Sociology in Blockchain

Sociology is the discipline that systematically studies social behavior and human groups, originating in the 1830s and 1840s. It evolved from social philosophy into a modern discipline.
Sociology is a discipline with multiple research methods. The main methods include the quantitative approach of scientism and positivism, and the interpretative approach of humanism, which are oppositional yet interconnected, developing and refining a knowledge system regarding human social structures and activities, with the primary goal of applying this knowledge to seek or improve social welfare.
The scope of sociology is broad, encompassing social actions or interpersonal interactions at the micro level to social systems or structures at the macro level. Therefore, sociology is often placed alongside disciplines such as economics, political science, anthropology, psychology, and history within the social sciences.
Sociology has considerable breadth in both research topics and methodologies. Its traditional subjects of study include social stratification, social class, social mobility, social religion, social law, and deviant behavior, employing both qualitative and quantitative research methods.
Since all areas of human activity are shaped by social structures and individual institutions, sociology has further expanded its research focus to other related subjects as society develops, such as healthcare, military or criminal justice systems, the internet, and even topics like the role of scientific knowledge development in social activities.
On the other hand, the scope of social scientific methods has also become increasingly broad. Since the mid-20th century, the diversification of languages and cultural transformations has led to the emergence of more interpretative and philosophical social research models.
Human Relationship Networks and Blockchain Networks

Blockchain represents production relationships, mapping human relationship networks onto the blockchain, maintaining human relationships through a technological means. The reason blockchain networks can accurately reflect human relationship networks and positively reinforce human relationships is that blockchain networks naturally align with the logic of human relationship networks, or in other words, blockchain serves as a bridge between the physical world of humans and the digital society, connecting two parallel worlds.
Blockchain May Change Four Important Social Relationships

In today's human society, there are four important social relationships, all of which will undergo some changes or improvements to varying degrees with the application of blockchain.

C2C Relationships

C2C is the most numerous relationship in human society.
C2C relationships among acquaintances cannot maintain much trust, often leading to betrayal.
C2C relationships among strangers are easily deceived due to low costs and high returns.
Blockchain enhances the reliability of acquaintance relationships through consensus verification and increases the trustworthiness of stranger relationships.
B2C Relationships
B2C is the most important social relationship today.
B2C employment relationships are quite mature, legally protected, but not suited for new developments.
B2C service relationships are also mature, legally protected, but prone to group deception.
Blockchain compensates for corporate structures with community-oriented approaches and combats unethical behavior through credit supervision.
B2B Relationships
B2B is the most important collaborative relationship in production.
B2B service relationships need to improve efficiency and enhance security.
B2B cooperative relationships need to ensure clear responsibilities, rights, and benefits.
B2B control relationships need to ensure upper and lower control relationships.
Blockchain enhances service efficiency through chain codes, ensuring cooperative alliances and control relationships.
G2BC Relationships
G2BC is the stabilizing force in social relationships.
G2B maintains the basic driving force of social development, requiring the maintenance of fairness and justice to unleash productivity.
G2C maintains the basic stability of society, requiring the maintenance of fairness and justice to ensure people's livelihoods.
Blockchain combines technology and governance to enhance government efficiency and build a harmonious society.

Limitations of Blockchain in Restructuring Social Relationships

When improving and restructuring social relationships, blockchain faces various limitations or contradictions, each of which could adversely affect its development. Therefore, it is necessary for blockchain to break through these limitations or contradictions to create new impacts for itself and society.

Scale Limitations: Blockchain has upper and lower limits in scale; fewer nodes make it easier to reach consensus but also easier to cheat, while more nodes make consensus harder to achieve, consuming more resources and increasing the likelihood of forks.
Efficiency Limitations: In the impossible triangle of blockchain, focusing on security and democracy makes it difficult to achieve efficiency. A system with inherent efficiency defects is hard to claim efficiency improvements in application.
Security Limitations: Blockchain claims to be more secure than centralized systems, but this is not absolute. Security encompasses many aspects; while blockchain may be secure in one area, it could be insecure in another, and usability may suffer.
Central Paradox: The hallmark of blockchain is its so-called "decentralization," yet in reality, centers are ubiquitous, such as large mining pools and exchanges.
Open-Closed Paradox: Blockchain is trusted by the public due to its openness, which fosters diversity; however, in reality, a closed-loop ecosystem needs to be established, raising questions about how to open and how to close.

Blockchain Needs to Support Dynamic Equilibrium of Social Relationships

Society is in a state of dynamic equilibrium, and as a mapper of human society, blockchain needs to support this dynamic equilibrium.

Dynamic equilibrium includes but is not limited to the following aspects.

Fairness and Justice: Fairness and justice are consistent in most cases, but sometimes it is difficult to achieve both. Overemphasizing fairness may lead to injustice; under stable principles, moderate leaning towards the weaker party is necessary.
Development and Stability: Development and stability are interdependent and mutually reinforcing, yet contradictory. Without stability, development is hindered; without development, stability can easily be disrupted. Maintaining stability can also stifle development.
Transparency and Privacy: To build mutual trust, transparency is needed; for privacy, anonymity protection is necessary. Limited transparency and limited protection can be achieved both technically and through management.
Democracy and Centralization: Extreme democracy and extreme centralization are both undesirable. First, democracy should precede centralization; democracy under unified rules, and centralization based on democracy, should be managed according to actual conditions and established procedures.
Present and Future: Current interests and future interests are generally aligned, but sometimes current interests must be sacrificed to gain future benefits. At other times, current issues must be resolved before addressing future problems.

A Trustworthy Layered Multi-Center Social Relationship Network

As society has developed to this point, it naturally exhibits characteristics of local flattening and overall layering, which is an inevitable result of social development. Therefore, rather than allowing blockchain to disrupt the current social relationship network, it is better to enhance and improve this network based on actual conditions.

Abandoning Flattening for Reasonable Layering: Theoretically, flattening should be the ideal goal of blockchain network governance, but in reality, it is difficult to achieve and unnecessary. Layering and zoning are more technically feasible and practically significant.
Local Consensus Complementing Global Consensus: Consensus does not necessarily need to be global; what often matters most is local consensus. Many local consensuses can converge to form a global consensus, which is a viable option under current conditions.
Downward Regulation Complementing Upward Filing: Blockchain is neutral; it can be anti-regulatory or regulatory. Freedom is an inherent characteristic of blockchain, while compliance is an external requirement. Using blockchain for regulatory filing promotes healthy development.
Online Evidence Storage Complementing Offline Verification: Evidence storage is the most fundamental function of blockchain, but blockchain cannot store much data. Therefore, blockchain evidence storage needs to combine online and offline methods, storing indexes online and original data offline to help build a trustworthy society.
Role Determination Complementing Contract Execution: Individuals play different roles in social networks, which correspond to different nodes on the blockchain. Setting roles and executing according to agreed rules is how blockchain functions.

A massive virtual cultural community and organization has formed online, and the ways of shopping, interacting, and communicating under the internet have changed, even driving changes in production methods, with new production and consumption models like O2O, B2C, F2C, S2B2C continuously emerging. Since the agricultural society, factors such as regional, household registration, income, occupation, and social status have left different marks on individuals, significantly influencing interpersonal interactions in traditional society, but appearing less important or even negligible in social networks. Against this backdrop, three new issues have emerged in the realm of production relationships.

