Why choose to enter the blockchain from the edge computing direction?
The current blockchain development has gone through ten years, where is the next development direction?
Computing power is the bottleneck of blockchain development, and the current application of blockchain is difficult to take into account in terms of security, low cost and ease of use.
Blockchain is a technological innovation pushed from “code farmers” to the world, and the cost-effectiveness of technology itself is the bottleneck restricting the marketization of blockchain technology. The current global “decentralization” as the core advantage of blockchain has been continuously emphasized in the past decade. However, since the development of blockchain technology, due to the limitation of computing power, we found that there is still a ternary paradox: in the design of decentralized blockchain, based on the existing computing power limitations, security, low cost, Ease of use can only balance two of the three. In Satoshi Nakamoto’s paper in 2008, he proposed the use of distributed computing and storage, which is separated from the centralized hardware or management organization, and the rights and obligations of constructing any node are equal. The ideal blockchain needs to be maintained by the participating computing nodes in the system. This raises the question, how to ensure the low cost, high security and ease of use of blocks when there are differences in the computing power of the participants? A more feasible way to solve these problems is to ask service providers (intermediaries) for entrusted management, or directly use the platform of blockchain service providers. This is also the reason why major companies are vying for the opportunity to develop blockchain projects — to seize the blockchain platform market.
In the process of blockchain industrialization, the development trend of integration with the Internet of Things and edge computing is obvious
According to market research firm Gartner, the number of IoT devices worldwide will reach 8.4 billion in 2017, up from 6.4 billion in 2016
A 31% increase, while the global population is 7.5 billion. The number of IoT devices will reach 20.4 billion in 2020. While the demand for the Internet of Things market is growing rapidly, the demand for new computing power innovation services is also expanding. According to IDC’s forecast, by 2020, there will be about 50 billion smart devices connected to the Internet in the world, mainly involving smart phones, body wearable devices, personal transportation, etc., of which 40% of the data requires edge computing services. Edge computing has strong market potential and is currently a hot spot for various service providers.
From the current development point of view, the integration of edge computing and blockchain is the general trend of the next development of the Internet of Things. First, edge computing provides platform support for the application of blockchain in the Internet of Things. IoT devices have the characteristics of low energy consumption and limited by geographical distribution. The limited computing power and available energy consumption of IoT terminal devices are important bottlenecks restricting their blockchain applications, but edge computing can solve this problem. On the other hand, the integration of edge computing and blockchain can improve the overall performance of IoT devices. However, there are still a series of problems to be solved in this development trend. For example, the combination of blockchain technology and the Internet of Things faces challenges in terms of service hosting, computing performance, response time and mass storage; There are three major risks in the lack of safety and legal supervision. These problems will not only occur in the process of blockchain integration of the Internet of Things and edge computing, but also in the integration process of blockchain and other industries. Therefore, careful consideration should be given when evaluating the application project of blockchain industrial scenarios.
