Blockchain "rectification" and futures investment strategy -- a financial practitioner's cold thinking

Original title:《Realistic thinking: I talk about the "rectification" of block chain and futures investment strategy

The author:Blackstone Kingslayer& have spent Senior practitioners in the financial industry, strong supporter and evangelist of blockchain technology

Preface:

Recently very interesting, block chain technology to rise to the national strategy, all the media began to party, each mouth big talk quartet, overnight it seems that all the companies with block chain and early industrial layout, satoshi nakamoto, become too many people's old friends. This industry is really too long without visible and tangible good, most of the time with a respectful and sincere attitude to do things carefully, now is a good, everything seems to be justified, block chain, is no longer associated with fraud crimes, now, has been a fashion synonymous with the innovation frontier.

When doing learning, the teacher always said that you should learn to "smooth your consumption over time and over different state of economy". Thinking over it, the development of any thing is a process of mean regression. Your attitude towards things should be the same. I think this article is more about my cold thinking about blockchain. 10, ten thousand people will not return to the direction, in the face of everyone rushed to the direction, to learn to see the road in front of us.

01 how to treat the "rectification" of blockchain

(I) the history of block chain technology

Blockchain is not new. It has been known as bitcoin's bookkeeping for more than a decade since the currency was born in 2008. It took a decade of work by cypherpunks and computer geniuses to get blockchain to where it is today. During this period, first there was the "king of shanzhai" eethernet, led by V god, who invented Solitidy language and set off a new wave of smart contract and token financing, which promoted the bull market of block chain technology. Later, EOS, led by BM, attracted much attention, created the DPOS consensus mechanism, but was always criticized for excessive centralization. In addition, TRON, Litecoin, Monero, Rippo, NEO,IOST and other blockchain projects also try to consolidate their position in the blockchain field through fusion and improvement of consensus mechanism and expansibility. In the past two years, Defi and cross chain become the hot topic of the block chain technology development, Maker, KAVA, Polkadot, Cosmos and other new project also sought after. And, of course, Libra, without which I wonder how I could have written this article today. Even today when a hundred flowers bloom, we have to face two important bottlenecks in the development of blockchain technology:

One is that there is no clear path of feasibility in terms of extensibility.Limited by the triad of scalability, decentralization and security (for a detailed explanation of the extensibility technology of blockchain, please refer to the previous articleDeep thinking: I talk about mu changchun's Libra general studies"), technology research and development in the field of extensibility should comprehensively consider the trade-offs between the above three characteristics of the block chain system. Up to now, there are many proposed schemes, but none of them has really been strictly supported by practice and reached consensus within the industry. (due to the current situation of small block chain circle and high user threshold, the number of users is severely limited. In addition to a few mainstream public chains, the technical practice of other projects is difficult to get sufficient demonstration.)

Second, the application scenarios of block chain technology are extremely limited.Even with the more efficient dpos-like consensus mechanism, the confirmation time and parallel processing quantity of block chain transactions cannot meet the requirements of the public in real life. Because the application scenarios of block chain technology are difficult to spread to the general public, more are applied to the license chain, the application scope and scenarios are strictly limited.

I understand the current situation

From the learning of block chain theory knowledge courses on the powerful country APP, to the popularization of cryptography and block chain knowledge in CCTV's "Oriental space", there is no doubt that the "flying bullet" of block chain technology has landed, and the development of block chain technology has been laid on the platform. However, I want to go into more detail on a few issues:

1. Chain ring and coin ring

Will tell from the actual situation, the chain ring is the so-called army, focusing on the chain blocks the development of the technology itself, not to release tokens or tokens, no public assets value, mainly led by the mainstream Internet companies or universities of science and technology enterprise, cooperating with government or business unit, using block chain technology characteristic, the chain of development license, the current main application areas for the judicial and administrative, drug management, and other fields.

The currency circle is the digital currency investment circle, and the main investment objects are all kinds of public chain projects at home and abroad. There is no threshold, and the projects are mixed with each other.

In short, the government's promotion of blockchain technology to the national strategy is an affirmation and incentive for the chain circle. As for the currency circle, it is difficult to judge in the short term, but in the long run, it may be beneficial to embrace regulation.

2. Development status of block chain technology in China

Due to the influence of the policy, the blockchain technology teams in China have been operating in small groups for quite a long time, even if they are all Chinese. Although many Chinese universities have opened the blockchain technology courses in a forward-looking way, compared with the blockchain, the state-recognized big data or artificial intelligence fields seem to attract more talents and have more development potential. The above factors have affected the development of domestic technology to a considerable extent, and also affected the power of discourse of Chinese technical teams in the industry. At present, the core development teams of Bitcore and eethernet, the two core blockchain projects, are in foreign countries. Cosmos and Polkadot, the most promising cross-chain projects, are in foreign countries. The most active development communities of blockchain technology are also dominated by americans. From the perspective of the author, the scenario application of a small range of license chain and a global public chain is not of the same order of magnitude, and the development community and development team are not at the same level. IT projects are a process in which everyone brings wood to the fire.

