Confirmation of digital information rights can promote a new generation of Internet transformation characterized by Web3.0

Original text: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/LAmT22h389OWnUxQGFynKw Author: Gao Hongbing, Su Zhong (Ali Research Institute) Recently, Han Feng, author of "Blockchain The Wealth of Nations", a visiting scholar at Columbia University, and a visiting researcher at Tsinghua University As a guest at Ali Research Institute, I talked with Gao Hongbing, Vice President of Alibaba Group and President of Ali Research Institute, about topics such as blockchain, digital economy, and the value of data information. During the dialogue, the two industry leaders pointed out that in the face of the new generation of Internet revolution characterized by Web3.0, the confirmation of digital information rights can promote the iterative development of the digital economy. This trend has drawn great attention from China and the United States.

01

"What is a digital account? What does it have to do with the digital economy?"

Feng Han, author of "Blockchain Wealth of Nations", visiting scholar at Columbia University, visiting researcher at Tsinghua University

In 2016, Dean Gao Hongbing once said something that impressed me deeply: "A bank credit building marked by reinforced concrete is being replaced by a blockchain credit based on data."

Zhou Ziheng mentioned in the book "Accounts - The Road to New Economy and New Finance" that before the Internet, the economy revolved around corporate accounts, and banks served companies, not much personal business; now, the Internet economy revolves around Personal accounts are carried out, and the generation of credit also revolves around personal accounts. The data shows that in 2021, the transaction volume of online accounts will exceed one trillion yuan. As a result, the economy and society have undergone essential changes, and the world of small data has entered the world of big data.

As Dean Gao said, from the traditional economy to the network economy, the core is the migration of the credit generation model, from atomized buildings and large enterprises to bitized data and individuals, and the continuous emergence of computing credit has highlighted the The importance of data and digital accounts.

Gao Hongbing Vice President of Alibaba Group, President of Alibaba Research Institute

In 2000, Microsoft internally proposed a network ID card plan (Passport), referring to digital accounts. As a digital account, Passport is the entrance for users to join the digital world. This is a huge business plan. Users can register and log in to this lifetime account through any software under Microsoft, and enter all Microsoft application scenarios. Zhou Ziheng's idea of "Account" on Internet finance echoes Microsoft's technology and commercial digital accounts to some extent. Dr. Zhou tried to use the Internet accounts in the digital economy to describe the future of the Internetization of traditional bank accounts. He found that by Consumer Internet finance driven by mobile payment is on the rise, and its core is precisely this Internet-based financial consumer digital account.

Going back to the sentence "a bank credit building marked by reinforced concrete is being replaced by a blockchain credit based on data", why do big banks choose the most expensive and best places for their offices? Because the bank wants depositors to see the strength of the bank and increase their credit. Entering the era of digital economy, the boundaries between the original public account of to B and the private account of to C in the bank are gradually blurred. Personal accounts also began to deposit and accumulate credit wealth, and the concept of personal balance sheet emerged. An individual's balance sheet is recorded digitally and has the potential to anchor a person's long-term credit. This digital balance sheet did not exist in the past, and in the IT era, it was difficult to do so because of the high cost of manual entry; now, with the popularization and application of WEB and APP, people use personal digital accounts to log in to the network and applications, The server system will automatically record and deposit these digital footprints, and through some scoring models, this personal balance sheet will be formed.

Today, the digital account is the starting point of the metaverse. It is also the entrance for people to join the metaverse. It can be said that without this digital account, there would be no Metaverse.

02

"What does blockchain technology bring to the digital economy?"

Feng Han, author of "Blockchain Wealth of Nations", visiting scholar at Columbia University, visiting researcher at Tsinghua University

The credit brought by blockchain technology is of great significance to the digital economy.

From the paper published by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2013, it can be found that the core of blockchain technology is the issue of asset rights confirmation in the digital age. Why does a content that exists in digital form belong to you? Before the blockchain, this was impossible. The Internet has a huge amount of information, but it has been an "ownerless world" before. The emergence of the blockchain solves the problem of information ownership with asymmetric encryption and private key signatures. Bitcoin is an example. The reason why some people question Bitcoin is precisely because they cannot understand why the string representing Bitcoin is so valuable. Bitcoins must be signed with a private key to be exchanged and show ownership. It is precisely because it solves the problem of right confirmation that Bitcoin meets the most basic definition of assets.

