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本帖最后由 Hetbert 于 2018-7-18 23:33 编辑
安永区块链专家：在交易中采用一致的货币对公链发展至关重要
据Coindesk消息，安永会计事务所全球区块链专家Paul Brody近日发文表示，一家公司想要在区块链上签订商业合同，最佳的选择是在同一区块链中采用同一种通证进行交易、结算等步骤。
这样做最重要的原因是便于企业进行风控管理。目前，所有商业交易都以传统法币进行，传统企业接受这些法币作为收入，同时也使用这些法币处理所有的债务、付款。
对于那些有意愿在区块链上进行交易的公司，这类公司会希望以相同的货币在链上进行交易。如果一家公司采用欧元，以固定价格购买产品，并且在公链上执行该合同，那么该公司也会希望以欧元进行结算。
Paul Brody is a principal and the global blockchain leader at EY.
The following article is the third in a series. Read part one here and part two here.
We were promised a global financial and industrial revolution. We got a mango tracker.
Three years since enterprises started exploring the possibilities in blockchain, it's perfectly understandable to be disappointed with what we've got so far.
But believe it or not, the seemingly banal applications for blockchain we're seeing, from food traceability to software licenses, are a big deal and rightly worth celebrating.
The biggest journeys take place one step at a time, and when it comes to enterprises, it's a particularly long journey. That 22,000-word software license agreement you clicked "yes" to without reading? Enterprises are reading every word of those things and arguing over the details. Adoption of technology inside the enterprise is sticky and durable, but it is also very slow as these systems are fragile and have many decision makers.
If you want to beg forgiveness rather than ask for permission a la Uber, that's your call. If you want to put a Fortune 500 company's cars into an asset-sharing system, be prepared to spend the next year locked up with the legal team.
As important as the milestones achieved so far have been, there's a much longer way to go and in this series of articles, I will examine the key transformations that need to take place for blockchains to go from interesting prototypes to production systems solving niche problems to general-purpose tools for moving value of all kinds around.
We're just transitioning from the interesting prototype into the niche problem-solving category, with things like food and wine traceability and software licenses leading the way as good case examples.
Going public...
Right now, nearly all enterprise blockchain examples are confined to private networks and, typically, non-financial systems. To get from niche use cases to general-purpose transactions suitable for all businesses, four transitions must happen.
The first is a shift from private, permissioned blockchains to their chaotic, public and permissionless counterparts. Like the move from private company systems to the internet, it looks scary now, but in a few years, we will all look back upon it as inevitable.
There's a good reason, however, that nearly all enterprise solutions today run on private networks: privacy. Public, permissionless blockchains, though they are based on key principles of cryptography, actually run most data in the "clear" – which is to say unencrypted. If you want to buy raw materials from suppliers and partners and you do so over the public networks like ethereum today, your pricing deals and volumes and partners will all be easily visible to your competition. Not very attractive.
And so companies have opted for private networks. But private networks, even industry consortia, don't scale very well. If you form a private network for food traceability and you want to ship the food and insure that shipment, you'll end up needing half a dozen different blockchain connections to complete the whole transaction.
Some companies are working hard on connecting up lots of different private blockchains. That's going to be expensive and our fear is that hackers will have a field day with those interoperable systems. This isn't a strategy that has worked in other industries and eras, and we don't see it having a better fate this time around either.
If you've been around long enough, you remember when companies had point-to-point connections for their email systems. It worked, just barely, but only for a few companies to talk to each other.
...while keeping data private
The internet and public key encryption made it possible for us to email everyone, everywhere securely without any predefined interconnections. With zero knowledge proofs, we believe the same will be possible for blockchain transactions.
This technology, which has been proven in a number of prototypes, is now being industrialized. It will allow all companies to work on public blockchains and to enter into contracts with each other securely and privately.
The mathematical principles that underpin zero-knowledge proofs are very complex, but the effect is very simple. I can prove to you something is true (e.g. I have a certain number of mangos, or I have delivered them to a certain customer or location) without enabling anyone else to understand the underlying data.
This means you can preserve the immutability and redundancy of a blockchain by allowing anyone to verify the truth of information and approve a transaction – something that is critical to consensus algorithms in decentralized systems – without exposing the details for all to see.
The same scenario we discussed before (buying product, shipping it, insuring it and tracking it and paying for it) can not only be done with a single contract with multiple parties, it can all take place on the same blockchain and be executed securely, privately and reliably.
Getting on to a shared, public infrastructure is critical for blockchains to scale globally and to move from very specific industry solutions into general purpose tools for moving value and enabling business agreements.
Though we think it will take some time to fully industrialize the implementation of zero-knowledge proofs, the payoff will enormous.
In my next article, I will take a look at the second key revolution we expect in blockchain technology: the transition from notarization to tokenization.
One of the most compelling uses of blockchain technology is the ability to reliably record information and verify when and where it was added to the network.
This feature, combined with the ability to synchronize a ledger, means that all parties can get the same information at the same time and have confidence in the truthfulness of that information. The result has been a rush to treat blockchains like infallible digital notaries, recording truthful information and sharing it around. Useful, definitely, but with significant limitations.
