We have grown accustomed to a world dominated by a single asset class: most people have deposits of just one fiat currency for life. In the blockchain era, however, thousands of cryptocurrencies like BTC, ETH, BTM pop up, and the way of tradings has changed from people-to-people to people-to-AI or AI-to-AI payments.
Therefore how can we stimulate the efficient and free circulation of multiple digital assets to inject fresh vitality into the cryptocurrency market?
Duan Xinxing, CEO of Bytom delivered a speech at 2018 Bytom global dev conference which was held in Hangzhou on Nov. 11 and proposed solutions in terms of programming languages, side chain and cross-chain technologies and three-layer architecture. In his speech, he also detailed the progress of Bytom and the project ’s future development.
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Here is a full transcript of Duan’s speech:
Blockchain and Digital Assets
For some, blockchain is seen as a software that has certain codes to crack some specific problems and needs periodic upgrades. Others think blockchain is a protocol which defines how participants on the blockchain interact with each other, just like TCP/IP.
Of course, blockchain is indeed a platform, especially true in public blockchains which allow developers to build various applications upon it as a network operating system does. To put it simply, “blockchain is an open source campaign powered by economic incentives”.
As some people are curious about the differences between Bytom and Ethereum or Bitcoin, the answer is quite simple: the vision of Bytom is to creating diverse assets and a programmable economy. During the development process of Bytom, we have made two expansions:
First, expand cash into diverse assets. Divers assets include native digital assets, the types of assets generated by the blockchainization of physical assets, and more complex interactive assets;
Second, expand the Bytom-based payment into various activities in a well-functioned economy such as registration, issuance, settlement, and transaction. Hence a simple payment system has turned into a programming economy with diverse assets.
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Two Reasons Behind Using Diverse Assets
Duan points out two critical reasons: one is post-90s or even post-95s generation’s views on the world have radically changed. The renminbi and the banknote themselves are a kind of virtual asset. The paper money’s value is created based on the users’ consensus and public’s understanding of its role to play in various occasions.
It is natural that new generations fully embrace diversified digital assets just as we embraced paper money decades ago. Therefore, I think the arrival of Gen Z will promote the prosperity of diverse assets, a fact widely accepted by the public.
The second reason touches on the development of artificial intelligence(AI), the Internet of Things(IoT), and the Machine Economy. You can’t imagine a legal gateway sitting between two IoT devices, like the bank to clear and settle transactions.
In the future, the machine-to-machine interactions require different types of assets in a more efficient operating environment and intelligent environment. In fact, we’ve found that the automatic data purchase based on Bytom enables the encryption of both sides’ public keys to generate two types of assets so that the latter public key holder can interact with the original owner. The intermediate platform is unable to decrypt data in the process, thus ensuring the data safety.
Bytom to Support Diverse Assets and Technical Development
As of today, 1714 product statuses of Bytom has been submitted and 27 versions have been iterated since the first test Network beta version released. Bytom has 28 core developers and attracted the attention of roughly 1000 developers globally. Bytom full-node wallet latest version is 1.0.7 at the press time.
In terms of Bytom’s product design and architecture, we adopt a classic model —UTXO or an unspent transaction output— rather than the popular model endorsed by other public chains which require users to set up an account first, and then to create a contract in the account to control asset flows. Bytom itself is a native asset public chain that is born for assets.
We continue to extend UTXO structure and give different tags to UTXO so that different types of assets will be generated. Assets on Bytom blockchain can be divided into small amounts, as well as UTXO. If the asset needs to be programmable, we can develop a programmable language on it, and use UTXO to do complex operations. Assets can also be destroyed. We still adopt a safer and more efficient model to build our asset system.
Bytom’s technology boasts two features:
Firstly, BUTXO supports more types of assets;
Secondly, different from Bitcoin’s temporary script of a transaction, Bytom develops our own high-level programming language, defines a certain type of asset and corresponding parameters and conduct intelligent operations with multi-signature. To this end, Bytom has put forward its own Equity language, which is a Turing complete and interpretive high-level language.
Many participants in the latest Bytom Dev Conference used the langue, which is beyond expectation. We have never thought about the anti-counterfeiting, traceability and registration solutions powered by Bytom blockchain for copyrighted work. But developers have implemented these features by calling the function.
