区块链复合物联网，数字化时代全新路径

Noah Yuval Harari's international bestseller "Sapiens" reveals many fictional stories that are responsible for human progress from nations to companies. In Harari's meaning, fiction is another word for corporations, nation-states, and political parties (among many others) that only exist in our collective imagination, but their effects are very real.

Fiction in this context is orthogonal to its usual definition: "not real". Fiction refers to human inventions that are not self-evident facts about the world. For instance, the existence of 21 trillion barrels of untapped oil on the earth or the existence of platypuses is not fictional. On the other hand, the institution of "marriage" is clearly a product of fiction.

In the late 18th century, novels emerged from the works of philosophers like John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, and the United States was a radical political structure. The most recent fiction is based on finance and digital innovation, rather than books. Stocks, debt, and derivatives are examples of financial fiction; the internet is a digital fiction. These fictions may be more real than "United States of America" as you send messages over the internet and use your equity return to buy a car. However, both depend entirely on human imagination to survive.

Like political fiction, financial and digital fiction are also very useful. Equity and debt allow businesses to sell their future profits to take on innovation risk today. Without financial fiction, venture capital and Wall Street would disappear and technology would stagnate.

Derivatives are fictions built on fictions. They derive value (roughly speaking) from variations in the underlying price (i.e., fiction). However, derivatives provide certainty to their holders in an uncertain world. Farmers holding wheat futures know what price they will sell their crop for after harvest. But while financial fiction is phenomenally powerful, it is also strictly bounded compared to its truly limitless potential. The most powerful economic fictions are either controlled by Wall Street guardians, bound by regulatory agencies, or rendered unusable due to their complexity.

The value of digital fiction is evident the moment you open your laptop. And, like flint and steel, sparks fly when digital fiction collides with financial fiction. Before the digital age, financial fiction was like sporadic spots. The combination of digital and financial fiction has led to an increase of over 100 times in the size of the capital markets in the 20th century. Trading speed, more efficient markets, securitization, and globalization have all contributed to the rapid spread of financial fiction.

However, too much fiction without any reality may lead to catastrophic results. The 2008 financial crisis was characterized by financial fiction. Simple mortgage agreements were securitized (packaged together to reduce the risk of any single mortgage). Then, mortgages were securitized repeatedly until the mortgages themselves were only a spot buried in the mountain. Economists call these complex agreements "informationally asymmetric," where only one party can see the actual risk of the transaction.

In short, while fiction has tremendous power, it is not inherently good. They require a baseline level of transparency and accountability to become utilitarian. Just as political fiction collapses in the face of corruption, financial, and even digital fiction can be influenced by corruption.

But blockchain was born at the end of 2008, amidst the dust of the financial system's collapse, anchoring financial and digital fictions on trust. With Bitcoin, we enjoy the basic financial fiction- money- without worrying about manipulation by private or public actors.

Bitcoin dismantles information and trust asymmetry in currency. Ethereum extends Bitcoin's utility beyond currency using smart contracts, which can securely run various financial fictions.

Using the Ethereum blockchain, new forms of financial tools like Uniswap's automatic market making and flash loans in DeFi were massively deployed for the first time.

At best, the decentralized finance (DeFi) frenzy on Ethereum is an anti-corruption playground for financial fictions. However, many architectures have failed, leading to hack attacks and exit scams. Nevertheless, DeFi now holds $15 billion in assets, growing by 2,200% compared to a year ago.

But there's another fictional fiction that introduces a new paradigm for human innovation: the Internet of Things. The Internet of Things is a network of sensors connected to the internet that connect physical objects (from cars to climbing carabiners) digitize them, and equip them with the power of fiction. This is counterintuitive. How can we fictionalize something material, something real? We can think of at least two ways: creating a digital twin of physical objects. Imagine an autonomous car with a seamless transferable digital representation that allows the owner to rent it out o