While knowing when and where a product was made is interesting and being able to trace its history is a powerful means to reduce fraud, it isn't an economic unit that I can buy or sell.
Digital tokens, on the other, are designed for economic activity. And blockchains are ideal for handling them.
Rx for commerce
Take something complex and valuable like a package of medicine. Not only do I need to record when and how it was created and where, I would also like to sell this product to my distribution partners and then on to pharmacies.
By creating a digital token to represent that package of medicine, not only do we record all the history of that medicine, just like a digital notary solution, we can also buy and sell that item by moving the token between accounts.
Public blockchains like ethereum are largely based on the ability to handle both complex business logic with smart contracts and a nearly unlimited number and type of digital tokens. Some tokens (like those representing money) are essentially fungible while others are unique. In either case, we believe the future of commerce is in contracts that involve the exchange of product and service tokens for money tokens.
Quite simply, the economy is going to be tokenized.
Using digital tokens, we can recreate all the sophistication of the existing financial and operational business world we live in, but with far less operational cost and complexity, and do it all within the same system. The future of business contracting is, we believe, the exchange of product and service tokens for digital payment tokens.
When combining tokenization with the complex business logic enabled by smart contracts, we can represent complex business interactions faithfully, and we can do so much more reliably than most companies can today. It's not atypical for companies to find that their ability to negotiate agreements far exceeds their ability to actually keep to those agreements.
Bird's-eye view
Volume purchasing agreements are a good example: most companies beyond a certain size often have multiple enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and subcontractors and subsidiaries, which makes doing even simple things like keeping track of volume purchased across the network difficult. And if you can't track volume, you can't get the discount.
With a smart contract and a blockchain for procurement, it's possible to both track total volume consumed across the business network and always calculate the correct price for each purchase order and validate each invoice.
As the token economy matures and companies put more and more assets, products, and services into public blockchains, expect the delivery of complex financial services to be digitized as well.
Everything from trade finance to receivables factoring will be a one-click activity, once participants have established a trustworthy track record of doing business on the blockchain – a record of granularity and precision that will far exceed the reliability of any traditional credit report.
To get there from here, however, the first step is for companies to embrace tokenization and move away from simply treating blockchains like fancy digital notaries.
Cryptocurrenices ask you to put your trust in math and not in fallible central bankers, but they come with a lot of political baggage of their own.
In particular, cryptocurrency boosters talk a lot about how central bankers have debased currencies over the years and how the printing of money by central banks has done much to impoverish people around the world. In an imagined future world of cryptocurrencies, fallible and politically influenced central bankers are replaced with algorithms and currencies get more valuable over time, not less so.
There are a lot of problems with this narrative, starting with the fact that a little bit of inflation is actually useful and the painful era of stagflation is more than 30 years in the rear-view mirror. Independent central banks are among the most trusted institutions in our economies, and also the most transparent. And while the market capitalization of cryptocurrencies seems large by absolute standards, it's tiny compared to the rest of the global economy. Daily trading of cryptocurrencies is between $5 billion and $6 billion right now. Daily trading on the foreign exchange markets is closer to $5 trillion.
Even if cryptocurrencies continue to grow (and they most likely will), if we want blockchains to deliver upon their promise, we must be able to transact using traditional fiat currencies. There are lots of practical reasons for this, the most important of which is the management of risk for enterprises.
Nearly all business transactions today are done in traditional fiat currencies. Traditional enterprises generate most of their revenue in those currencies and they also handle all their debts and payments in the same currencies.
In order for firms to transact on the blockchain, they will want to transact in those same currencies. If I have a deal to buy a product at a set price in euros, and I execute that contract on a public blockchain, then I also want to settle it in euros, most likely. Every time I move money between currencies or hold substantial amounts of a different currency, I'm adding foreign exchange risk to my business, which serves no purpose if it can be avoided.
One option for companies engaging in smart contracts on blockchains is to arrange payment settlement through the banking system separately and simply record that payment on the blockchain. This option works, but we believe it is a less-than-ideal solution when you start to consider the broader economic ecosystem that you are enabling on a blockchain.
All in one
The best option for companies entering into business contracts on a blockchain is to complete the full exchange of asset tokens within the same blockchain. Asset tokens (representing product) are exchanged for money tokens in the simplest format, but with all the tokens being represented in the same blockchain, more sophisticated options are possible. Companies can borrow against inventory, with loans repaid automatically upon the sale of the inventory, for example.
At EY, we've taken to calling this a "full cycle economic contract" as the gold standard for what enterprises will want to achieve using blockchains for commerce. Full-cycle digital contracts will not only be lower risk, since both assets and liabilities will be transparently managed on the blockchain, but almost any kind of financial service can be delivered against those flows with minimal cost for the transactions.
Ultimately, this means billions of dollars in tokenized fiat currencies must be available on the public blockchains to facilitate these transactions and payments. If this path does come to pass, however, it means that central banks will have to find a regulatory structure or approach that allows for multiple currencies and tokens to co-exist on public blockchains – networks they do not regulate or fully control. It also means that private central-banking blockchains are not necessarily likely to have a big role ahead.
We believe, however, that there are mechanisms for regulators to control their own currencies in decentralized public networks, and I will dive into that and more in my next post. |
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