First, a trust crisis has emerged. In the internet era, interpersonal interactions have shifted from reality to virtuality, from closed to open, with the marginal cost of information acquisition and interaction being nearly zero, leading to low-cost internet crimes, online fraud, cyber violence, theft of personal privacy, and various criminal acts and malicious events harming society and the state. The risks of online interactions have significantly increased the cost of trust between individuals, undoubtedly raising the production costs of "internet + large-scale production cooperation."

Second, there is a lack of effective intellectual property protection measures. Under current internet technology, the cost of information copying and dissemination is very low, breaking down information islands and monopolies, but lacking effective intellectual property identification and protection mechanisms, making accountability costly. When producers' intellectual property is infringed and economic interests are harmed, it is difficult to defend rights, and the ownership of information and technology remains unclear, making it hard for important resources like information and data to participate in value distribution. The sharing value of internet technology has not been fully realized, affecting the sustainability of knowledge and technological innovation and inevitably impacting resource allocation efficiency.

Third, more seriously, internet technology has not truly brought about a fair, transparent, and borderless economic development environment, but rather created new monopolies. New technologies indeed provide strong technical support for large-scale socialized production and cooperation; however, the profit-seeking nature of capital turns new technologies into new monopolistic factors, hindering and restricting the possibilities for large-scale production development and cooperation. Internet giants not only attract massive capital inflows but also become new capital themselves, using their advantages in traffic and algorithms to stifle the growth and survival space of numerous small and medium enterprises, occupying a major share in value distribution, and destroying a healthy competitive environment. In content provision, in pursuit of greater profits, they deviate from the correct value orientation, offering false, vulgar, and potentially risky products and services, while platform companies unilaterally seize user traffic, leveraging user traffic and the content information they create, even personal privacy, to gain enormous income, while creators do not receive their due benefits, leading to information value being monopolized by giants.

The production relationship layer reflects trust deficits, unclear property rights, and capital monopolies, which not only fail to better promote socialized large-scale production but also restrict the development of productive forces to some extent. Therefore, there is an urgent need for new means to emerge, driving new changes in the realm of production relationships and addressing the fundamental contradictions of social development.

Analysis of Blockchain's Promotion of the Movement of Basic Social Contradictions

In recent years, blockchain technology, which has emerged on the foundation of the internet, with its unique characteristics of decentralization, has provided the possibility for constructing value internet platforms. Blockchain is a new application model of distributed data storage, peer-to-peer transmission, consensus mechanisms, and cryptographic algorithms, essentially functioning as a distributed shared ledger and database, characterized by decentralization, immutability, traceability, collective maintenance, and transparency. However, blockchain has been around for a decade since its concept emerged and gained widespread application.

The transformation of production relationships triggered by blockchain is primarily reflected in its promotion of the movement of basic social contradictions and the transformation of social structures. It can serve as a new means to optimize the aforementioned issues in production relationships, helping to enhance the trustworthiness needed for large-scale production cooperation and bringing about an effective rights confirmation mechanism. Decentralization breaks capital monopolies, achieving a new transformation of production relationships that better meets the inherent requirements of socialized large-scale production, reinforcing the basic economic system of socialism, and promoting the healthy operation of basic social contradictions, mainly reflected in the following three aspects.

(1) Blockchain is conducive to enhancing or creating trust suitable for large-scale production cooperation.

On one hand, blockchain is a mechanism of full-chain backup and sharing, where each participant is an independent node, participating in distributed storage and sharing. The actions of nodes are subject to full-chain supervision. Therefore, under the constraints of the consensus mechanism, each node must self-regulate while also accepting supervision from others, thereby supervising others as well, breaking down the trust barriers between strangers. On the other hand, the data formed by blockchain technology is traceable but immutable, providing a more secure and consistent solution for building trust between individuals. Publicly shared and reliable data becomes a technical endorsement for mutual trust among strangers, which differs from moral self-regulation, third-party guarantees, or post-fact legal systems; it is a new mechanism that can help endorse the credibility of strangers beforehand and achieve effective punishment afterward through network-wide dissemination, representing a stronger trust endorsement. It should be noted that blockchain technology ensures consensus through algorithms and effectively executes the content of consensus through smart contracts, but it cannot replace traditional means of generating or increasing trust between individuals, such as kinship and morality, nor does it have a powerful "centralized" entity to provide credit guarantees and proof; it is merely a way of credit reconstruction based on technical and mechanism constraints, relying on algorithms to prevent losses and harms caused by deception.

(2) Blockchain, as an effective rights confirmation mechanism, changes the distribution and ownership of production materials.

Under private ownership, especially capital-dominated private ownership (including modern capitalist market economies), production relationships manifest as private ownership of production materials, with surplus products also belonging to capitalists. "The objects produced by labor, that is, labor products, exist as alien entities, as forces independent of the producer, standing in opposition to labor." In Marx's view, the subject of private ownership—capital—"is not aimed at obtaining the first profit but merely seeks the endless movement of profit." In other words, capital's pursuit of profit (essentially surplus value) is endless, reflecting the antagonistic production relationship between capital and labor, and as capitalist private ownership deepens, this antagonistic relationship becomes increasingly irreconcilable. Analyzing the production relationships of capitalism from the principle of the unity of opposites between productive forces and production relationships reveals that while capitalist private ownership vigorously promotes the development of productive forces, it also forges a material weapon that ultimately leads to its own demise—socialized productive forces.

(1) Changes in Organizational Structure and Social Hierarchy

The new technological revolution has altered organizational structures, particularly in market economies where transactional organizational forms have changed significantly. The emergence of internet platforms has gradually detached organizations from physical entities, transforming them into virtual, borderless organizations that are more open and extensible, with organizational boundaries becoming increasingly blurred and continuously extending. On this basis, blockchain has transformed the multi-layered tree-like organizations that rely on centralized command due to information asymmetry in traditional society into decentralized, chain-like flat organizational structures. Organizations using blockchain technology do not have central nodes issuing and storing various information and instructions; instead, information dissemination, transmission, and storage rely on each node forming a chain structure. The interactions and responses of each node to information create new information, operating effectively under the constraints of pre-agreed smart contracts, resulting in decentralized decision-making, fewer hierarchical levels, and rapid responses.

The changes in organizations reflect on the social level. On one hand, the changes in various flat organizational structures will alter the external connection states between organizations, leading the entire social organization towards flattening, reducing social organizational hierarchies, decreasing the number of authorities and central nodes, weakening centralized and monopolistic powers, and fostering closer and more equal collaborative relationships among individuals, gradually narrowing social class gaps. On the other hand, while social hierarchies tend to flatten, this does not fundamentally eliminate hierarchies. However, through blockchain, it is hoped to break monopolies, reduce bureaucratic tendencies, and accelerate the liquidity and openness of resource allocation, also aiding in the movement of social hierarchies from stagnation to fluidity.

