A few days ago, I attended a dinner for the "cryptosphere", and most of the attendees were traders. During the meal, someone asked a good question: What is the most scarce thing in the blockchain? I wanted to answer, but found that there was some communication barrier... When I finished, everyone looked confused. There are many people like me who are engaged in trading analysts, and during the discussion, I realized that some basic concepts need to be popularized. This is very helpful for investors to understand and participate in (or take over) our future projects. Now, let's start the discussion!
When it comes to blockchain, people are repeatedly brainwashed by mysterious concepts such as L2 DA. Under the repeated bombardment of information, even if they only understand part of it, at least they are no longer unfamiliar with the topic. However, the two basic concepts of blockchain, "transaction" and "state", especially the latter - the global "state" on the chain, are completely misunderstood.
The state machine is the best mathematical model to describe the blockchain (please don’t run away when you hear the word “math”, and don’t rush to search; the explanation in the encyclopedia is too complicated). It consists of three simple concepts: old state, new state, and input… It’s that simple, and anyone can understand it.
Suppose I have $10 and you have $20; this is the old state (current state). Input can be simply understood as a transaction; in the blockchain, it is a signed transaction request, such as "I transfer you $5". When the input (transaction) is applied to the old state, the old state becomes the new state: I now have $5 and you have $25.
Everyone thinks of blockchain as a bank, but banks actually run as state machines as well. Most people check their bank accounts just to see the balance, which is a state query. Occasionally they may need to see historical transaction records, but banks usually only provide transaction records for the last one to two years. Blockchains usually keep all historical records, so the amount of stored transaction data grows indefinitely, but what about the state size? This is a topic worth discussing.
When the number of bank accounts is fixed, the size of the current balance table for all users is fixed (think of an Excel sheet), even if some users do not make transactions for years, while others make 10 or 100 transactions a day; the size of the table only changes when accounts are opened or closed. In short, the historical transaction data will continue to grow, but the state table can grow and shrink.
Back to Ethereum, anyone can pay gas fees to deploy applications, and the deployment of smart contracts will increase the state size. Each smart contract, such as USDT, will occupy new state space when adding new users. On EVM, especially L2, you only need to pay a small gas fee to occupy more state. Deployed contracts are rarely deleted, so the historical transaction data has continued to grow since the first day of Ethereum, and the most terrifying thing is that the growth of state space has never stopped.
If we ask what is the scarcest thing in the blockchain, we might say BTC, because its total supply is fixed in the code. However, in smart contract blockchains, state space is undoubtedly the scarcest resource. Even with only the weak traffic of crypto users (most of whom are still playing on centralized exchanges), Ethereum's state space has expanded to a point that personal PCs cannot sustain. It is conceivable that when real mass adoption occurs, the growth rate of global state usage will be unimaginable.
Therefore, we believe that the global state of the blockchain can be treated as a scarce resource and priced. In turn, only by limiting the explosive growth of the global state can we face the scarcity of resources.
There is an economic principle that when the price is zero, demand becomes infinite, leading to waste. This is why, although newspapers can be distributed at a price below cost, they cannot be distributed for free; otherwise, unread newspapers will go directly to the recycling bin, wasting resources.
This also answers a current question about blockchain: if the state space of the blockchain is too cheap, it will lead to on-chain space being used for "meaningless" applications, such as emoticons. (This is not to say that memes have no value, but their life cycle is much shorter than that of applications such as USDT.)
Therefore, we need to popularize the concepts of blockchain transactions (inputs) and states, as well as a state machine model that is more suitable for blockchains, hoping that it will help everyone (better understand our future projects).
#BTC☀ #BNB金鏟子 #BTC突破7万大关 #BTC走势预测 #ETH🔥🔥🔥🔥 $BTC