With the development of the digital economy, digital information will be confirmed and turned into assets, which should be one of the directions of future technological evolution. In this process, the blockchain solves the bookkeeping and confirmation of rights, that is, to issue certificates on the issues of "who you are and who you belong to", record transactions on the entire network, and avoid confusion.

From the perspective of the operating system, the confirmation of digital information requires point-to-point communication, which cannot pass through a third party or operator, and requires decentralized storage, that is, information cannot be stored in a centralized server. In addition, there needs to be a "trusted computing capsule", that is, the program that processes data itself needs to be protected. In the future, what can really protect digital information is the trusted computing capsule, which is precisely the most difficult.

From a practical point of view, in 2019, Facebook also proposed a discussion on the ownership of digital information. Nick Grossman, one of the main participants in Facebook's virtual currency Libra, once proposed that Libra is needed as a transaction currency just because data can be traded as personal assets in the future. On December 8 last year, the U.S. Congress organized a hearing on Web 3.0, and cryptocurrency veteran Brian Brooks attended and testified. He expressed his point of view at the hearing that Web3.0 is to realize that individuals own their own data.

Gao Hongbing Vice President of Alibaba Group, President of Alibaba Research Institute

Blockchain is about asset prices, not the underlying logic of the Internet and Metaverse.

The underlying logic of digital transformation is still the TCP/IP protocol, which is the cornerstone of the digital world, and distributed computing and packet switching are the two cores of this protocol set. Due to the Internet Protocol (IP protocol), more hosts and terminals are connected, making computing of great value. 5G has upgraded the performance of this network protocol. Cloud computing, big data, IOT, blockchain, metaverse, etc., are content and applications that run on the TCP/IP protocol.

As far as the realization of data and data value is concerned, it is necessary to recognize the "DIK value law of data", that is, the generation of data value must go from D (data) to I (information) and then to K (knowledge). D (data) is just a raw material, and D (data) must undergo informatization I (information) and knowledge K (knowledge) before it can generate value. In fact, Bitcoin is through the blockchain, and through calculations, data is converted into asset value. Blockchain and computing are exactly the tools and means for data to complete informatization I (information) and knowledge K (knowledge).

The D (data), I (information), and K (knowledge) process of data value realization, just like the value realization of coffee, D (data) is equivalent to planting, we obtain coffee raw materials, and coffee is further roasted It is processed into coffee beans and coffee powder, which completes the industrialization of coffee. Finally, when it enters the Starbucks coffee shop, coffee becomes a product of the service industry, which corresponds to K (knowledge) of the data.

The success of the Internet protocol is due to the fact that the inventors of TCP/IP claimed no intellectual property rights, which allowed for its widespread and rapid adoption. Nowadays, in the field of data development and use, due to the existence of various stakeholders, the cost of data ownership is very high. Microsoft tried to unify the standard by using its own software and portals; Apple built a set of privatization systems and accounts to solve this problem, but no matter who it is, the difficulty of realizing the value of data today is still huge.

03

"How to realize the value of digital information and promote the iterative upgrading of the digital economy?"

Feng Han, author of "Blockchain Wealth of Nations", visiting scholar at Columbia University, visiting researcher at Tsinghua University

We are migrating from Web2.0 to Web3.0. As a decentralized world, the user experience of Web3.0 may even be worse than that of Web2.0, because the central server will solve the problem more smoothly, but in a decentralized world, such as paying with a Bitcoin wallet requires six confirmations , the transaction processing per second (TPS) is more than an order of magnitude worse than that of Web2.0.

However, Web3.0 helps to confirm the rights of information assets. History has repeatedly proved that confirmation of rights facilitates large-scale transactions and wealth movements. The development of China's real estate industry is a good example. With clear property rights, real estate can be legally and normally traded, and banks issue loans to individuals, pushing up housing prices year by year. This shows that the confirmation of asset rights can form large-scale transactions, which will generate huge wealth benefits. However, although real estate has a strong ability to create wealth, it has stifled industrial innovation. In the United States, real estate accounts for a relatively high proportion of the asset structure of only the bottom-level people; people with higher levels of education have stronger innovation capabilities, especially when various financial innovations bring more wealth opportunities. Relatively speaking, the Chinese people's concept is still at the stage of commodities being wealth, thinking that mass production means wealth, but this is no longer the case.

With the emergence of blockchain and Web3.0, if digital information-based confirmation of rights really appears in the future, the digital economy will definitely bring a new wave of wealth movement. But how?