(2) Promoting Changes in Economic and Social Governance Methods

From the perspective of micro-organizations, blockchain technology constructs an efficient information transmission channel based on a peer-to-peer model, leading to a flattening of organizational structures. Correspondingly, management methods and social governance approaches, as well as transmission mechanisms, change from relying on centralized command and hierarchical execution to relying on smart contracts for automatic operation, self-execution, and self-regulation. In blockchain, there have been explorations of autonomous entities, such as distributed autonomous organizational structures. This new organizational autonomy may provide insights and profound impacts on economic governance and social governance methods.

In terms of economic governance, the invisible hand of the market and the visible hand of the government alternately regulate economic operations and resource allocation, promoting economic and social development. However, beyond the market and government, there is a third force driving the management of enterprise organizations and the overall economy. Many economists have studied this, such as Elinor Ostrom, the 2009 Nobel Prize winner in Economics, who found that "few institutions are either private or public—either 'market' or 'state'; many successful management systems have broken through rigid classifications, becoming various hybrids of 'private characteristics' and 'public characteristics'." This self-organization and self-management in the governance of public affairs and economic organizations help address ineffective or powerless situations in market regulation and government control. The peer-to-peer information transmission model, information transparency, and smart contract operation formed by blockchain technology represent a third-party governance force that neither relies on market regulation nor government control, but solely on algorithms and consensus mechanisms to promote resource allocation and market transactions, serving as a spontaneously generated, self-governing regulatory means.

Promoting the Establishment of More Effective Incentive Mechanisms

Blockchain is essentially a combination of various technologies forming an incentive constraint mechanism, effectively restraining dishonest, plagiaristic, and other "evil" behaviors through full-chain openness, information sharing, and distributed ledger and encryption technologies. Moreover, it can establish a set of incentive mechanisms recognized by all chain nodes, significantly enhancing the enthusiasm of nodes and reducing the opportunism caused by asymmetric information, thereby improving the operational efficiency of economic and social organizations and optimizing the ecological order of the networked world.

The work proof and incentive methods under blockchain are primarily reflected through tokens. Tokens are a broad concept; anything that can prove rights and value, and can be exchanged and circulated, can be called a token. Broadly speaking, stocks and bonds are also a form of tokens. Tokens also represent a form of consensus, as their value attributes derive from societal recognition of their value endorsement. A blockchain without tokens is merely a distributed ledger with simple accounting functions; with the existence of tokens, blockchain becomes not just a technology and ledger but also an incentive mechanism. Under the blockchain mechanism, not only are normal transaction behaviors recorded, but also the contributions made by each node to maintain the consensus mechanism and supervise "evil" behaviors are recorded. These workloads form new blocks, and the rewards obtained by contributing to this are a form of tokens. Tokens can circulate as a trading tool across the entire chain and participate in value distribution under the blockchain mechanism. As a unique incentive mechanism, tokens provide endogenous motivation for the development of blockchain organizations, encouraging nodes to actively maintain the consensus mechanism and facilitating the self-formation, self-development, self-application, and self-improvement of the blockchain organizational structure ecosystem.

Some tokens (such as encrypted digital currencies) possess the characteristics of value and rights proof of digital assets, but tokens themselves are merely manifestations of incentives, encompassing a broader scope and deeper connotation than encrypted digital currencies, and can be fully represented without relying on encrypted digital currencies, using certain rights or functions to fully reflect the incentives included in tokens. As for ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings), which have been banned in China, they should not be equated with tokens, as ICOs overly emphasize the financial attributes of incentives, detaching from the real economy, lacking regulation, ultimately leading to rampant speculation and fraud, resulting in direct prohibition by regulatory authorities. It is important to note that the incentive mechanism under blockchain is still a unique mechanism that can guide the integration of individual and collective interests. According to public choice theory, a common dilemma in mechanism design is that individuals with information advantages often harm collective interests to achieve resource and interest allocation in a direction more favorable to themselves, resulting in Pareto inefficiency in resource allocation. Blockchain technology can improve this situation; the pre-establishment of the consensus mechanism ensures, to some extent, the consistency of individual and group interests. The transparency of the entire chain and the cross-verification mechanism of falsification ensure that nodes can only achieve the possibility of fraud if they control more than 50% of the computing power, significantly increasing the authenticity of information and reducing market failure caused by information asymmetry, leading to Pareto improvements in resource allocation.

Despite the various shortcomings in the development of blockchain and the potential risks of being controlled and manipulated by capital, as a highly viable technology and an advanced governance concept, it will inevitably readjust the relationships among existing productive forces, production materials, and production relationships, promoting social progress and development. From the perspective of social development and governance, the following outlook can be made regarding the development of blockchain.

First, blockchain will become the infrastructure for social governance.

Although blockchain originated with Bitcoin, it has since been adopted by numerous financial institutions.

Second, it will form a multi-center governance pattern.

While blockchain is an important technological infrastructure in the global economy and society, it does not mean that blockchain will replace all other technologies as the sole means of social governance, nor does it mean that all centers will be eliminated. It can be said that for a long time in the future, the centralized management of governments, states, and even political parties will be the cornerstone of social stability and orderly development, which cannot be easily denied or forcibly removed beyond the stage of social development. With the continuous development and improvement of the basic economic system of socialism and the deepening of socialist democratic politics, the ways and means for people to be the masters of their own affairs will continue to diversify. Under the conditions of enhanced blockchain scalability and processing speed, as well as improved information interaction capabilities, effective autonomy will emerge within a certain scope, achieving a deep integration of community autonomy and state governance, leading to the emergence of multiple large nodes that become key nodes and dispatch centers for social governance, forming a governance pattern of multi-center, diversity, and coexistence of various social governance forces.

Third, it will give rise to highly collaborative new contractual relationships.

As blockchain technology gradually improves and its application fields continue to expand, the publicly accountable distributed platform it constructs, the automated operation of smart contracts, and the large number of digital assets derived from it will give rise to a new generation of network protocols. Under the new trust formation mechanism, a new era of contracts will be initiated, achieving a higher level of collaboration over a broader scope.

Various innovations reduce our vulnerability to participants, intermediaries, and outsiders, thereby alleviating our concerns about the potential negative behaviors of an increasing number of diverse individuals. Another improvement method encourages the precise collection and transmission of valuable information among an increasing number of participants.

Similarly, this will enable a wider range of mutually beneficial participants to discover each other. All these innovations have improved the scalability of society throughout human prehistory and history, allowing our modern civilization to be sustainable under such a vast global population.

Modern information technology, especially utilizing the recently discovered computer science, can often identify mutually beneficial competitions, improve information quality, and reduce the need for trust in certain types of institutional transactions. The emergence of more and more individuals and diverse people can thus enhance social scalability in various ways.

The flow of information between minds I refer to as intersubjective agreements, including spoken and written words, habits, traditions, legal content, rules, customs, and case precedents, as well as various other symbols such as "stars" in online reputation systems and market prices, etc.

Minimizing trust reduces the vulnerability of potential harmful behaviors between participants, between participants and outsiders, and between participants and intermediaries. Most systems have undergone long-term cultural evolution, such as law, which reduces violence, fraud, theft, and technological security. In this way, we need to compare the vulnerability of trusting our peers with the progress of institutions and technology, which has greatly balanced our vulnerability relationships. In most cases, a sufficiently trustworthy institution, such as a market, depends on the trust of its participants, which often indicates another sufficiently trustworthy institution, such as contract law.

