互聯網革命vs區塊鏈革命系列
前言
馬克吐溫曾經說過：“歷史不會重演，但它確實會押韻”。1994年，《連線》雜誌的主編凱文·凱利著就了《失控：機器、社會與經濟的新生物學》一書，這是關於社會進化、特別是互聯網發展的“先知預言”，後來成為《黑客帝國》主演們的必讀物。25年後，八維資本試圖捕捉互聯網和區塊鏈革命之間的相似之處，以幫助人們更好地瞭解技術生命週期和區塊鏈行業的未來。我們將在接下來的幾周內發佈一系列文章，歡迎訂閱我們的微信公眾號。
文章系列，敬請期待：
互聯網與區塊鏈革命之：
part1:早期的成功產品
part2:顛覆性公司的起源
part3:早期的挑戰
part4:新概念，估值和時機
part5:我們是在1994年嗎？ 下一步該怎麼辦？
互聯網與區塊鏈革命：早期的挑戰（第3部分）
作者：Remi Gai @ 八維資本
編譯：八維研究院
八維研究院原創，轉載請註明出處
本文是整個系列的第三部分：
在新興技術的早期階段，可擴展性，成本和市場教育方面經常存在巨大挑戰，這限制了突破性應用程序的開發和大規模採用。 然而，這些挑戰通常隨著時間的推移而得到解決。我們目睹了互聯網的發展，同樣期待在區塊鏈中看到類似的進步。
可擴展性和成本：
2017年CryptoKitties發佈後的擁堵的以太坊交易
儘管目前的互聯網連接速度很快，但在早期階段，互聯網的可擴展性不高，成本卻很高昂。 1996年8月7日， AOL（美國在線） 的互聯網服務因承載不了互聯網用戶數而崩潰，並且過了19個小時都沒有修復。 在那時，每天都有越來越多的美國人開始上網，而AOL是最大的互聯網服務提供商，其他的競爭對手包括Prodigy，CompuServe和MSN 等。互聯網本身並沒有崩潰，但訪問它的能力暫時支撐不住了，對於許多已經開始在生活中依賴網絡的人們來說 ，這是一個大問題 。
這與2017年12月在區塊鏈世界中發生的情況類似。CryptoKitties在以太坊上增加了鏈上交易量，堵塞了網絡。大多數用戶都無法在區塊鏈上完成交易。除非他們願意出價高額的Gas費，這在社區裡引發了很多混亂和困擾。
以太網網絡的堵塞一方面證明了到目前位置區塊鏈技術在更復雜的情景下非常缺乏可擴展性，另一方面，在互聯網和區塊鏈技術的早期，網絡堵塞和可擴展性不足也證明了這些技術的重要性和潛力。在未來的幾年內，我們亟需開發出更好的可擴展性解決方案，來支持不斷增長的用戶群和需求。
美國互聯網和無線移動通信的平均速度
在互聯網初期，打造一個初創企業需要高額的網絡費用和成本，這與區塊鏈行業的現狀也是類似的。那個時候，上網的過程需要一個調制解調器（modem）和一條電話線，所有的在線服務都需要維護一個本地modem網絡，以供人們撥入。當時最受歡迎的在線服務- AOL美國在線，每月收取9.95美元，可以無限制訪問5小時，而每增加一小時的費用為2.95美元，以今天的標準看，這是非常受限的服務。然而，隨著時間的推移，與DSL的寬帶連接最終實現，從而提高了互聯網速度，到2014年，互聯網速度比1999年快了200倍，便宜了90%。同樣，我們也見證了無線移動通信速度在過去幾年中的增長，從2G技術的低於1Mbps到4G技術的25Mbps，使新的服務通過移動電話（如音樂和視頻流）變得可行和實用。隨著時間的推移，圍繞可擴展性和成本的限制逐漸消除，更復雜的和帶寬更密集的應用程序變得實用和可行。
不同項目的交易速度
在區塊鏈領域，我們還處於技術開發週期的早期階段，我們面對著可擴展性和成本的挑戰，這大大阻礙了更復雜的應用場景和大型用戶群的使用。低可擴展性意味著開發人員或用戶必須支付更高的費用才能超過隊列中的其他事務，以減少等待時間。截至2019年2月， 以太坊的平均交易費用約為0.13美元 ，其中更復雜的DAPP（如鏈上游戲）將很快收取高昂的交易費用。雖然並非每個行動都需要在鏈上發生，但我們仍迫切需要增加區塊鏈的可擴展性，以支持不斷增長的DAPP數量，以及支撐在同一個分佈式賬本上的所有日常交易（VISA每秒處理24000個交易）。許多項目正致力於通過不同方式擴展區塊鏈的交易速度 ，並在可擴展性，安全性和分佈式之間進行可變的權衡。
隨著最近EOS和TRON（分別為4,000和750 TPS）主網的推出，過去幾個月內我們看到更復雜性能的DAPPs的數量有所增加， 我們期待，隨著區塊鏈可擴展性的延展，這一良好的趨勢將延續下去。 總的來說，業內正在探索不同的擴展解決方案，如
新穎的數據結構（Sharding，Tangle，DAG，Coda等），第2層解決方案（Sidechains，off-cha ins，散列時間鎖等），以及更有效的一致性算法（ POS，DPOS，Casper，Avalanche，Hashgraph等）。這些解決方案將逐步增加帶寬並降低區塊鏈交易的成本，從而實現新的使用場景和服務 。
1999 - 2010年啟動創業公司的成本降低
此外，我們預計啟動區塊鏈初創公司的成本也會隨著時間的推移而降低。在互聯網革命期間，創辦一家初創公司的平均成本從1999年的500萬美元大幅下降到2005年的50萬美元，再到2010年的5萬美元。