In May 2022, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin co-authored an article with Microsoft Research researchers. The article points out that the existing encrypted digital industry is monotonous, excessively speculative, and excessively financial, and there are almost only hype and speculation. It is hopeless to continue like this, and once there is an external shock, it will collapse. According to the analysis of the article, this phenomenon occurs because there is no credit subject in Web3.0. In real life, all economic contracts and the operation of economic entities will be implemented by the "legal representative". Only by relying on the subject of credit and responsibility can there be long-term, global collaboration. At present, there is no concept of credit subject on Web3.0, and "blockchain credit on data soil" has not yet been formed. Therefore, the future Web3.0 must develop the concept of "credible soul". This "credible soul" is first an account or a private key. Through the transaction data related to this private key, through the clear and non-tamperable characteristics of blockchain technology, a credit score is given, and this "credibility" is given through credit on the chain. "Soul" preliminary content.

To establish blockchain credit in Web3.0, first use the root of credit, which is the account, and then combine credit ratings on the chain to cast credit NFT, which is the "credible soul" mentioned in the article. Users establish credit subjects on this "soul", become the masters of digital information and credit, and realize true decentralization.

If this concept can be realized, it will indeed help to solve many problems in the Web2.0 world:

First of all, it breaks the "data island" problem in Web2.0. At present, different account information of users cannot be connected. Once the information on these isolated islands is bound to one "soul", the user will have the autonomy of information to a certain extent. In addition, in Web3.0, in order to attract users and traffic, new projects will "airdrop" tokens. If a "credible soul" appears, the project can find a truly valuable "soul" through credit evaluation. It will encourage those users with high credit value to enjoy themselves in the Metaverse.

Secondly, the "credible soul" is expected to connect Web2.0 and Web3.0 and promote the formation of a truly global credit market. In the future, from the perspective of protecting user information ownership, the platform should provide convenient support interfaces so that users can have a "trusted soul" in the metaverse, promote new services and business model innovation, and create huge wealth opportunities.

When information is confirmed to people, a decentralized "credible soul" is formed, credit is transferred to accounts in the Metaverse, and new business models in the future will emerge. In my opinion, the real economic upsurge in the future will be brought about by Web3.0 or Metaverse, which can be called Digital Economy 2.0. In the digital economy 2.0, everyone fully owns their own digital information, and the market economy derived from this basis is very powerful. Now, Web3.0 is just around the corner. The US government has said that it must ensure that the Web3.0 revolution occurs in the United States. In this context, China also attaches great importance to this field.

Gao Hongbing Vice President of Alibaba Group, President of Alibaba Research Institute

China recently issued a policy document on building a data-based system, with the goal of building a digital economy with data as a key element. One of the tasks in the document involves the registration of data property rights. The key is how to do this work?

In China, domain name registration now has an income of hundreds of millions of yuan a year. In 1996, I participated in the start-up of China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC). Initially, the Chinese Academy of Sciences assigned 10 establishments, and a division-level unit was assigned from the network center to act as the State Council’s information agency responsible for the registration of “.cn domain names.” The start-up funds for that year were less than 400,000 yuan. At that time, this organization negotiated with international organizations in the name of the Civil Internet Association, and got back the right to register and operate the ".cn" country domain name. At that time, the domain names of ".com" and ".net" were completed through agents and agents.

This can be regarded as the earliest digital asset, which is registered based on the IP address, which is equivalent to the house number. This is the ISP stage (Internet access) of Internet development. Later, the Internet entered the ICP stage (Internet Content). Portal websites digitized and Internetized the content of traditional media, forwarded it, and made money by attracting eyeballs and posting advertisements, which is the so-called portal network era. At this stage, digital assets were not formed, but free content was used to attract traffic, which cost a lot, and many portals struggled to survive. Later, in the era of large-scale Internet applications and e-commerce, the so-called new finance or Internet finance formed by the token system emerged. Tokens are used to lock credit by digital means. The so-called digital assets or digital credits are only one field of the digital economy, not all of them. They are the use data in the field of assets or credit.

The key to the problem is to re-understand data and data applications. This issue still needs to be discussed on the basis of digital accounts. If the government sets up an agency to register data assets, what will be registered? What do you use to register? These operational issues are important.

The key point is that the construction of a data horizontal circulation trading market must be based on the vertical depth development (DIK) of data. Public policies must encourage the public and private sectors to invest resources and costs, and vigorously develop data value (DIK), focusing on the use of computing, blockchain, algorithms, and various computing models to further informatize data and knowledge Only by forming data products on this basis can large-scale circulation transactions be produced.