These trusted institutions traditionally implement various accounting, legal, security, and other control roles, promoting the functionality of client institutions by minimizing their vulnerability to participants within the system, such as accountants, lawyers, regulatory agencies, and investigators, making them more trustworthy.

Innovation can only partially eliminate certain types of vulnerabilities, namely reducing the risks that come with trusting others. There is no institution or technology in the world that requires no trust at all.

Even with the most powerful security technologies and encryption methods, there is no institution that requires no trust. While some encryption protocols can ensure that certain specific data has a very high probability of resisting extremely powerful adversaries, they cannot guarantee complete security when the actions of all participants need to be considered.

For example, encryption can strongly protect emails from third-party eavesdropping, but the sender still has to trust that the recipient will not forward it; otherwise, the content of the document may be leaked directly or indirectly to a third party. Another example is that in our most robust consensus protocols, certain parts of participants or intermediaries are not 100% measurable through computing power, equity, personalization, and computation, which may jeopardize the integrity of transactions or information flows between participants, thus harming participants.

Recent breakthroughs in computer science can significantly reduce vulnerabilities, but they do not eliminate all vulnerabilities to potential attackers.

Mutual matching can help mutually beneficial participants discover each other. Matching may also be the best representative of social scalability on the internet. Social networks like Usenet News, Facebook, and Twitter facilitate like-minded individuals coming together, even future spouses.

Once they allow people to discover each other, social networks play a role in facilitating relationships at all levels, from casual to frequent to addictive.

Christopher Allen and others have conducted some interesting and detailed analyses regarding team sizes in online games and social networks, as well as the time spent on interactions.

eBay, Uber, Airbnb, and online financial exchanges have greatly enhanced social scalability through business matching: searching, finding, gathering, and facilitating mutually beneficial business negotiations. These related services also promote actions such as payments and deliveries, as well as confirming that strangers fulfill their other obligations in these transactions, and discussing the quality of these services, such as "star rating" systems, Yelp reviews, etc.

Blockchain and Cryptocurrency

Scalable markets and prices require price-scalable currencies. Price-scalable currencies need scalable security so that diverse individuals can use this currency without worrying about inflation, theft, and counterfeiting.

In 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto introduced Bitcoin to the internet, enabling individuals and groups to communicate using Bitcoin. The breakthrough of the currency invented by Nakamoto lies in providing social scalability to the masses in a context of minimized trust issues: reducing vulnerabilities to counterparties and third parties.

Replacing cheap but institutionally expensive computing power with costly and automated secure computing power, Nakamoto enhanced social scalability. A group of partially trusted intermediaries replaced a single fully trusted intermediary.

Financial control through computing steroids: blockchain acts as an army of robots, checking each other's work.

When we can ensure the most important functions of financial networks through computer science rather than traditional accountants, regulators, investigators, police, and lawyers, we will choose an automated, globalized, and more secure system over a manual, localized, and inconsistent security system. When cryptocurrencies operate correctly on public chains, they can replace large numbers of bureaucratic computing armies composed of banks. "These computers on the blockchain allow us to place the most important components of online protocols on a more secure and reliable foundation, making interactions that we previously dared not implement on the global network possible."

The most distinctive features of blockchain technology, especially in Bitcoin technology, include:

Blockchain's high level of security and reliability can be maintained without human interference. Without such high security, blockchain is merely a free and wasteful distributed database technology, tightly bound to local bureaucracies to maintain the integrity of the network.

Important data should be submitted to blockchain confidential calculations as early as possible, ideally encrypted and signed directly from the devices that generate them, maximizing blockchain's advantages in protecting integrity.

A Merkle tree contains four transactions (from tx0 to tx3), and with the appropriate replication and transaction chain protected by proven work, the Merkle tree can negotiate to make data like transactions non-falsifiable.

In Bitcoin, the root hash of Merkle securely summarizes these for verifying the unchanged status of all transactions in the block.

The "secure property rights" architecture I proposed in 1998 used the concepts of Merkle trees and replicated data to combat erroneous software and malicious users, but did not include blocks. It demonstrated my theory that you can protect the integrity of globally shared data and transactions and use them to design a Bitcoin.

However, Bitcoin is not more efficient than Bitcoin and does not possess the scalable blocks and classified accounting systems like Bitcoin. Meanwhile, it resembles today's private blockchains, where secure property rights assumptions require distinguishable and countable nodes.

Based on the 51% computing power attack, some public chains like Bitcoin and Ethereum have important security goals limited. We really hope someone can answer this question as the most powerful miner: can someone really launch a 51% computing power attack?

The security of blockchain is objectively limited, and its management is potentially affected by 51% attacks. An attack is certainly not referred to by attackers as an "attack"; they may call it "enlightened management" or "democratic action." In fact, some types of software updates require soft forks to fix errors or improve underlying protocols.

Other software updates may require hard forks, which is a safer method proposed by Bitcoin than soft forks. Although blockchain reduces trust issues more than any other network, it still cannot fully achieve complete trust.

Miners are partially trusted guardians, and some are not development experts or computer scientists, having great confidence in the community of blockchain developers. Learning the design principles and code structure of blockchain is similar to how a non-professional might understand the achievements of a scientific research expert in a corresponding discipline.

During hard forks, the influence of exchanges is also significant, as they can choose which trading symbols, i.e., tokens, to support.

Most public chains, of course not all public chains, can thus dodge the bullet of "identity verification being a challenge" and better handle the issue of miners' anonymity at a high level, which may be a more appropriate approach than mapping inherent brain-based concepts onto underlying protocols. PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) is struggling to advance in this regard.

I believe some "private chains" are also true blockchains, while others should be classified under "distributed ledgers" or "shared databases." They are fundamentally different from public chains like Bitcoin or Ethereum, lacking social scalability.

In situations where secure identification of distinguishable and computable server groups is needed rather than anonymous membership in public chains, all the following cases are very similar. In other words, they require some other solutions that are not sufficiently socially scalable to address Sybil attacks:

Private chains.
The "federated" model of side chains. Although it was hoped previously, no one can figure out how to implement side chains under minimized trust issues. Side chains can also be called private chains, which is a good fit because they are architecturally very similar to external dependencies like PKI.
Multisig-based plans, even when completed under blockchain-based smart contracts.
Threshold Oracle architectures that can move off-chain data onto the blockchain.

The primary method for identifying a group of servers uses PKI based on trusted certification authorities, but it is not very socially scalable. To avoid security vulnerabilities from trusted third parties, reliable certification authorities are both costly and labor-intensive bureaucracies, often requiring extensive background checks or relying on others, such as Dun & Bradstreet's enterprises. I once led a team that designed such a CA.

PKI-supported private chains are a good choice for banks and some large enterprises, as they already have mature internal PKIs covering employees, partners, and private servers needed for important transactions.

Bank PKIs are relatively reliable, and we also have semi-reliable PKIs for web servers, but generally not for web clients, even though people have been dealing with client certificate issues since the invention of the web. For example, advertisers want a secure way to track customer identities that can replace phone numbers and cookies. However, such alternatives have yet to be found.

