Two Paths of Blockchain Development: Credibility and Usability

The development of blockchain technology presents two main directions: the pursuit of credibility and the pursuit of usability. Usability focuses on making products easy to use, while credibility aims to expand the boundaries of human knowledge, such as how Bitcoin attempts to solve the problem of establishing trust in things and data. The existence of these two demands has led to forks in the development process of blockchain.

Ethereum continues the fundamental philosophy of Bitcoin, but faces some challenges in practical applications. Some consortium blockchains make certain compromises to improve usability, as Ethereum does have some inconveniences in actual use. When the complex logic of smart contracts is introduced into the blockchain, the advantages of consortium blockchains in computation, storage, and communication become more prominent.

Verification is the most critical and challenging aspect of the blockchain industry. Currently, there are three main verification methods: collateral, cumulative game ( approximation ), and built-in efficient market hypothesis. However, projects like Bitcoin have still not fully resolved the issue of verification incentives, which is the root cause of many subsequent problems.

Decentralized assets are an important innovation of blockchain technology. Compared to traditional assets, decentralized assets have a unique risk-return structure. From an information theory perspective, decentralized assets perform better in eliminating uncertainty. Although Bitcoin's price is highly volatile, its computing power and transaction data are completely open and transparent, which makes its uncertainty far lower than that of traditional credit assets or publicly traded company stocks.

Blockchain technology is building a brand new non-cooperative game system. In this system, participants make decisions based on their own conditions and judgments without needing to establish trust relationships with each other. This mechanism is similar to the price mechanism in a market economy and can achieve general equilibrium on a global scale.

Projects like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and NEST are attempting to build non-cooperative game systems and use these systems to deposit decentralized assets. However, providing financial services, achieving value capture, and accumulation in a decentralized environment remains a challenge to be solved. Future developments need to consider value capture and competitive strategies from the initial design stage.