A representative figure in the field of kitesurfing venture capital explains why blockchain is the sixth wave of technology

Baozou Commentary : The article mainly introduces Bill Tai, a famous entrepreneur in the kitesurfing industry, on his understanding of the world's technological waves. He came from Silicon Valley in the United States, founded many companies, witnessed the development of many technologies, and has a long period of technical work experience. He believes that after the fifth wave of data technology, blockchain is the latest sixth wave. Like every previous technological advancement, blockchain has a profound social and economic impact, and its advantages are huge and clear, so we need to use it responsibly.

Translation: Annie_Xu

Bill Tai has a cheerful, outgoing manly demeanor and is engaged in some of the most exciting development projects of our time.

Bill Tai became a venture capitalist in the kitesurfing field at the perfect time and place for the development of both technology and kitesurfing. His online name KiteVC is a reflection of his identity.

Tai is an investor in mining and blockchain service company Bitfury and blockchain data analysis company Blockseer, with 30 years of technical work experience. He puts blockchain technology in the context of technological revolution, equating the TCP/IP protocol, the foundation of the Internet, with the advent of blockchain. He tells us the details behind smart contracts, Twitter, and AirBnb with very attractive stories.

In this episode of the Unchained podcast, Tai explains how Bitcoin enthusiasts with no background in chip design developed an efficient Bitcoin mining chip ASIC, how a blockchain support group was formed at Richard Branson’s Necker Island Blockchain Summit in 2015, and how he turned his passion for kitesurfing into a global kitesurfing and technology integration event represented by MaiTai Global.

Tai surveys blockchain technology today and argues that it is different from the Internet of 1992-1994.

"The promise of blockchain is clear: low-friction, high-speed, low-cost commerce. That's certain, but mastering how to use it is difficult."

Tai studied computer chip design at the University of Illinois and started working in Silicon Valley early. He joined LSI Logic, founded by the CEO of Fairchild Semiconductor, a forerunner of companies that would later lay the foundations for Silicon Valley, such as Intel, AMD, and National Semiconductor. After graduating from Harvard Business School, he helped the Taiwanese government build the semiconductor industry, which later grew into a company with a market value of $130 billion. He later became a semiconductor analyst and venture capitalist, investing in routers, hubs, switches, and founding iAsiaWorks, an ISP and data center, which went public in 1994. Other companies he has invested in include Canva, Tweetdeck, Zoom, and Scribd.

Tai said:

"I'm primarily a builder, although I'm also a financier, but I'm not just a check-writer. I have an idea of ​​what should exist, but if it doesn't exist, I'll build a team to make it happen."

That's how Treasure Data, the podcast that records everything, came about.

"I have the intuition that the era of big data requires a simple, easy-to-use, and scalable data infrastructure, so I formed a team of engineers to start this company. Now the company's more than 200 corporate customers have provided 40 trillion rows of data in three or four years. Just as I finished saying this, 8 billion rows of data had been added because they continuously input information into the system at a rate of 1 billion rows of data per second every day."

Tai believes that the sixth wave of technology has emerged, with data being the fifth and blockchain being the sixth. "I think the first wave was a bunch of scientists turning physics into useful products - semiconductors." The second wave was companies making computers, communications equipment, switches, routers, hubs. Think Cisco, Apple, Dell, "any company that puts a little package of physics into a box that can move atoms."

The third wave saw the emergence of Internet service providers and data center infrastructure, which connected these boxes to form local and wide area networks and the Internet. The fourth wave added user interfaces to the previous networks. "Instead of hardware protocol engineers developing networks that run information behind the scenes, it was kids like Zuckerberg developing Facebook in their bedrooms, or Jack Dorsey writing Twitter in seven days."

The fifth wave is the data stage. Companies are starting to collect data on user behavior and even penetrate the physical world. "If you think about a company like Walmart, it's actually a cutting-edge data science company with physical stores because they can see how everything is flowing inside."

The sixth wave is blockchain. Tai said that thanks to companies like Uber and AirBnb, "people have become accustomed to a model that I call virtualization. They are accustomed to physical objects or values ​​being virtualized into digital form and circulated in the transportation system." Now blockchain allows us to transfer bitcoins, and eventually we can also transfer the ownership of houses, cars or land.

As this medium blog post shows, Tai says blockchain is to banks what TCP/IP is to telecom companies. When the Internet first emerged, networks like UNIX, Sun Microsystems, Novell, etc. existed independently; then Cisco brought us multi-protocol routers that can convert different data formats.

In the blockchain field, he sees private chains developed by banking alliances and public chains developed by open source communities, which will eventually be integrated into larger networks.

"Just like TCP/IP, it's been like a virus that's positively impacting these networks, shaping them from the inside and making them more efficient and more liquid. I think that's what you're going to see in the future. All the players in the trading industry will look at the new inventions and say, 'Wow, I can do what I've done before and reduce the transaction costs to one-tenth or even one-hundredth of what they were before; so why reject it?'"

He acknowledged that there is a competitive mentality between Internet finance startups and banks, so there are lessons to be learned from the experience of telecom companies. "The Internet is ultimately a win-win for everyone. Everything is integrated together, which is the general trend; therefore, life is better."