PKI can serve some very important people and things. However, PKI is not so easy for niche groups. Because it relies on traditional identity verification bureaucracies, its social scalability is limited.

Given that the Bitcoin blockchain itself may be the most secure financial network in existence (indeed, Bitcoin is much more secure than traditional payment networks, maintaining its low management costs and seamless cross-border transfer capabilities), the surrounding old centralized network servers are not secure.

We need more socially scalable ways to securely compute nodes or find another way to ensure as much stability as possible against corrupt bureaucracies, assessing the contributions to ensuring blockchain integrity. This is what proof of work and full network broadcasting aim to do: greatly sacrificing the scalability of computers to enhance social scalability.

In a narrow sense, blockchain is a decentralized shared ledger that combines data blocks in a chain-like manner in chronological order, ensuring immutability and non-falsifiability through cryptography, capable of securely storing simple, sequential, verifiable data within the system.
In a broad sense, blockchain technology is a new decentralized infrastructure and distributed computing paradigm that uses cryptographic chain structures to verify and store data, employs distributed node consensus algorithms to generate and update data, and utilizes automated script codes (smart contracts) to program and operate data.

Blockchain features decentralization, temporal data, collective maintenance, programmability, and security trustworthiness:

First is decentralization: The processes of verifying, accounting, storing, maintaining, and transmitting blockchain data are all based on a distributed system structure, establishing trust relationships between distributed nodes using pure mathematical methods rather than central institutions, thus forming a decentralized and trustworthy distributed system;
Second is temporal data: Blockchain uses a chain-like block structure with timestamps to store data, adding a time dimension to the data, which has strong verifiability and traceability;
Third is collective maintenance: Blockchain systems employ specific economic incentive mechanisms to ensure that all nodes in the distributed system can participate in the verification process of data blocks (such as Bitcoin's "mining" process) and use consensus algorithms to select specific nodes to add new blocks to the blockchain;
Fourth is programmability: Blockchain technology provides a flexible script code system, supporting users to create advanced smart contracts, currencies, or other decentralized applications. For example, the Ethereum platform provides a Turing-complete scripting language for users to construct any precisely defined smart contract or transaction type;
Finally, it is secure and trustworthy: Blockchain technology uses asymmetric cryptographic principles to encrypt data, while leveraging the powerful computing power formed by consensus algorithms such as proof of work from various nodes in the distributed system to resist external attacks and ensure that blockchain data is immutable and non-falsifiable, thus possessing high security.

Blockchain technology has solved two important problems that digital cryptocurrency has long faced, namely the double-spending problem and the Byzantine generals problem:
- The double-spending problem, also known as "double flower," refers to the digital nature of currency being used two or more times for payment. In traditional financial and monetary systems, cash (fiat currency) is a physical entity that naturally avoids double spending; other digital forms of currency require trusted third-party central institutions (such as banks) to guarantee it. The contribution of blockchain technology is to solve the double-spending problem of decentralized systems through verification and consensus mechanisms of distributed nodes without third-party institutions, completing value transfer simultaneously during the information transmission process.
- The Byzantine generals problem is a common challenge faced during the interaction process of distributed systems, which concerns how distributed nodes can reach consensus and establish mutual trust in the absence of a trusted central node. Blockchain achieves the construction of a decentralized trusted system without needing to trust a single node through digital encryption technology and distributed consensus algorithms. Unlike the credit endorsement mechanisms of traditional central institutions (such as central banks), the Bitcoin blockchain forms a software-defined credit, marking a fundamental shift from centralized national credit to decentralized algorithmic credit.

The Bitcoin Ecosystem

With its first-mover advantage, Bitcoin has formed a comprehensive ecosystem and industrial chain covering issuance, circulation, and financial derivatives markets (as shown in Figure 1), which is the main reason it has long occupied the vast majority of the digital cryptocurrency market share. The open-source nature of Bitcoin has attracted a large number of developers to continuously contribute their innovative technologies, methods, and mechanisms; Bitcoin's network nodes (miners) provide computing power to ensure the stable consensus and security of Bitcoin, with most of their computing power coming from specialized equipment (mining machines) sold by device manufacturers. The Bitcoin network issues a certain number of bitcoins for each newly discovered block as a reward for miners, and some miners may collaborate to establish profit-sharing mining pools to pool computing power and increase the probability of obtaining bitcoins.

Once Bitcoin is issued and enters the circulation phase, holders can use specific software platforms (such as Bitcoin wallets) to pay merchants with bitcoins to purchase goods or services, reflecting Bitcoin's monetary attributes. Simultaneously, due to the price fluctuation mechanism of Bitcoin, it possesses all the attributes of financial derivatives, leading to the emergence of Bitcoin trading platforms to facilitate holders' investment or speculation on Bitcoin. In the circulation phase and financial markets, every Bitcoin transaction is verified and recorded in the blockchain by all miners in the Bitcoin network.

Bitcoin is the first "killer application" empowered by blockchain technology, and to date, the core technologies and talent resources of blockchain still largely reside in the field of Bitcoin research and development. However, as a new generation of underlying foundational technology, the application scope of blockchain will inevitably extend beyond digital cryptocurrencies into other fields such as finance, economy, technology, and politics. The existing technologies, models, and mechanisms of Bitcoin will provide valuable references for the development of blockchain in new application areas, while innovations in new fields will inevitably promote solutions to existing problems in the Bitcoin system. Therefore, Bitcoin and blockchain technology exist in a symbiotic relationship of collaborative evolution rather than mutual competition.

The Basic Model and Key Technologies of Blockchain

This section will elaborate on the basic model, fundamental principles, and key technologies of blockchain technology, as well as several innovative models of blockchain beyond the Bitcoin system, in conjunction with the current state of technology and applications of the Bitcoin system. Most existing blockchain applications are similar to Bitcoin, differing only in certain specific aspects or adopting more or less variants of the Bitcoin model.

The consensus process of blockchain is essentially a crowdsourcing process. How to design an incentive-compatible consensus mechanism that allows self-interested nodes in decentralized systems to spontaneously implement block data verification and accounting work, while increasing the costs of irrational behaviors within the system to suppress security attacks and threats, is an important scientific problem that blockchain needs to solve.

Smart Contracts Based on Blockchain

The concept of smart contracts was first proposed by scholar Nick Szabo in 1994, initially defined as a set of digitally defined commitments, including agreements that contract participants can execute these commitments, with the original intention of creating various flexible and controllable smart assets by embedding smart contracts into physical entities. Due to the limitations of computational means and the lack of application scenarios, smart contracts did not receive widespread attention from researchers.

The emergence of blockchain technology has redefined smart contracts. Smart contracts are core components of blockchain (contract layer), driven by events, stateful, and run on replicable shared blockchain data ledgers, capable of actively or passively processing data, accepting, storing, and sending value, as well as controlling and managing various on-chain smart assets. As an embedded programmable contract, smart contracts can be embedded in any blockchain data, transactions, tangible or intangible assets, forming a programmable control software-defined system, market, and assets. Smart contracts not only provide innovative solutions for the issuance, trading, creation, and management of traditional financial assets but also play an important role in asset management, contract management, regulatory enforcement, and other affairs within social systems.