第一波成本降低的原因是由於開源Open Source （這意味著不再需要UNIX，Web服務器和Oracle數據庫的許可證）和並行計算Parallel Computing（這意味著不需要購買昂貴的Sun服務器和EMC存儲）。 然後，第二波成本下降是由於雲計算Cloud Computing的成熟 ，由AWS推廣開來，雲計算提供了網絡存儲（S3），處理能力（EC2）和根據雲上的流量進行自動擴展或縮放的能力。
根據Gartner的說法，部署一個概念驗證的企業級區塊鏈的起始成本為275,000美元，最高可達數百萬美元。而在公有區塊鏈（如以太坊，Neo，EOS等）上搭建簡單DAPPs的部署和交易費用可能會花費$30-85k，而且目前的區塊鏈人才短缺，人力成本也要花費很多錢。
與互聯網的發展類似，我們希望，在啟動區塊鏈項目時可以不斷降低成本。未來，區塊鏈交易變得更具可擴展性和更便宜，企業級的更多全棧平臺（BaaS 託管 - Kaleido，AWS，Azure，Oracle等），開發平臺（NoOps - Esprezzo），中間件（Omnitude）和開發者工具（Mist，Geth，Remix等）正在出現，而更多的人才也將遷移到區塊鏈領域來。
教育：
曾經，全世界50％的CD都有AOL標誌
教育是新技術被應用和接納，降低進入門檻，幫助“跨越鴻溝”（Geoffrey Moore創造的一個術語 ）的重要推動力 。 在認知鴻溝未被跨越之前 ，技術通常被視為一個異類，一旦真正跨越鴻溝，人們就會認為它是一種安全的消費品。
在互聯網的初期，Jan Brandt被聘為AOL的營銷副總裁，她的職責是擴大用戶群。在市場調查中 ，她意識到人們不知道該如何使用計算機，因為“有人拿起電腦鼠標開始將它指向計算機，就像遙控器一樣”，所以“啟蒙”教育是很重要的。與其告知用戶一種產品（比如電腦）勝過另一種產品（比如電視），還不如告訴他們到底怎麼去使用電腦。
AOL實施的營銷策略是免費發放試用磁盤CD給人們試用，結果效果出奇的好。人們開始註冊並在線上綁定他們的信用卡。AOL對這一戰略進行了大量的投資，使CD隨處可見，在人們的郵箱裡，在新電腦上，在雜誌上，通過電影租賃等方式分發出去。因此，在全球生產的CD中，有50%都有美國在線的標誌，他們一舉超越了競爭對手，並在幾年間將其用戶群從20萬增加到2500萬。總的來說，AOL的營銷活動是一個很好的例子，它通過降低早期用戶中技術水平較低的人群的進入門檻來推動產品的大規模應用。
從Coinbase學習並獲取0x程序
為了推動加密世界的發展，我們已經看到了許多關於教育下一代加密技術和區塊鏈技術用戶的舉措，其中包括由 德勤 或 IBM 舉辦的大型會議，如 Consensus共識大會，企業教育， ConSensys Academy 等開發人員教育 和大學教育，如 ConSensys Academy區塊鏈教育網絡 。
許多公司還試圖通過活動和營銷活動贈送Token或冷錢包。最近， Coinbase推出了一項 學習和賺取加密程序 ，為完成他們的教育課程的用戶提供加密貨幣獎勵。目前，與傳統支付解決方案（如 Venmo 或 Paypal ）相比，區塊鏈的使用仍有很多缺陷和摩擦，並要求用戶具備一些基礎知識（私人/公共密鑰，Gas費/交易費等），更不用說與密鑰管理和交易相關的不可回撤的風險。我們仍然處於行業的早期階段，全球採用率不到1％，對普通大眾進行關於加密貨幣，區塊鏈和密鑰管理的培訓對於行業的發展至關重要。 像 AOL 和 Coinbase 這樣的大公司可以通過贈送免費試用的CD和加密貨幣來給用戶提供額外的激勵，這將有助於降低用戶的進入壁壘並推動技術的普及。
總的來說，不可否認的是，過去幾年，區塊鏈行業已經在解決可擴展性、成本和市場教育方面取得了重大進展。雖然我們還處於這一技術週期的早期，但我們相信，區塊鏈將以與互聯網類似的方式慢慢成熟，並逐漸變得更具可擴展性、更經濟實惠和更實用，最終，區塊鏈技術和產品將會被普羅大眾廣泛的採用。
後記
馬克吐溫曾經說過“歷史不會重演，但它確實會押韻”。 我們試圖在互聯網和區塊鏈革命之間勾勒出一些相似之處，以幫助公眾更好地瞭解技術的生命週期。請留下您的想法和評論，希望本系列文章將為行業提供一些有價值的觀點。
資料來源：
“互聯網如何發生” ，由 Brian McCullough 撰寫 。
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/reply-unending-chasm-how-survive-geoffrey-moore/
https://www.coinbase.com/earn/0x
https://bothsidesofthetable.com/why-has-seed-investing-declined-and-what-does-this-mean-for-the-future-6a9572357130
https://bothsidesofthetable.com/a-deep-dive-into-what-has-really-changed-in-venture-capital-f5d225f7f8
https://howmuch.net/articles/crypto-transaction-speeds-compared