Has the regular army come to suppress the bandits?

Recently heard most of the words is: "regular army into the mountains, the first thing to do is bandits." This means that after blockchain technology becomes a national strategy, existing domestic currency circle projects will be regulated and cleaned up, and the sound and orderly development of blockchain technology will be guaranteed through policy formulation and dynamic supervision. The author believes that the popularization and education of block chain technology is good, but if the over-promotion and over-expansion of effectiveness, it will breed the soil of pyramid selling and fraud. If the corresponding regulation still fails to keep up, the negative impact of criminal behaviors on society and people will greatly harm the prospect of the development of blockchain technology.

The author wants to think about the problem from two perspectives:

First, the development of block chain technology fundamentally needs to be driven by commercial interests.The IT industry needs a lot of market practice, and the Internet thinking is the process of development, trial and error, adjustment and production. In order to fundamentally promote the development of block chain technology, it is impossible to blindly engage in academic and research behind closed doors. Block chain technology principle is simple, even more difficult knowledge of cryptography, data structure, and computer communication knowledge is limited, chain blocks the development of technology to carry out effective and finance, game, and this combination, you need a lot of people to participate in practice and feedback, and to be able to push it forward, is the commercial interest.

Second, whether supervision should be fully or not.Objectively speaking, no matter in terms of knowledge level and regulatory experience, there are difficulties and weaknesses in the regulation of blockchain industry by traditional regulators. From this perspective, on the one hand, to improve the technical knowledge level of regulators in the block chain field, only a deep understanding of its operational logic can see through the trick. On the other hand, the development of many new things requires the process of free range. I think this is the reason why the regulators didn't lock up the block chain industry together before.

(iv) how difficult it is for blockchain technology to truly "land"

In fact, the author has been thinking about a question, as the current server cluster operation is complete and stable, the database system functions are sound and easy to operate, virtualization, cloud computing continue to boost the efficiency of the operation now, why do we have to promote the license chain block chain technology in a small range, whether there is such a need. If you want to tamper proof, directly in the traditional server access management can be; If you want traceability, just optimize the database structure and develop the traceability path. Why use relatively inefficient and immature block chain technology, whether there is excessive pursuit of technical gimmicks.

At present, many Internet companies have cooperated with local governments to establish block chain system for data recording, claiming to make use of system features such as decentralization and tamper-proof. The author is skeptical about this. If to data records of a domain, then consensus on how to set up the node, the node server how to wash cloth, node is all controlled by the government departments, if all nodes by the control of the department, so what's the meaning of decentralized, under the condition of 100% grasp the work force, how to guarantee the system won't appear hard bifurcate rollback data.

(v) where are the real application scenarios

The author believes that the future application scenarios of block chain technology are as follows:

One is the common chain. Similar to BTC and ETH, the most cutting-edge block chain technology in the future will take place on the global public chain.

The second is the chain of alliances. The establishment of alliance chains among different interest groups, on the one hand to check and supervise each other, on the other hand to reach consensus and realize a common vision, similar to Libra.

The third is smart contracts. Smart contracts mean that there are infinite possibilities on the block chain, and lay the technical foundation for the development of a hundred flowers on the block chain.

The fourth is cross-chain platform. In terms of the current public chain function is not complete, the proposed cross-chain seems early, but the demand for assets and transactions cross-chain is inevitable, so the generation of cross-chain platform is inevitable.

02 on investment strategy

(I) the influx of funds

The author seldom mentions the problem of digital currency investment in his articles, because digital currency is different from traditional financial market, which has serious information asymmetry and market manipulation, technical indicators often fail, and currency price fluctuations are more subject to the manipulation of traders and the influence of market information. Therefore, any judgment on the direction of the currency's price is questionable at any time. After the important news of block chain was officially announced on October 25, the exchange currency price fluctuated wildly. Taking BTC as an example, it first went up from $7,500 to $10,000, then turned its head and went down to $9,100 +, which is currently stable at around $9,400 (Block beat BlockBeats editor: November 24 below 7000 dollars). With regard to the management of asset values in digital currencies, I hope that it may be of benefit to readers to popularize the basic knowledge and clarify futures hedging investment strategies (BTC is cited as an example below).

