On May 28 this year, General Secretary Xi Jinping delivered an important speech at the National Conference of Academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chinese Academy of Engineering. The important speech of the general secretary made the society reach a consensus quickly: blockchain is one of the development directions of the new generation of information technology.Generally speaking, bitcoin is only an application of blockchain. Only with blockchain can bitcoin exist. However, the general understanding process of the public is the reverse: from bitcoin to blockchain. The understanding of bitcoin comes first.The characteristics and advantages of blockchain are decentralized ledger system, ways of trust with the lowest cost, safe and reliable value transmission, creating a new form of social contract, innovation of self-control and consensus mechanism, and reconstructing commercial civilization.Blockchain is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, its technology has a very wide application prospect; on the other hand, high-risk projects in the name of blockchain and even scams appear from time to time, there are some hidden dangers.There are a series of risks that can not be ignored in the development of blockchain: political risk, financial risk, economic risk, social risk, legal risk and technical risk.Blockchain has fundamentally changed the traditional centralized way of credit creation--machine trust. Blockchain makes any form of value transfer more secure. It can effectively solve the problem of data security and privacy. It is expected to lead us from personal trust and institutional trust to a new era of machine trust. If new technologies such as artificial intelligence represent new productivity, blockchain represents more advanced new production relationship in the future.
