Blockcloud was launched on the exchange on April 10th, and Xiaogui conducted an interview with Dr. Ming on the afternoon of April 11th.

Dr. Ming took the time to have "breakfast" before the interview at six o'clock that afternoon while adjusting the lighting and equipment for the shooting. It was very hard.

Unlike the scientists in Little Turtle’s impression, Dr. Ming is very eloquent and can adjust to his condition in a short period of time and talk eloquently in front of the camera.

After a conversation, Dr. Ming gave the impression that he has both realism and romanticism at the same time. He has a clear understanding of the challenges faced by Blockcloud and is ready for a protracted war. I also have enough confidence and expectations for myself and the team.

Xiaogui: Dr. Ming once mentioned in an interview that he had a very difficult time starting a business, such as sleeping in an underground bridge with his colleagues. Can you tell us more about your entrepreneurial story?

Mingzhongxing: It’s not that there was a difficult time to start a business. Starting a business has always been a coexistence of hardship and romance. At that time, it was mainly because I had no money. In addition to sleeping under the bridge, I also ate hot dry noodles for seven yuan a day, one bowl a day. I couldn't afford more. Later, my business gradually improved.

Tell me something interesting. At that time, we had an investor who had a habit of visiting the invested company to see for himself whether the team was reliable. He was in Beijing and we were in Shenzhen. After he voted for us, he came over once. I said it's more difficult here. If we go somewhere else, I can't bear to have you come to us. Then he said no, I have to come to your office and I want to inspect it myself. So come on.

Our first office was a residential building, a very old residential building on the eighth floor with no elevator. Our investor is actually very nice, a little fat, and finally climbed up from the first floor. After crawling to our office, he sat on our sofa and drank two bowls of water. He rested for ten minutes before starting to talk to us. After this inspection, he said, "I know how you are doing, but I will never come here again."

Little Turtle: Are you really going to sleep under the bridge?

Ming Zhongxing: I don’t sleep all the time, but I sleep occasionally. One is because I am too tired, there are no decent places around, and it is not cold in Shenzhen. The other one really doesn’t have any requirements.

Xiaogui: What did Dr. Ming do before starting Blockcloud?

Mingzhongxing: We have always been in the Internet of Things and Internet industries, and Blockcloud is an extension of our research results. You can also understand that I was doing Blockcloud before I started Blockcloud, but there was no such name as Blockcloud at that time. The network technologies underlying Blockcloud itself are topics we have been studying for a long time.

Xiaogui: When did Dr. Ming first come into contact with blockchain?

Ming Zhongxing: 2016 is quite late. At that time, I felt that Bitcoin was a scam and I didn’t buy it much, so I still regretted it. Yes, I still regretted it, haha.

Xiaogui: How did you come up with the idea of ??using blockchain to create an innovative TCP/IP protocol?

Ming Zhongxing: Because I study TCP/IP myself, I The research direction of his PhD is how to improve the TCP/IP protocol. So as a new form of network technology, blockchain, as people who study networks, we naturally have to study it. During the research process, we felt that this technology was actually quite good and could be brought over. It just so happens that there are some problems in our previous research results that are difficult to solve. We can try to use blockchain technology to make up for our shortcomings, mainly to provide trust and incentives.

So after we came up with this idea, we discussed it with teachers and classmates. Everyone thought it was pretty good, so we did it. Except for some not-so-good people who use it to do bad things, as a technical system and theoretical system, blockchain still has a lot of innovations and things that can be learned from.

Xiaogui: To be honest, Blockcloud is still a bit abstract to me, because I am not studying TCP/IP, so I would like Dr. Ming to introduce it more vividly.

Ming Zhongxing: Blockcloud is a bit like what Huawei does, or what Cisco does. It itself is not directly oriented to C-side users. You have to surf the Internet every day, and you can understand that the network you go to is what we want to do.

Little Turtle: What is your official explanation?

Ming Zhongxing: Blockcloud is a new generation of TCP/IP based on blockchain technology. It mainly combines the technical advantages of blockchain and the technical advantages of the next generation Internet to enhance and improve the bottom layer of the network. The Internet provides better mobility, stability, credibility, fairness and trust support for the network.

This is basically not human language. An intuitive understanding of Blockcloud will make your online experience more enjoyable!

Little Turtle: Doctor, can you explain why we sometimes can’t connect to the Internet when we take the subway or train?

Mingzhongxing: Taking the subway and taking the train are not the same thing. Taking the subway is really because there is no signal, and there is nothing you can do. In most cases, if you take a green car by train, it won't be a big problem. If you enter a tunnel, it's because there is no signal, and there is nothing you can do about it.