(2) spot investment and futures investment

Spot investment is the so-called low buy high sell strategy, at the low price will be converted into BTC, and then at the high price of BTC into French currency, the price difference is the profit of investors, this is the most basic investment ideas, because the BTC is now available in the market, so called spot investment.

The essence of futures investment is still to buy low and sell high to make a profit, but the investment process USES derivatives such as futures contracts, which have a subject matter (such as BTC) and a term (such as one week, one month, one year), so the details are more complicated. Futures investment can be divided into long and short:

1. Do more refers to himself with the counterparty of futures contracts agreed, in a certain time T (i.e., week, month, year) at a fixed price after X (X is often lower than the price of T time the price of the asset, your judgments, such as BTC a week after the price is expected to rise from 7500 to 8500, this time the agreed price is less than 8500 X is reasonable) to buy a fixed number of assets (BTC). To be long means to be bullish, and to be long means to predict that the price of BTC will rise and exceed the agreed price of X. If the price of BTC is S after time T, then by fulfilling the contract, BTC will be bought at the price of X and sold at the price of S in the market, then each BTC will gain a profit of s-x.

Short is the opposite of long. Refers to himself with the counterparty of futures contracts agreed, in a certain time T (e.g., week, month, year) at a fixed price after X (X is often higher than the price of T time the price of the asset, you judge, such as BTC a week after the price is expected to rise from 7500 to 8500, this time the agreed price X higher than 8500 is reasonable) to sell a fixed number of assets (BTC). Short means to be bearish, and short BTC means to predict that the price of BTC will fall and exceed the agreed price of X. If the price of BTC is S after time T, then by buying BTC in the market at the price of S, and fulfilling the contract to sell BTC at the price of X, each BTC can obtain the profit of x-s.

It is worth mentioning that futures investment can use leverage, which means you can double the return and loss of your futures investment according to the multiple. For example, if you choose 10 times leverage, you can earn 10 times and lose 10 times. High leverage means high risk and high volatility. Futures investment is not empty set of white Wolf, but needs to be deposited in the margin, and all of the futures exchange take mark-to-market system, margin often has the branch of the initial margin and maintenance margin, when your investment gains and losses, gains and losses will be immediate reaction to the deposit, when the deposit amount below the maintenance margin, the exchange will ask until to the level of initial margin deposit amount. When the price of BTC fluctuates too violently, the loss is too large and the margin is not deposited in time, the exchange will be forced to explode.

(iii) analysis of portfolio investment strategy

Knowing the basic content of futures investment, we can say more about the investment strategy of using futures contracts to combine existing digital assets. Simply speaking, in the case of holding BTC, according to their own judgment of the future BTC market trend, long or short BTC, to obtain additional gains, to avoid excessive losses.

Holding BTC, when the expected market price rises, in the BTC appreciation of profits, you can do BTC futures contract, gain one more futures contract income;

When holding BTC, when the expected market price declines and facing BTC depreciation loss, short BTC at this time, the futures contract gains, thus reducing their loss degree.

The great pleasure of finance is to use a wide variety of derivatives to hedge the risks of the underlying assets and to make excessive returns from market fluctuations. At present, due to the size and depth of the transaction, digital currency exchanges only open the futures derivatives class.

Postscript:

For knowledge and opportunities, the author's attitude is gentle, which is related to experience. The connection with finance is in chengdu, the weather in the south is always gloomy, often scattered light rain, slap on the face, almost like a girl bitter tears, add a bit of injury. Even if it is not a rare rainy day, it is always filled with cumulus clouds, reluctant to put some light in. Over time, gradually, also fell in love with this mood, this plot, this taste. In this atmosphere, mahjong and tea have become the daily companions of chengdu people, blending into the ordinary life.

Summer, the old bookstall on the street is a pleasant place to go, set up a horse, carefully rummage through the boss's new collection of old student books, always can find a few or weird or interesting, pat off the dust, with the musty smell and the boss's hot tea fragrance in the teapot, with relish can also read for a while. If see not enough, brazenly and boss contend for the money of a three melon two jujube, the boss scold of also always can yield to my soft grind. Sometimes, small bookstall is also lively, chattering because the boss set up a tea table to place a table mahjong, encountered the boss hand wind is not good, even buy books to settle accounts have a few minutes. Like chengdu people this kind of bashi style, people, even when making money to make a living, also like night rain no wind, is gentle.

There is a saying that if you stay in chengdu for a long time, you cannot live without it. The feelings of the city and people are little by little interwoven together, the emotional waves of the wire QQ and the disturbance of the mood together, it became the fetters and heart knot. After writing the topic of block chain, my thoughts still stirred. Unconsciously, I Shared a moment of my life with all of you. Perhaps reading this moment here, you and I have some resonance.
The above.

Source:mp.weixin.qq.com

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