The new Internet and blockchain

This post originally appeared on ZeMing M. Gaoswebsite, and we republished with permission from the author. Read the full piecehere.

The real Bitcoin and blockchain

Blockchain was invented 14 years ago in the form ofBitcoin. As designed by its inventorSatoshi Nakamoto[1], it is a law-abiding dis-intermediating Peer-to-Peer cash payment system built on an IP-to-IP decentralized protocol compatible with IPv6, with unbounded scalability and extremely low transaction costs. Its native token, bitcoin, is meant to be a commodity traded in the market purely for its actual utility instead of a vehicle of speculative investments.

The usefulness of the electronic Peer-to-Peer cash system comes from its having a unique combination of two seemingly contradictory properties at the same time, namelyphysicalityanddigitality, which were previously thought not possible to be combined at the base system-level:

(1)Physicality: physical cash-like instant settlement (versus the other account-based financial assets that require a long and costly process of settlement), and