https://ylv.io/how-much-does-it-costs-to-run-dapp-in-2018/
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/ethereum-transactionfees.html
英文原文：
Internet vs BlockchainRevolution: Challenges in the Early Days (Part 3)
This article is part of the Internet vs Blockchain Revolution Series. If you areinterested in reading the other articles.
In the early stage of emergent technologies, there are often challenges around scalability, cost,and education, limiting the development of breakthrough applications and massadoption. However, these challenges are generally solved over time as we havewitnessed with the evolution of the Internet and we should expect a similar technological progression in Blockchain.
Scalability and Cost:
Pending Ethereum Transactionsafter CryptoKitties’ Release in 2017
Despite today’s fast Internet connection, the early days of the Internet faced challenges in terms of scalability and cost. On August 7, 1996, AOL’s Internet service failed from supporting a high volume of Internet users and went down for nineteen hours. At that point, Americans were increasingly living their online lives every day, and AOL was the country’s largest internet service provider, amongother competitors such as Prodigy, CompuServe and MSN. The Internet itself hasn’t crashed but the ability to access it temporarily stopped, and it was a big deal for many who started to get used to surfing the web in their daily life. This is similar to what happened in theblockchain world in December 2017, in which the of CryptoKitties spiked the on-chain transaction volume on Ethereum and clogged the network. Most users couldn’t get their transactions through on the blockchain unless they were willing to bid a high amount of gas fees, which caused a lot of confusion and distress in the community. While the Ethereum network jam made many of us realize the current lack of scalability of blockchain technology in servicing more complex use cases, both of these failures in scalability during the early days of Internet and Blockchain showed a validation of how important these technologies had become in a few years for the early adopters and the need for better scalability solutions to support the growing user base and demand.