Specifically, smart contracts are a set of situational-response programming rules and logic deployed on the blockchain as decentralized, trustworthy shared program code. Smart contracts also possess the general characteristics of blockchain data, such as distributed recording, storage, and verification, immutability, and non-falsifiability. The signing parties of the contract reach a consensus on the contract content, breach conditions, breach responsibilities, and external verification data sources, and if necessary, check and test the contract code to ensure accuracy before deploying it on the blockchain in the form of a smart contract, allowing for automated execution of the contract on behalf of all signing parties without relying on any central institution. The programmability of smart contracts allows signing parties to add any complex terms.

Typically, after being signed by all parties, smart contracts are attached to blockchain data (such as a Bitcoin transaction) in the form of program code, propagated through a P2P network, and verified by nodes before being recorded in a specific block of the blockchain. Smart contracts encapsulate several predefined states and transformation rules, scenarios that trigger contract execution (such as reaching a specific time or occurring specific events), and corresponding actions under specific scenarios. The blockchain can monitor the status of smart contracts in real-time and activate and execute contracts upon verifying external data sources and confirming that specific triggering conditions are met.

Blockchain and smart contracts have extremely broad application scenarios. For example, business models such as equity crowdfunding or P2P online lending in the internet finance sector can be realized through blockchain and smart contracts. The traditional approach involves using exchanges or online platforms as central institutions to complete fundraising, management, and investment, which can easily lead to funding risks due to the credit deficiencies of central institutions. By utilizing smart contracts, these functions can be automatically executed on a decentralized and trustworthy blockchain. The blockchain can record every financing transaction, calculate each investor's equity share when a specific financing amount is successfully reached, or automatically refund funds to investors if the financing amount is not reached within a certain period.

Moreover, by asymmetrically encrypting physical assets such as houses and vehicles and embedding smart contracts with specific access control rules before deploying them on the blockchain, users can use these assets once they meet specific access permissions or perform specific actions (such as payment), effectively addressing pain points in asset transfer and usage permissions in rental business models for houses or vehicles.

Smart contracts exhibit characteristics of autonomy, self-sufficiency, and decentralization:

Autonomy means that once the contract is initiated, it will run automatically without requiring any intervention from other signing parties;
Self-sufficiency means that the contract can obtain funds by providing services or issuing assets and use these funds when needed;
Decentralization means that smart contracts are guaranteed to be executed by decentralized storage and verification of program code rather than centralized entities, which greatly ensures the fairness and justice of the contract.

Blockchain can technically solve the trust dilemma in social governance. The highly transparent distributed ledger of blockchain, utilizing real-time timestamps, creates a "strong connection" relationship between every subject on the blockchain and others, breaking down the low-trust dilemma caused by the "weak connections" between individuals and institutions. This promotes a comprehensive enhancement of social trust and government trust levels. For example, using blockchain technology to record in real-time and share public budgets, public decision-making, and the progress of social issue handling can truly realize the operation of power under public scrutiny and supervision, promoting the enhancement of trust levels.

Finally, constructing a trustworthy society based on blockchain technology will reduce the complexity of social operations and interactions. Due to the transparency, decentralization, and verifiability of blockchain data, social subjects no longer need to verify each other's credit levels themselves or rely on the credit of governments and institutions as support before deciding whether to trust others. The significant enhancement of social trust levels can further increase the enthusiasm of social subjects to participate in social governance, promote cooperative behaviors in social governance, and drive governance towards co-construction, co-governance, and sharing.

On one hand, blockchain can prevent and reduce social deviance. Since operational rules can achieve openness and transparency with multi-party participation, and data possess characteristics of immutability and traceability, all subjects within the blockchain system can maintain mutual constraints and supervision, achieving the function of curbing deviant behaviors. In the field of social governance, by digitizing and programming social individuals and institutions, and incorporating them into the blockchain system after removing anonymity, the occurrence of social deviance can be effectively prevented and reduced. First, the public transparency of blockchain data can promote mutual supervision. Any behavior of individuals in the public blockchain system can be seen by other members. Once deviant behavior occurs, individuals cannot escape, thus achieving mutual supervision. Second, the traceability and immutability of blockchain will deter individual deviance. The immutability and traceability of blockchain data determine that individuals' behaviors on the blockchain will be irreversibly recorded. Once deviant behavior occurs, they may find themselves in a difficult situation. If linked with the social reality's punitive mechanisms, the costs of individual deviance will far exceed the benefits, thereby reducing the occurrence of individual dishonesty, illegal activities, and power rent-seeking deviant behaviors, promoting individuals and industries towards self-governance and self-discipline in social governance. The potential value of blockchain in preventing and reducing social deviance provides it with vast application space in credit system construction, public safety, and other fields.

On the other hand, blockchain can achieve more comprehensive information traceability and verification. Under the combined influence of information barriers and fragmentation between departments, the difficulty of information sharing, and the limited access to information for the public and society, the inadequacy of information traceability and verification has become a pain point in current social governance. For example, in the field of government services, the public often still requires various proofs when handling various affairs. It is common to see reports about the public needing to prove "I am me" in personal matters, which has drawn criticism from the public. Blockchain can link individuals' small ledgers with institutions' and industries' large ledgers through the construction of "alliance chains," integrating individual data with institutional and industry data on the basis of ensuring data circulation and trustworthiness, providing solutions to break down information barriers and promote information sharing, making real-time information traceability and verification possible for the public and institutions.

In the era of digital survival, the differentiation of information acquisition and usage capabilities will exacerbate social class differentiation. The differentiation of social classes will, in turn, intensify the differentiation of individuals' information acquisition and usage capabilities, forming a vicious cycle that leads to class solidification.

Although blockchain constructs a distributed infrastructure, granting each node more participatory rights and allowing individuals to express their intentions authentically, blockchain itself has certain entry barriers and technical requirements that lower-tier populations may not reach, making it impossible for them to express their interests. Therefore, groups at higher social and economic statuses are more likely to leverage their advantageous positions in blockchain to influence social governance decisions and service provision, consolidating their class status. In contrast, lower-tier groups, due to their technological disadvantages, find it difficult to effectively express their demands, thus unable to utilize blockchain to voice their interests and effectively benefit from social governance decisions and service provision.

From this perspective, although the development of blockchain technology promotes the intelligence and socialization of social governance, this technological dividend cannot benefit all classes and may even place lower-tier populations in a more vulnerable position, exacerbating the solidification and differentiation of social classes.

Blockchain, through decentralized distributed storage and recording of information data, will bring about dilemmas regarding data rights and individual privacy. On one hand, blockchain will generate issues regarding the protection of individual data rights. The digitization of social governance is an important prerequisite driven by blockchain. The data generated by individuals' social activities in the social governance space is aggregated into the blockchain system, forming valuable data to support social governance decisions and service provision. However, how to confirm the value rights of data generated by individuals and how to assign this value to the individuals who generated the data remain challenging issues. Meanwhile, in traditional centralized social governance structures, central institutions possess absolute supervisory rights over data. Although there are concerns about data privacy violations by central institutions, at least one can rely on the center to protect data privacy. Although blockchain was initially designed to be anonymous, behaviors and transactions on the blockchain are visible to all nodes. As blockchain develops, the design of anonymity is also expected to change, leading to certain vulnerabilities in privacy protection on the blockchain.