Bytom’s tech stack adopts three-layer architecture due to the existence of a ‘Blockchain Trilemma’. The key issue for a blockchain is how to balance security and efficiency. In real life, the problem can be solved with a product and engineering perspective. The underlying protocol is focused on security, while layer 2 and layer 3 for concurrency, scalability, and efficiency and programmability.
Currently, Bytom provides developers around the world with a development template and tools, as well as 8 contract templates, including single-signature contracts, multi-signature contracts, crypto-to-crypto trading contracts, trusted third party custodian contract, loan contracts, call option contract, and betting contracts. Many developers have made a lot of interesting things, for example, Greek developers have designed three types of assets for government environmental agencies and chemical companies with the use of the multi-signature contract and other features. Each type of asset can identify the amount of emissions and waste.
Moreover, scientific data extracted from the process can add indicators for Ethereum. Hence it is possible to program more and more social relations and production relations.
Besides, our own core developers are also conducting active explorations. Two sentences— ‘Information is Power. Computing is power.’— is written in the Genesis block of Bytom. But what is ‘Computing is power’? Does it mean we should blindly worship ‘power’?
Information can be considered as power and play a role in the social development because everyone can obtain information from the Internet and it brings benefit to the public. Yet traditional monopoly of computing power cannot benefit everyone.
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Numerous entrepreneurs and research institutions flock in the artificial intelligence(AI) space, and a large number of NGOs are working on bioinformatics processing, speech recognition, image recognition and data processing, but they do not control computing power. What does computing mean to them? Can they use Bytom blockchain to do improvement? Our exploration has proved that it is a possible development direction.
The left image shows Bytom’s mining pool. This calculation method that supports inference learning has been included in Bytom’s consensus algorithm. When there is a certain task, we can identify the redundant and idle computational power as an asset in Bytom, and then leverage the computational power to facilitate tradings so that AI companies which have data but lack of computational power or those that have creative and visionary ideas can get access to computing assets via Bytom, advancing the development of the AI industry.
Dapp is not the Only Direction
Bytom is a fledgling blockchain. The white paper was published in June 2017; the mainnet was released on April 24, 2018; the virtual machine and programming language were unveiled in July 2018. In August, Bytom announced the launch of its Global Dev Competition, an event committed to promoting the application of blockchain technology and strengthening the exchange and collision of technical peers in both China and abroad.
Dapp is not necessarily the only development direction in the future for Bytom, because the amount of daily activity and the usability of DApps on other public chains are very low. We currently focus on supporting the developer community and Dapps. Bytom is not only a Dapp, but also serves as an accessory and a plug-in in the system.
Blockchain itself cannot solve all problems, but as a technology, it can work together with other technologies to generate a set of solutions to more problems.
Bytom faces two challenges in the future. For a start, it needs to achieve scalability based on the Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus; the second challenge is how to develop more scalable applications with high usability on a higher level.
Bytom now is dedicated to building side chains on the network. For one thing, BUTXO offers better concurrency; for another, side chains and subchain models with the application layer can solve such problems. For example, we are able to develop subchains for national secret test scenarios, deploy nodes, and perform various debugging and configuration upon the blockchain to meet specific requirements.
Meanwhile, Bytom partners with many top universities and research institutions to develop Zero-Knowledge Proof technology. The next step for Bytom is to enhance school-enterprise and international cooperation. We plan to work with Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Tongji University, and Tsinghua University to improve our research teams of engineering, underlying protocols and patents.
It can be seen that developers from all over the world contribute to the launch of this Dev conference and the creation of Bytom ecosystem. At present, Bytom is among only a few public blockchains in China that enjoy a relatively complete community of blockchain developers. We have a community of about 600 active developers from China, the US, Japan, and South Korea. Further, we will expand cooperation with enterprises and institutions to develop more meaningful service products for the real economy and the virtual economy in the future.
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In the end, what does Bytom mean? It connects the byte world and the atom world. Some say Bytom refers to a type of asset and value, while others think it represents liquidity and consistency, as well as information and substance. Here we want to emphasize that Bytom is a technology platform, a kind of technical means or a technology open source campaign. Further, Bytom also means technology and prosperity. We hope Bytom and blockchain technology can drive great social progress and the economic prosperity.
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