Average Internet and WirelessMobile Telecommunication Speed in the US
The high network fees and costs for launching a startup during the early days of the Internet and the current state of the Blockchain industry is also similar. Back then,the process of getting online required a modem and a phone line, in which all the online services maintained a network of local modems for people to dial in.The most popular online service at the time, AOL, charged $9.95/month for 5 hours of unlimited access with each additional hour costing $2.95, which by today’s standard, was very restricting.However over time, the broadband connections with DSL eventually came, scaling up the Internet speed, and by 2014,the Internet speed was 200 times faster and 90% cheaper compared to 1999. Similarly, we have also witnessed an increase of wireless mobile telecommunication speed over the years, from less than 1Mbps with 2G technology to 25Mbps with 4G technology, enabling new services to be viable and practical through the mobile phone, such as music and video streaming. Over time, the limitations around the scalability and cost were gradually removed, allowing for more complex and bandwidth-intensive applications to be practical and viable.
Transaction Speed of Various Blockchain Projects
In the blockchain world, we are still early in the development cycle of the technology, in which the challenges around scalability and cost are preventing the practicality of more complex use cases and large user base. Low scalability means that the developers or users would have to pay higher fees to outbid the other transactions in the queue to reduce wait time. As of February 2019, the average transactions fees are roughly $0.13 for Ethereum, in which more complex dapps, such as on-chain games, would quickly rack up high transaction fees. Although not every action needs to live on-chain, there is still an urgent demand for blockchain to be scalable to support the growing number of dapps, and all the day to day transactions (Visa processes 24,000 transactions per second) living on the sameledger. Numerous projects are working on different means to scale the transaction speed of blockchain, with variable trade-offs between scalability,security, and decentralization. With the recent mainnet launches of EOS andTRON (4,000 and 750 TPS respectively), we have seen an increase of more complexdapps being released in the past couple months, and we expect this trend tocontinue as more scalable blockchains are being deployed in the space. Overall,the different scaling solutions being explored such as novel data structures(Sharding, Tangle, DAG, Coda etc.), layer 2 solutions (Sidechains, off-chains,hashed-time locks etc.), and more efficient consensus algorithms (POS, DPOS,Casper, Avalanche, Hashgraph etc.) will gradually increase the bandwidth and reduce the cost for transactions on the blockchain, enabling new use cases andservices over the years.
The decrease of the cost of launching a Startup from1999-2010
Additionally, we expect that the cost of launching blockchain startups will also decrease overtime. During the Internet revolution, the average cost of starting a startupalso drastically reduced over the years, from $5m in 1999 to $500k in 2005, and$50k in 2010. The first wave of cost reduction was due to the appearance of open source (which meant no license for UNIX, web servers and Oracle databases) and horizontal computing (which meant no need to buy expensive Sun servers & EMCstorage). Then, the second wave of cost decrease was due to the maturation of cloud computing, popularized by AWS,providing web storage (S3), processing power (EC2) and the ability to scale upor down depending on traffic (auto-scaling) on the cloud. According to Gartner,deploying enterprise blockchain proof-of-concepts has a starting cost of$275,000 and can go up to several millions of dollars. Depending on theblockchain (Ethereum, Neo, EOS, etc), the deployment and transaction fees of simple dapps on public blockchains can cost you $30-85k (interesting breakdown here), and current blockchain talents are in shortage and expensive ($150k on average).Similar to the evolution of the Internet, we also expect a cost reduction inlaunching blockchain projects as the blockchain transaction speed becomes morescalable and cheaper, more full-stack platforms on the enterprise side (BaaShosting - Kaleido, AWS, Azure, Oracle, etc), development platform (NoOps -Esprezzo), middlewares (Omnitude) and developer tools (Mist, Geth, Remix, etc)are being released, and more talents migrating into the blockchain space.