In decentralized social governance blockchain data, any individual's social activities, exchanges, and other information data will be recorded and broadcasted for confirmation within the blockchain system, which may infringe upon individual privacy rights and even lead to illegal exploitation.

Blockchain may lead to the loss of individual subjectivity. Individuals are not only creators of technology but also operators and subjects of technology, as well as constituent units of technological systems.

Technological advancements bring opportunities and conveniences for the comprehensive development of economic and social systems. However, as a tool, technology may lead to the objectification and alienation of individuals. The liberating potential brought by blockchain technology comes at a cost; even as relationships between individuals become more like digital choice problems, the social relationships themselves will become mechanized and rigid.

Blockchain is a machine for constructing trust, but this statement is incomplete. From a sociological perspective, trust is categorized. It is not the case that having data automatically leads to trust.

For instance, we trust our family members, trust our parents, and trust our friends. This process does not require blockchain; trustworthy data can still build trust, which is what we commonly refer to as the first paradigm of constructing trust based on personality.

Circle: Collaborative Network#

Metcalfe's Law
This is a law about the value of networks and the development of network technologies proposed by George Gilder in 1993, named after the computer networking pioneer Robert Metcalfe, in recognition of his contributions to Ethernet. Its content states that the value of a network is equal to the square of the number of nodes within that network, and the value of the network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users.

This law indicates that the more users a network has, the greater the value of the entire network and each computer within that network.

Everyone is an elite in the computer field, and there is a classic law in the computer world called Metcalfe's Law.

This law states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users. In other words, when you have three users, the value might be 9, but when you have five users, the value becomes 25. This growth rate is very fast; thus, when Didi has 100 drivers versus 10,000 drivers, there is a significant difference in scale. Therefore, in our social collaborative processes, the value networks generated by collaborative networks of different scales are also vastly different. Currently, everyone is familiar with WeChat groups; you can have 5 users or 500 users, and everyone can feel that the power of this community is entirely different.

Grameen's Five-Person Group Community#

Next, I will compare several different communities, starting with Grameen's five-person group community. In this five-person group, strong collaborative relationships can be established. For example, in rural areas, people often refer to each other not by names but as the father or mother of a child. Many people cannot call each other by name, but in Grameen's group, everyone is required to know each other's names. Moreover, the five individuals are relatively familiar with each other. This kind of acquaintance network forms a network constraint. If you do not comply with some default rules within this network, it will be challenging to continue collaborating in this group, which serves as a foundational consensus for small-scale communities.

This is a small-scale community in economic activities. Additionally, many people may know that the U.S. Marine Corps often operates in small groups, where each member has different specialties, and they assign specific tasks to their teammates, forming a small combat unit. This flexibility is very strong, and the requirements for mutual cooperation are very high.

So why do we say the number five?

This number serves as a boundary; internet companies say this is the number that can be fed by a pizza, meaning that a pizza can feed this number, establishing an upper limit for building a strong collaborative community.

Dunbar's Number (English: Dunbar's number), also known as the 150 Law, refers to the upper limit of the number of people with whom one can maintain close interpersonal relationships, typically believed to be 150. Here, interpersonal relationships refer to the number of people a person knows and understands the relationships between those people. Supporters believe that teams exceeding this upper limit require stricter rules, laws, and mandatory norms to maintain stability and cohesion.

Dunbar's number does not have a precise value; it ranges between 100 and 230, with 150 being the commonly used figure. [1] Dunbar's number was first proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar in the 1990s, determined by the size of the neocortex, and thus became a limitation on team size. The processing capacity of the neocortex determines the upper limit of the number of people with whom one can maintain close interpersonal relationships. In such groups, everyone knows each other and understands each other's relationships. Moreover, this number includes familiar old classmates and colleagues, meaning that the actual number of close friends will be even fewer, approaching single digits. [2]

The second number I want to mention is Dunbar's number, which was studied by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar at Oxford University in the 1990s regarding different social structures and relationships. He found that regardless of whether in primitive tribes, capitalist tribes, or modern society, no matter how civilization evolves, the number of close relationships each person can handle is approximately 148. If rounded, it is 150. Dunbar's number has since been elevated to Dunbar's theory, which is considered the theoretical foundation for many human resource management and social networking theories.

You can reflect on your daily social situations and count the number of acquaintances you can maintain; generally, you will not exceed 50 people.

Dunbar's theory also has another extension regarding the number of people with whom one can engage in deep interactions, which is generally around 20 people. For example, if you have more than 20 close female friends in your group, you are quite impressive. I have yet to see many girls with more than 20 close friends.

The Popularity of Blockchain#

This has become a foundational application for social interaction. Many communities have begun to explode in development, with many people starting to add numerous friends. I have also seen many people fill their WeChat friend list, having three, four, or even more WeChat accounts. Do you know the maximum number of friends one can add on WeChat?

My WeChat has not yet reached its limit, so I have not verified this answer. The official WeChat website states that the upper limit for friends is 5,000. However, multiple channels indicate that Zhang Xiaolong has set this number at 5,040. Why is there a decimal? Because this number is the population of Plato's ideal state. It actually borrows this metaphor.

You can take a look at your friend list when you have time. You can check your chat history with each person. If there are chat records within a year, I believe that there shouldn't be too many people exceeding two or three hundred; perhaps 90% of interactions are limited to dozens of people.

For instance, we all say we believe in science. Science is not a single person, nor is it a program or a machine. It is difficult to summarize it in one sentence. So what is the greatest feature of science? The greatest feature of science is falsifiability.

Let’s take one of the most fundamental sciences: physics. From the time of Aristotle to Galileo, Newton, and Einstein, physics has continuously progressed, with each new stage discovering the errors or shortcomings of previous theories. However, we cannot say that the era of Aristotle was not scientific; with Einstein's theories of relativity, we cannot say that Newton's classical mechanics is not scientific. Science is not about being infallible; it can be wrong, but the entire construction process must be falsifiable, meaning it needs to be re-verified and validated by others.

The decision-making process in social networks is a typical group decision-making process (Group Decision Making, GDM), where multiple stakeholders negotiate their viewpoints through feedback to reach a consensus. Typically, the GDM process includes four main stages:

Experts provide opinions.
Trust-based opinion fusion: In the process of integrating expert opinions, different weights can be assigned to their opinions based on their trust values.
Calculate the degree of consensus.
Feedback: Generate personalized feedback and provide opinions to all or some experts, considering them in the next round of negotiation, thus making the experts' opinions more aligned to reach group consensus.

Research on trust in group decision-making mainly includes three aspects: (i) trust propagation; (ii) trust-based opinion fusion; (iii) trust modeling.

3.1 Trust Propagation in GDM

Trust and distrust can propagate simultaneously in group decision-making networks, but it should be noted that the two are not independent. For more details, see the 2016 paper on Uninorm trust propagation and aggregation methods.

