Forkit — The first Podcast on Blockchain technology in Chinese!

Back in June of this year, when I recorded a podcast with Xie Hanjian on Teahour, we announced that we would launch “the first Chinese podcast about blockchain technology”. This Chinese podcast is forkit.

The real reason we’re doing this blockchain podcast is because we’re a bunch of idealists. The blockchain industry is still in its early stages of development, which is very unfriendly to technology beginners and those who are still outside the blockchain circle. There has long been a lack of a blockchain podcast that actively promotes positive energy and technology awareness.

And we have rich experience in podcast production, and as an industry practitioner with many years of experience, we hope to share our understanding, accumulation, direction and trend of the industry technology.

From the beginning of “the first Chinese podcast to talk about blockchain technology”, we hope to call on more partners to join us, discuss with us the process of learning blockchain and experience sharing, and hope to spawn a variety of podcasts to enrich this ecology.

For us, from “first” to “best” must be a road that will never end, but will be filled with beautiful scenery and harvest in the process. I hope you will urge us and help us to keep doing it.

In the first episode, we talked about why we do the show and how some of our anchor practitioners got into it. The topic is very interesting and I hope you enjoy it.

Finally, attach the address of The Meta Episode http://forkit.fm/0 (click to read the original text to get to the link), as well as the edited voice text, Enjoy ~

Welcome to our new podcast, Forkit. This is our first Episode, our Meta Episode. In this episode our question is: What is this show? Which group of people are doing this show? And why do we have such awesome names? First of all, Forkit is a Chinese podcast dedicated to blockchain. As far as we know, there are no other Chinese podcasts on the market. Now, let’s say hello to each of our hosts.

Daniel: Hello, I’m Daniel. I’m very happy to be one of the hosts of Forkit. I hope to record more interesting programs for you in the future. Thank you. Kevin: Hi, I’m Kevin and I’m excited to have the opportunity to do a new podcast called Forkit. Forkit is a great name and I’m really looking forward to this show. Terry: Hello everyone, my name is Terry. Today we have an agreement that we will not promote our projects. So, I am Terry, the initiator of a public chain project. I am also a programmer and have been writing code for nearly a decade, although I have been writing less in the last year. I think it’s valuable to have front-line blockchain practitioners share their experiences with you, so Forkit will find the best blockchain practitioners in the industry to share their experiences with you. It’s our mission to share code, technology, and everything about blockchain.

Terry: Daniel, how did you feel when you first heard the name? Daniel: WHEN I first heard Forkit on another Podcast from our show, I thought of a clothing brand called Fcuk. At that time, Jan and I were recording a show and we mentioned that we were launching a new Podcast called Forkit. Then, every time Jan posts “Forkit,” his face twitches and gives a really weird smile. Kevin: I think your pronunciation is magical. You can get to the middle. I think Forkit is a good name. It has the spirit of blockchain. Terry: Kevin, Daniel, and I are the three founders of Forkit, and there’s another important founder named Jan, who didn’t make it to our Meta Episode because he’s still in closed development, but will be on the show a lot as one of our hosts. In fact, Jan and I were the first to do this program. At that time, we were thinking that as developers, we needed to find a word to match our technology-oriented blockchain spirit. So I looked for it for a long time, and I found that Fork is a good word. It has meaning on both sides. Fork in blockchain means Fork, Jan and I have a common understanding of Fork: we think Fork is a good thing, Fork is a feature of blockchain, but also the embodiment of blockchain competition.

So we think Fork is an interesting essence of blockchain; For code, everyone uses GitHub, where I can Fork your code, either out of competition or to give back to your project.

After choosing Fork, it’s easy to think of the next word, either it or me. Forkit or Forkme (hearty laughter)… Forkme is too easy to mistake. If I remember correctly, there was a Tshirt on GitHub called Forkyou, and we didn’t want to get too close to it, so we chose Forkit. The spirit that we want to emphasize is that if you feel something is wrong, you Fork, you compete, you do what you think is right. Daniel: Terry, when you talk about Fork, you think Fork is not a problem, it’s a spirit. But I think for a lot of people who are new to blockchain, they know that a hard fork is when one chain splits into two chains, but a lot of times, bifurcation happens when there’s a disagreement. Disagreement in the conventional wisdom is always considered bad, and the hope is that the community will reach a consensus, and then there will be an uncontested upgrade to Hard Fork. So let’s define Forkit as a good or a feature, a little counterintuitive, and Terry can expand on why branching is a good thing. Terry: With respect to a hard fork, it’s good to move in the same direction if everyone is on the same page. If the community can’t agree, and you have a new idea that you want to join the project, then the community or the owner of the project may not agree, and there will be a fork. But in the physical world, we might not be able to fork. For example, when the United States elects a president, it must force an agreement. For example, it must elect Trump. What if I have a different opinion? On blockchain, I can choose not to compromise, when I have no way to reach agreement with the community, I can Fork a chain and make it into the world you want, which in my opinion is a good thing. In the normal case, there’s a lot of branching, so for example in the normal case I choose the longest chain, which is actually called branching. So I don’t think it’s a bad thing to be stuck in a Hard Fork, a Fork that can’t be reconciled. Kevin, what do you think about this? Kevin: Fork is inevitable, because in a centralized system, you can’t say that everyone is on the same page at the same time, and it takes time for information to spread. So in the network, participants at different times may have different views on the same event in the network. The central question is can we agree on what we disagree on? Many consensus algorithms believe that consensus can be reached under economic incentives. If there is no consensus within the agreement, it will reflect the decentralized governance spirit of blockchain: one person or group of people does not have full authority over a particular agreement. If I don’t agree with you, I can pull another chain, if I can find my own community, find people who support me, then my chain can be an independent chain. Bitcoin went through a phase where development basically stopped, and then after the debate, the hard fork, where both sides could push their own chains as they wanted, and let the market decide which chain was more valuable, I think that’s a good way to go.