Education:
At one point, 50% of the CD's produced worldwide had an AOL logo on it
Education is an essential driver for the adoption of new technologies, lowering the barrier to entry, and helping "crossing the chasm" (a term created by Geoffrey Moore). Before the chasm,technology is usually treated as a foreign object, and once it has trulycrossed, it is perceived as safe to consume. During the early days of the Internet, Jan Brandt from AOL was hired as VP of marketing to growits user base. During market research, she realized that people didn’t know howto use the computer as “someone took a computer mouse and started pointing it at the computer like the remote control”, so it was important to go back to the basics. Selling consumers on the virtue of one online service over another wasnot as important as educating consumers on what an online service was. The marketing strategy implemented by AOLwas to send out trial disks and CDs for people to try out, and the resultsproved to be extraordinary, with people signing up and providing their creditcards. AOL re-invested so much into the strategy that CDs were found everywhere, in people’s mailboxes, on new computers, in magazines, given away with movie rentals, etc. so that at one point, 50% of the CDs produced worldwide had the AOL logo, leap frogging the competitors and growing its user basefrom 200k to 25M clients over the years. Overall, AOL’s campaign is a good example of a successful initiative indriving adoption by actively lowering the barrier of entry for the less tech-savvy crowd of early users.
Learn and Earn 0x program fromCoinbase
To draw a parallel with the cryptocurrency world, we have seen many initiatives in educating the next generation of crypto and blockchain adopters, with large conferences, suchas Consensus, corporate education,taken by Deloitte or IBM, developer education, such as ConSensys Academy, and universityeducation, such as Blockchain EducationNetwork. Many companies are also attempting to in give out tokens or cold wallets for free through events and marketing campaigns. Recently, Coinbase launched a learn and earn crypto program,offering cryptocurrency rewards for completing their educational courses.Currently, interacting with blockchain still has a lot of frictions, and require you to have some foundation knowledge (private/public keys,gas/transaction fees etc.) compared to traditional payment solutions such as Venmo, or Paypal, not to mention the irreversible risks that come with keymanagement and transactions. We are still early in the industry with less than 1% of worldwide adoption, and educating the general population about cryptocurrency, blockchain and key management will be very important for the industry to grow. Large companies such as AOL and Coinbase are well positioned to offer extra incentives through giveaway CD trials and cryptocurrencies to actively help lower the barrier of entry and drive further adoption.
Overall, it’s undeniable that the Blockchain industry has been making significant progress towards solving the challenges around scalability, cost, and education over the past few years. Although we are still early in this technological cycle, we are confident that Blockchain will mature in a similar fashion as the Internet,gradually becoming more scalable, affordable and practical for mass adoption.
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The Internet Revolution facts are based on thebook “How the Internet Happened”,written by Brian McCullough. MarkTwain once said “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme”. We areattempting to draw some similarities between the Internet and BlockchainRevolutions, to help entrepreneurs and investors better understandtechnological life cycles.
Sources:
Book “Howthe Internet Happened”, written by BrianMcCullough.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/reply-unending-chasm-how-survive-geoffrey-moore/
https://www.coinbase.com/earn/0x
https://bothsidesofthetable.com/why-has-seed-investing-declined-and-what-does-this-mean-for-the-future-6a9572357130
https://bothsidesofthetable.com/a-deep-dive-into-what-has-really-changed-in-venture-capital-f5d225f7f8
https://howmuch.net/articles/crypto-transaction-speeds-compared
https://ylv.io/how-much-does-it-costs-to-run-dapp-in-2018/
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/ethereum-transactionfees.html
八維研究院出品的其他研究
跨境金融科技平臺Pandaq正式發佈｜八維資本 X TrueChain
《互聯網vs區塊鏈革命》系列之一：早期的成功產品
《互聯網vs區塊鏈革命》系列之二：顛覆性公司的起源
硬核技術：證券型通證需要專屬的區塊鏈嗎?
企業級區塊鏈：過去、現在和未來
