Blockchain technology are well known for lot of people, but many people are not very clear about it's business value, including some entrepreneurs.So I want analyze it here by the theory from Clayton M. Christensen，a Innovation strategy master.
Blockchain technical characteristics
In the past year, blockchain technology has been known to many people. Let’s simply review it.
First, there is a distributed ledger, all transaction data is stored in the ledger and we can see it on every computer node. It is immutable.
The second is a set of encryption algorithms, although you can see all the transaction data but can not be traced back to the person, unless the person shows his private key.
The third is a decentralized peer-to-peer network. All data is circulated at each node. The node does not need a central organization to control. Therefore, the consensus is not based on the strength or credit of the central organization,is the network itself. If the nodes demage the rules ,they will lose more than they have, so the economic man will spontaneously maintain the smooth running of the rules.
The fourth is diging, and the computing power of the network is provided by each node.There are different mechanisms designed to incent the nodes.
Destructive innovation
Next, we need to analyze the subversive of the blockchain on the Internet to determine whether it is the most important technological innovation in the next decade.
First of all, see if there is a subversive strategy. Generally , the subversive strategy is divided into two types, new market disruption and low-end disruption.
On the new market disruption,the digital currency generated by the blockchain is composed entirely of a set of encryption algorithms that can be circulated throughout the world without any restrictions. Especially in the case of services that require currency trading, it completely removes the restrictions between national borders ，reduces the cost of trust-building， increases the number of consumers.
At the low-end of disruption, Internet services require a centralized server to operate, but the blockchain is distributed by global nodes to provide computing power and many others service can be provided by algorithm、community ets. So the cost will be greatly reduced, the efficiency will be greatly improved. In the future,even if the company goes bankrupt, the network can continue to operate without the team to maintain.
In addition, although the Internet provides countless functions and services, this obviously exceeds the needs of the users themselves. So you can see that the battles of Internet companies focus on getting users’ attention. However, in terms of reliability, Internet companies are completely failure. From Google to Facebook ,they have collected a large amount of user data and used it privately, especially because they are collecting user data in all areas deliberately. No matter how they use,this kind of behavior is extremely dangerous. The blockchain is extremely disruptive in this respect.
Next, we also need to judge whether there are strong enough barriers in the blockchain, and whether the blockchain has asymmetry of motivation and asymmetry for the Internet.This will determine whether blockchain can grow independently under the rule of big Internet companies. And the overlap of value network between blockchain and the Internet can be used to judge the size of the expansion barrier in the develop.