But if you take a high-speed rail, such as in a plain area, the signal may be very good, and you will also get dropped. This has something to do with us, because the bottom layer of the network does not support the movement of nodes very well. When the Internet was designed, it was designed for static networks, and it was not considered that the things you connect to the Internet would move. Later, these things will move, and sometimes they are not very easy to use. This is the intuitive understanding.

Xiaogui: What are the pain points that Blockcloud hopes to solve?

Ming Zhongxing: The pain point Blockcloud hopes to solve is the problem of poor network support for upper layers in large-scale dynamic networks.

For example, when taking a high-speed train, sometimes the network is not good. You may optimize the transport layer protocol so that you don’t get disconnected when you take the high-speed train. For example, when watching iQiyi, sometimes the connection will freeze. , in fact, your local bandwidth is enough, you can use better path selection and more optimized communication peer selection to allow you to watch iQiyi without lag; another example is our artificial intelligence or this kind of driving, it is There are very high requirements on delay and data transmission rate, which are difficult to solve under the existing Internet system.

I don’t know if you have watched Ready Player One. The current Internet must not be able to support that scene in Ready Player One. Because there are too many people surfing the Internet, the amount of data transmission is too large, the entire network is too complex, and it is too dynamic. So if you really want to realize the top player scenario, you need to improve the network. Blockcloud may be able to do it, but the current network will definitely not work. ?

Little Turtle: It sounds like maybe we don’t have a particularly big need for it right now.

Mingzhongxing: For you as a C-side individual, it may not be that big at the moment. For example, if you chat on WeChat or read Toutiao today, Blockcloud is not actually useful. But many scenarios, such as the current industrial Internet and future smart driving, artificial intelligence, virtual reality AR, and VR, have relatively high network performance requirements.

Xiaogui: Blockcloud may be relatively future-oriented.

Ming Zhongxing: Actually, there won’t be much later.

If you think back to five or ten years now, you would hardly have thought that everyone’s mobile phone could access the Internet ten years ago. It was also hard to imagine that five years ago, you would be able to use a mobile phone without an ID card or an ID card. Wallet, no bank cards.

Maybe in five years, everything that can be powered by electricity will be able to access the Internet. Then there are many scenes in science fiction movies that you think are science fiction now. Maybe five or ten years later, they will be part of your life. This happens very quickly.

Xiaogui: Yes, what is the difference between the service-centered network architecture and the physical address-centered structure?

Ming Zhongxing: Your lipstick is very beautiful. For example, if you want to buy a lipstick, based on the address, you need to know where the lipstick factory is, and then go directly to the factory to buy a lipstick. As for the service center, I don’t care where you got it from. I want lipstick. I reach out and get it. I ask for it from the supermarket or Taobao.

Little Turtle: Why is this better?

Ming Zhongxing: For example, if you want to buy a Chanel lipstick, and then I ask you to go to the Chanel factory, is it convenient for you? But is it convenient for you to buy one on Taobao?

Little Turtle: It might be fake.

Ming Zhongxing: Yes, so this is why blockchain is used. How to solve this fake thing? Taobao has waiters, and we have blockchain.

Xiaogui: Blockcloud’s protocol is built by building blocks. Can you introduce the entire architecture of Blockcloud?

BOC Ming: One to four layers, from the bottom up, the transaction chain layer, the service chain layer, the routing layer and the service layer. Taking a supermarket as an example, the transaction chain layer is the cashier, the service chain layer is the quality inspector, the routing layer may be the map of the entire shopping mall, and the service layer above is the shopping mall.

In such a structure, the lower two layers are about the blockchain, and the upper two layers are about the basic network layer.

Xiaogui: I read an article yesterday that said that blockchain is the king of protocols and the Internet is the king of applications. The blockchain ecosystem is a combination of fat protocols and thin applications, with the protocol layer accounting for the majority of the blockchain architecture. What do you think of this point of view?

Ming Zhongxing: From a narrow perspective, if it is only in the blockchain field, I very much agree with what Mr. Yuandao said. From a broad perspective, blockchain itself is also an application of the Internet.

There is no conflict between them. I think both are correct.

Xiaogui: In addition to Blockcloud, are there any other solutions to the problem of dynamic data transmission?

Ming Zhongxing: Quite a lot, because the Internet itself is a complex system with countless application scenarios and countless usage conditions, so Blockcloud is not omnipotent. Blockcloud is not designed to solve all problems on the Internet, nor is it used in all scenarios on the Internet.

There may be different solutions for different scenarios, but Blockcloud is relatively low-level, so it may be used in many application scenarios, such as the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, VR, AR, edge computing and more.

