The Universe of Blockchain Protocols: From Imagination to Reality

The emergence of blockchain technology perfectly integrates the attributes of technology and finance, becoming one of the most valuable fields for research today. Setting aside market fluctuations, we can explore the essence of blockchain protocols from a cosmological perspective.

Protocols in the Universe

Modern cosmological theories suggest that from the Big Bang to the emergence of humanity, countless cycles have occurred. Although we cannot fully comprehend this process, we can explore the mysteries of the universe by studying the physical laws on Earth.

The universe can be viewed as a vast protocol system. The galaxy rotates, the solar system revolves around the galactic center, and the Earth orbits the Sun. These celestial motions follow certain forces, magnetic fields, or the effects of unknown dark matter. For billions of years, there seems to have been a consensus reached between galaxies and celestial bodies, forming natural laws and establishing rules, standards, and agreements.

The Power of Human Imagination

The Earth has evolved from a harsh environment into a habitat suitable for human survival, following a certain natural protocol. As a species, humans possess a unique imagination and continuously expand their horizons.

From the perspective of biological evolution, the emergence of Homo sapiens gradually rendered other hominids less competitive. Homo sapiens developed concepts such as language, family, institutions, currency, nation, globalization, and the internet. These concepts began with imagination, were validated through practice, and ultimately became reality. Everyone is an experimenter in this process, continuously validating our imagination.

As a historian once said, our world is essentially created by human imagination. Everyone is struggling for the world they imagine, and this ability seems to be unique to humanity.

The Essence of Blockchain Protocols

From the Shell Era to the Digital Era, humanity has undergone a long process of development. The Internet Era brought about the HTTP protocol, while Blockchain ushered in the Web3.0 era.

A protocol is a set of rules, standards, or agreements established for data exchange in a network, used for communication between different system entities. In short, a protocol is a set of rules that govern the data exchange between two entities.

Blockchain technology upgrades the rules of data exchange to the rules of value exchange, marking the transition from the mobile internet to the value internet, and also the shift from centralized rules to decentralized rules.

Conclusion

Research on large-scale Blockchain projects requires repeated refinement of the protocol layer. The protocols in the early universe were also extremely insecure, reaching a certain equilibrium state only after a long game of competition. Changing a certain equilibrium or protocol standard of the universe requires enormous energy and cost.

The birth of the Bitcoin protocol has similar characteristics. Over time, this set of protocols has become increasingly secure, robust, and operates automatically. Changing it would incur enormous costs.

Therefore, blockchain practitioners should think more about protocols rather than just products, so as to promote the development of the blockchain industry based on Bitcoin.