Blockchain mobile phone, true technology or hot spots?

Lead: Although these mobile phone manufacturers are vying to label themselves as “blockchains”, in the eyes of some industry insiders, this is more like a “hot spot”.

Lenovo S5 mobile phone, propaganda that this blockchain concept mobile phone built a blockchain technology at the bottom of the Z space payment area system. Beijing News reporter Zhu Junshe

So far, the blockchain has been lively for four months, almost a hit, that is, from the capital to the media, now hardware manufacturers are also planning to share a piece of cake.

As of April 12, the Lenovo blockchain mobile phone S5 has been sold for about 20 days. This thousand yuan machine mainly uses the "blockchain" protection technology to ensure payment security. In addition to Lenovo S5, Candy S11, Changhong R8 Kirin also played the label of the blockchain mobile phone, and said that there are blockchain wallet, mobile phone mining and other functions.

In the opinion of many technicians and industry insiders in the blockchain industry, the above-mentioned blockchain concept mobile phone does not clearly state which specific blockchain technology is applied. The so-called encryption function is unknown, and its technology is also used in ordinary mobile phones. There are applications. And because mobile computing power is completely difficult to match the mining machine, "mobile phone mining" is not realistic.

Zhao Yongliang, deputy dean of Shandong Blockchain Application Technology Research Institute, analyzed that smartphones have encountered bottlenecks. "From this perspective, blockchain mobile phones are suspected of being hot spots."

Many manufacturers push "blockchain mobile phones"

On March 20th, Lenovo released the "Lenovo S5", which is called Lenovo's first "blockchain" mobile phone.

According to related reports, as a "blockchain" mobile phone, Lenovo S5 will provide the "blockchain" protection technology at the bottom of the system, so that every payment link is fully protected, starting at 999 yuan.

Lenovo's flagship store on the Tmall platform, Lenovo S5 sales data shows: as of noon on April 12, its monthly sales in Tmall Lenovo flagship store totals about 1,000 units.

The combination of blockchain and mobile phone is not new. In January of this year, a well-known domestic mobile phone manufacturer candy mobile phone released a new machine - Candy S11, also known as blockchain creation version of the mobile phone, the official price of 2499 yuan of the new machine is the biggest gimmick.

As of noon on April 12, Tmall's candy mobile phone flagship store showed that its monthly sales volume was only 121; Jingdong's candy flagship store and Jingdong self-operated store even had less than 500 comments.

The promotion of candy mobile phone said that the candy block chain mobile phone = candy mobile phone + block chain wallet + block chain mining machine. Can be used as a mining machine to mine a digital forked currency called "Ether Mist" and then convert it into candy points.

According to the promotion of candy mobile phones, this "world's first blockchain mobile phone" will use the blockchain technology to reshape the mobile phone industry.

In March, Changhong, a veteran home appliance brand, also announced the launch of a blockchain mobile phone, Changhong R8 Unicorn, which is priced at 2,999 yuan. Changhong R8 Qilin claims to be the first Unicorn blockchain mobile phone developed by Changhong Communications for Unicorn. This mobile phone is a new generation of blockchain mobile intelligent terminal. Based on POW consensus algorithm, device fingerprint technology and LBS location service, users can participate in the blockchain with lower threshold.

The so-called Unicorn is a blockchain project that claims to "restrict the hegemony of miners." To put it bluntly, it is a project for mining services. This Changhong blockchain mobile phone has also been labeled as “mining”.

In the evaluation areas of Tmall and JD.com, the comments on the Lenovo S5 and Candy S11 mobile phones are all about the performance and appearance of mobile phones, and few users have evaluated their "blockchain" related functions.

Some netizens commented on the configuration and performance of Changhong R8 Kirin and Candy S11, saying that it has no special sagacity compared with the configuration of the thousand yuan machine, but after adding the blockchain element, a brand A mobile phone that is not well known to the public can be priced at nearly 3,000 yuan.