If the network is very dynamic, relatively large in scale, not very regular in shape, and has relatively high performance requirements, some of these application scenarios are suitable for Blockcloud. Others, such as WeChat, you make a WeChat call and you keep moving, so you don’t feel too bad, right?

Little Turtle: Is there any other solution to the same problem?

Ming Zhongxing: Yes, but we should be one of the best. Because in our research field, there are only so many people on earth who do this. One wave for China, one wave for the United States, and one wave for Europe.

Little Turtle: Why are you the best?

Ming Zhongxing: There are just three groups of people in one ***. The wave in Europe is no longer viable, because Europe as a whole has lagged behind China and the United States in the Internet field. To be honest, the people in the United States are better than us, but they are older now. When it comes to combining innovation with blockchain, as far as I know, the group of people in the United States have not come up with the idea to take a similar route to ours. And in China, our entire research group is well-deserved No. 1 in the field of next-generation Internet research. ?

Xiaogui: I am very confident. Blockcloud is a data transmission protocol, and the public chain is an application protocol based on this protocol. How do you cooperate with the public chain?

Mingzhongxing: It’s very similar to the relationship between cars and roads. How do you think cars and roads can cooperate? I laid the road underground, and then you run on it, so there may be a joint in the middle, and we have to plug it together.

For example, for some public chains, they need better support from the bottom layer of the network, so put us under them; for example, for some public chains, they have better applications for specific scenarios. Running on top of us; for example, there are some public chains that solve specific problems, such as data privacy, identity authentication, etc. These can serve as our supplements and help us provide better saturation characteristics in a certain aspect.

Xiaogui: On top of the Blockcloud protocol, blockchain native applications can be generated and applications that can connect to parts of the Internet. What preparations does Blockcloud make to connect this kind of Internet application?

Mingzhongxing: In fact, they are all the same. Essentially, we are just a road. It does not make much difference to us whether electric vehicles, fuel vehicles or horse-drawn vehicles run on it.

But for native Internet applications, we may need to add some chain things and blockchain economic parts, so it may need to make some changes and innovations at the technical and economic model levels. . But if you don’t want to change it at all, just treat us as a traditional road, and there’s no problem.

Xiaogui: Some people will question you and your team, thinking that you have done a big thing and cannot complete it. What do you think?

Mingzhongxing: In 1994, everyone looked at Jack Ma the same way. In 2000, everyone looked at Liu Qiangdong the same way. In 2021, everyone looked at Mao Zedong the same way. So I think it doesn’t matter how you look at it, of course it’s a bit rogue.

In essence, working on the bottom layer of the Internet is a systematic team effort that requires long-term persistence and hard work. Our team has achieved visible results in this regard, regardless of the corresponding research results, background, or previous industrialization work. Our location in the country can still be found.

This matter is indeed quite big, but for those of us who work on the Internet, we generally don’t fight for it overnight, and it doesn’t mean that I will have to implement this thing in three or six months. Many blockchain projects say that I will build a mainnet in three months and a mainnet in six months, and then serve people all over the world. This is definitely nonsense.

For example, I can do this for ten or eight years. Because every generation of Internet people of ours basically follows this rhythm, working little by little, just like building a road, chisel, chisel, chisel, hammer by chisel, and our team has such a gene.

Any business venture is extremely risky. I cannot guarantee that we will be able to do it, but I can guarantee that if we cannot do it, others will not be able to do it either.

Little Turtle: You don’t look like a scientist.

Ming Zhongxing: So what do I look like?

Xiaogui: He looks like the founder.

Ming Zhongxing: Thank you.

Xiaogui: Most members of the Blockcloud team are scientists.

Ming Zhongxing: We are scientific workers, and the word scientist is a support and encouragement to us, but I think we are still far from being scientists.

Xiaogui: So how do you balance the attributes of a company and a research institution?

Ming Zhongxing: The DNA of our entire research group, starting from our ancestors, is academic and industrialization. We must grasp both, and both must be strong.

Our ancestor is an academician and is now the dean of the Department of Computer Science at Tsinghua University. He is also one of the three major network operators in China, the founder and chairman of China Education Network, and at the same time the largest in the world. Founder and Chairman of Next Generation Internet. He himself runs several listed companies.

Because the Internet is not like studying basic subjects, such as mathematics, physics, and astronomy. You can hide in the attic and calculate for 20 years, and then calculate a black hole. The Internet was never developed by scientists. It was built bit by bit by scientific workers and engineers. Therefore, the style of doing things in this field is to build the thing you are studying while doing academic research.

To build it, it must be run in an industrial manner. Therefore, from the day we received education in this field, in addition to learning how to research a network, we are also learning and practicing how to build and operate a network in a commercial manner. We are quite skilled in this matter.