blockchain + IoT” was not upgraded until last year.
It can not be made into ecology until it is friendly and low-sensitivity enough to developers — anyone with only one year’s work experience can develop an application of “my own IoT ecology”. Remember: it’s never ecology when there’re only big names who can do it.