For example, when predicting the trust value between two nodes that are relatively distant in a social network, if there are multiple indirect paths between them, it is advisable to use the shortest one (i.e., the one with the fewest intermediary nodes):

Trust: In cases of complete trust/distrust, if expert E1 fully trusts E2 and expert E2 fully trusts E3, then E1 will fully trust E3.
Distrust: If expert E2 completely distrusts E3 and expert E1 fully trusts E2, then expert E1 will completely distrust E3.

Trust-Based Expert Opinion Fusion#

In the latest literature on fuzzy decision-making, Yager's Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA) has gained widespread use. By employing a ranking-based weighting approach, the influence of certain malicious users' opinions can be effectively reduced.

Uninorm trust propagation and aggregation methods defines a singular trust weighted average (UTWA) operator, using trust as a metric to calculate weights and ranks to generate OWA aggregation operators. In 2018, the authors of this article further expanded UTWA, proposing A new consensus model that estimates trust and distrust using all possible paths while incorporating experts' risk preferences to fuse expert opinions using the OWA operator.
Additionally, the trust relationships between experts can be represented by directed edges in a graph. To assess each expert's importance in opinion fusion, the author also suggests calculating the inner centrality of each expert node in the network, normalizing this value to calculate weights and derive the order in IOWA.

When it comes to trust propagation, for instance, when you buy toothpaste or cosmetics, you often only recognize the brand and do not consider the production processes involved. Advertisers for cosmetics will not explain the production processes used, etc.

This raises another issue: due to the limited capacity of our brains to process information, we can only accept simplified information. Thus, trust propagation must be a simplified process.

This indeed creates a contradiction; the process of producing trust is complex and requires professional training, but this process cannot be fully recorded or transmitted. Therefore, many media personalities and the perceptions shaped by media can easily lead to emotional manipulation, where these individuals cannot absorb professional analyses and only focus on emotional language and articles. Consequently, many public accounts and self-media operations often first stimulate the emotional operating system within friend circles, providing little professional content.

To summarize the two paradigms of trust: one is personality-based trust, which includes trust in relatives, friends, and family, gradually extending to our social relationships, layer by layer, becoming increasingly diluted, like ripples in a pond. The second part is trust in systems, which is a falsifiable paradigm that arises in science. With these two types of trust, another issue arises: the production and propagation of trust. Producing trust is a complex process that requires professional support, which is difficult to communicate externally, while the propagation and reception of trust is a simplified process, outputting a brand and symbol.

Regarding blockchain as a machine for trust, we approach it from a sociological perspective.

The contradictions involved in decentralization are particularly prominent in the realm of rules and the distribution of interests, that is, in the software part of the human social operating system.

To summarize, the hardware part of the human social operating system benefits the entire group due to increased efficiency, while the software part has a higher demand for decentralization, leading to more pronounced contradictions, as it involves the formulation of rules for interest distribution.

Remarkable Sociological Experiments#

1. The Birth of Bitcoin
On October 31, 2008, an individual using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto proposed the design white paper for Bitcoin (Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System) in the metzdowd cryptography mailing list and publicly released the initial implementation code in 2009. The first Bitcoin was generated on January 3, 2009, at 18:15:05 UTC. However, Bitcoin truly gained popularity and captured public attention at least two years later.
As an open-source project, Bitcoin quickly attracted a large number of developers, and the current official website bitcoin.org provides various code implementations and tools related to Bitcoin.
In addition to its ingenious design concept, one of the most talked-about aspects of Bitcoin is that the true identity of its inventor, "Satoshi Nakamoto," remains unconfirmed to this day. Some speculate that "Satoshi Nakamoto" may not be a single person but rather a team. These speculations have added a legendary color to the Bitcoin project.
1. The Significance and Value of Bitcoin
To this day, the topic of Bitcoin remains filled with controversy. However, most people would likely agree that Bitcoin is a remarkable sociological experiment in the history of digital currency and even the entire financial history.
Since the Bitcoin network went live in 2009, it has operated 24/7 globally for over 8 years without any management, successfully processing millions of transactions, including a single transaction of 150 million USD. Notably, the Bitcoin network has never experienced a major system failure.
The Bitcoin network currently consists of thousands of core nodes, requiring no centralized supporting institutions, purely relying on distributed mechanisms to support a steadily increasing transaction volume.
Bitcoin has truly achieved a secure and reliable decentralized digital currency mechanism from a practical standpoint, which is the fundamental reason it has garnered immense enthusiasm from countless fintech practitioners.
As a conceptual currency, Bitcoin primarily aims to address several core issues faced by existing currency systems:
Being controlled by a single institution, making it vulnerable to attacks;
Its value cannot be guaranteed, leading to volatility;
Inability to conduct anonymous transactions, lacking privacy.
As previously discussed, the key to achieving a decentralized digital currency mechanism lies in establishing a reliable transaction record system and forming a reasonable currency issuance mechanism.
This transaction record system must accurately and fairly record every transaction that has occurred and be immune to malicious tampering. Compared to existing banking systems, it is evident that current banking mechanisms, as third-party intermediaries for financial transactions, provide transaction record services at a cost. If all parties involved in the transaction fully trust the bank's records (database), there is no trust issue. However, what if the currency circulates on a larger scale (even across multiple banks)? Which bank's system can provide completely reliable and uninterrupted service? The only possible solution is a distributed ledger. This ledger can be freely accessed by all users, and no individual can maliciously tamper with or control the recorded data. To achieve such an unprecedented ledger system, the Bitcoin network cleverly designed the blockchain structure, providing reliable and tamper-proof digital currency ledger functionality.
In the Bitcoin network, the issuance of currency is regulated by the Bitcoin protocol. The total amount of currency is controlled, and the issuance speed is automatically adjusted over time. Since the total amount is fixed, the value of a single Bitcoin will rise as more economic entities recognize Bitcoin. The automatic adjustment of the issuance speed prevents inflation or stagnation.
On the other hand, it is important to recognize that as a sociological experiment, Bitcoin has achieved tremendous success, particularly in the realm of blockchain technology, which has already given rise to many valuable business scenarios and innovative technologies. However, this does not necessarily mean that Bitcoin itself will inevitably enter future commercial systems.
1. More Valuable Blockchain Technology
  If Bitcoin is a highly influential sociological experiment, then the blockchain technology extracted from Bitcoin's core design shows the potential to shape a more efficient and secure future business network.
  Starting in 2014, the blockchain technology behind Bitcoin began to gradually attract attention and further sparked a wave of innovation in distributed ledger technology.
  In fact, people have long recognized that technologies related to accounting are crucial for the management of assets (including tangible and intangible assets) (including ownership and circulation); and decentralized or multi-centered distributed ledger technology is of great significance for current open and multidimensional business models. The ideas and structures of blockchain represent a highly feasible technology for realizing such distributed ledger systems.
  Blockchain technology has now transcended the Bitcoin network itself, emerging prominently in various fields such as finance, trade, credit, the Internet of Things, and the sharing economy. Now, unless specifically stated as "Bitcoin blockchain," when people refer to "blockchain technology," it often has no necessary connection to Bitcoin.