Technical experts: no open source, no chain, hot spots

Although these mobile phone manufacturers are vying to label themselves as “blockchains”, in the eyes of some industry insiders, this is more like a “hot spot”.

In the propaganda of Lenovo S5, this blockchain mobile phone is mainly security. Lenovo S5 has dual domain isolation and global encryption space to protect users' account, password and network shopping security, and supports blockchain technology from the bottom. For more introductions, Lenovo related staff said "only this information."

In this regard, a technician of the blockchain technology company matrix yuan said that in the absence of detailed information, purely literally, the so-called "dual domain isolation" is the common storage and private key storage isolation, belonging to hardware security. Environment; "global encryption" is to store everything in an encrypted manner. "I feel like I’ve said it, and I haven’t said it. It’s hard to read what I want to explain."

Cao Wei, chief strategy officer of the Energy Blockchain Laboratory, said that the blockchain is widely regarded as the security protection of private data, value transmission, traceability, etc. "But most of the hardware blocks of application blockchain are not needed at present. these functions."

In his view, using blockchain technology to solve the problem of payment security, it is difficult to see the doorway through the slogan. "It doesn't tell us what algorithm is used, how many nodes are there, and it doesn't tell us where these nodes are. What consensus is there to ensure that the 'byzantine attack' does not occur in the future."

In addition, he believes that the blockchain is heavily involved, that is, open source, and the blockchain that is not open source has no meaning.

In the view of COO Li Jun of blockchain technology company Bubbi blockchain, the value of blockchain is to solve problems such as security, traceability and distributed storage. "Without the chain, it is not a blockchain mobile phone. ”

“Mining is a practice of the blockchain consensus mechanism. Even if you really use mobile phones to mine, this method can’t be compared with the mining power of mining machines. The computing power of a single ASIC mining machine may be The sum of the computing power of 100 million mobile phones." Cao Yu said.

The current blockchain and mobile phone have technical problems

According to industry insiders, the combination of earlier blockchain and hardware products is the digital currency hardware wallet, which is also the currently recognized blockchain hardware application product.

A staff member of the matrix element said that as a blockchain technology company, they only have one hardware wallet on the hardware, and other hardware-based products that are more recognized in the industry, "have not heard of it."

“Hardware wallets actually solve the security problem of digital assets by combining with blockchain technology,” said Cao Yu, chief strategy officer of the Energy Blockchain Lab.

In his view, the current blockchain combined with hardware such as mobile phones has technical problems. The first is that it is difficult for hardware such as mobile phones to support the operation of the blockchain network. For example, when the mobile phone network is disconnected, there will be “lone blocks” (isolated blocks), which is not only a problem with the blockchain, but also a problem with the communication network. “Once the line is dropped, there will be a transmission breakpoint. If the mobile phone does not connect to the Internet for an hour, the transactions that occur in the blockchain network during this hour can easily be tampered with.”

He believes that the current technology can only provide the function of breakpoint retransmission in a centralized manner, but once it is centralized, it cannot be called a point-to-point distributed network, nor can it be called a secure block. Chain system.

In addition, the current blockchain technology has not yet reached the maturity stage. Cao Yu believes that all blockchain hardware uses physical equipment to solve the digital world problem, and has not yet reached the stage of solving physical problems with physical equipment. This aspect is due to the immature technology of blockchain hardware and software integration. The technology of the blockchain itself is immature. "For example, the efficiency of blockchain, the fault tolerance of blockchains in high concurrency environments, and compatibility issues in different hardware environments need to be addressed."

However, it is not unfeasible to use blockchains in areas such as smart phones such as mobile phones. "If it is clear how to integrate the blockchain into the hardware, how many nodes, what kind of consensus mechanism and encryption means are used, this will make the public more convinced." Cao Yu said.

Zhao Yongliang, deputy dean of Shandong Blockchain Application Technology Research Institute, has experienced a bottleneck after the development of smart phones in recent years. For some non-head traditional manufacturers, there is no new growth and innovation. In this respect, the blockchain mobile phone is more like a speculation.