Terry: Let’s talk about our hosts. Someone asked, are all four of our hosts, except Jan, new to Podcast? What do you think about this?

Daniel: We’ve been doing podcasts for years! Terry: I did a Podcast called Teahour with Daniel and Kevin. I’m sure a lot of the audience came from Teahour. I want to say that we are not newbies to podcasts. We suddenly wanted to do the show, but we were not inexperienced. Here’s an introduction to Teahour: It’s a technical show for programmers, but not just blockchain. There are several episodes on blockchain that we’ll be serializing on Forkit in the future.

Terry: Forkit will focus on blockchain, so if you’re interested in blockchain or blockchain technology, make sure you subscribe to this show. If you are interested in frying coins, I think you can listen to them, after all, we are also people who buy coins, and occasionally say the price, but this is definitely not our focus. If you want to study fundamentals, it’s best to listen to our program because we talk about fundamentals from a technical point of view. Formally, the main form of our show is bullshit (hearty laughter). But we work on the front lines of the blockchain industry, and our bullshit must still have some value. Of course, we also have some other forms, such as interviews, we will invite the top executives, you will know how the top executives in the industry work, how they think about the blockchain industry, it will be a very dry form. We also make some comments based on the news, such as the XXX chain is going to fork, the XXX project is going online and so on.

Terry: Next, we need to talk about anchors. We used to write code and do technology. How did we get into the blockchain industry?

Daniel: Let me introduce myself briefly. I’m Daniel, the host of Teahour. I have recorded many programs on Teahour. Now I am the COO of a blockchain, responsible for some Marketing and Operation work. I have been in the blockchain industry for four years, so I can be counted as an industry veteran. According to the traditional algorithm (one day in the coin circle, one year in the human world), it has been over a thousand years (Terry: one thousand years old demon). Teahour is also the reason I joined the blockchain industry. At the end of 2013, I needed to interview a guest, but I didn’t get an appointment for a month, and they kept standing me up. At that time, I asked a good friend of mine on RubyChina, qiu Liang, the CEO of the Cloud Currency Exchange at the time, to replace me as an interview guest. On the day of the interview, we asked and answered some General questions and talked about digital currency, exchanges and blockchain. But the Teahour that aired later was about a third of our chat, and only that third was insensitive. That is to say, Qiu Liang told me more than three times the length of a normal episode. And a big chunk of it is very sensitive, and I have to cut it out.

However, he told me so much that I immediately saw the cognitive gap: people who do digital currency and exchange outside the circle and those who do it inside the circle have different views and cognitive gap on the same thing. I think in the early days of any industry, especially the early days of the blockchain industry, if you want to enter this industry and do something, you need a master and a guide. This mentor and guide can help you quickly improve your understanding of the industry from the perspective of the circle. And this awareness is something that you don’t see or recognize when you’re standing outside the circle, through the various public messages. At that time, Qiu Liang helped me achieve this effect. He suddenly made me realize the huge gap between digital currency and blockchain from outside the circle and from inside the circle. It was the huge gap between us that aroused my great interest, so in early 2014, I found Qiu Liang, agreed to his invitation, joined CloudCoin, and officially entered the blockchain industry.

After that, I made exchanges, a website security network, a wallet imToken, ethereum enthusiast community, Spark mining pool, smart contract platform, and now I’m the co-founder of a public chain project. Terry: Why? I heard you did everything. You gathered the seven dragon balls to summon the dragon. Daniel: Can you name one I haven’t done? If say you ask me to have to dig a mine, because do mine pool does not calculate to dig a mine, dig a mine nevertheless I return true to have done, mine machine once had in my home, oneself dig the kind of in the home. Kevin: I used to mine on a desktop, back in the days when CPU mining was profitable. Terry: Well, there’s a small change. We’ve just had one of our Forkit founders and anchors join the show. He just got out of a meeting with Jan. He is the founder and architect of a public chain. He would like to say hello to you at Jan. Jan: Hello, everyone, I’m Jan, I was included just to listen in. Terry: Jan may be a little confused right now. Why is it a public chain? Since we were not going to promote our project in the first programme, we used “X” instead. We’re talking about how people get into this business, and then Kevin, how do you get into this business? Kevin: My story is similar to that of a lot of technical people. The first time some in the programmer community heard about bitcoin was in 2012. At that time, I thought bitcoin was interesting but didn’t have a deep understanding of it. Later, after seeing the discussion in the community two or three times, I thought, so many people are interested in bitcoin, so let’s learn about it and read the white paper. After reading the white paper, I was very, very shocked. In fact, BEFORE bitcoin, I was very interested in economics, and I had a certain foundation, for example, I also dabbled in Austrian economics. So when I read the White paper on Bitcoin, I thought this thing was really strong. Because at that time in the start-up, so did not be able to do blockchain. At that time, it was very inconvenient to buy coins. Basically, I had to put money into something I don’t know what it was, so I was very hesitant and didn’t buy much. Anyway, I’m basically in a fan, enthusiast, learner mode. Later, there are other stories in the middle, really called the end of last year. Jan said that they would do a public chain, which I thought was a good opportunity. Moreover, I knew most of these people and knew that they were a good team, so I officially entered the blockchain. Terry: OK, I know that, but I’ll pretend I don’t know. Here’s a question: What were you doing before you got into blockchain? Kevin: We used to run an online technical training school. The training was mostly for non-computer majors who had worked for 5-10 years and wanted to become programmers. The school was open to the world and is still in operation. It’s just that I take time off from day-to-day operations to find someone better to do things with, and I can take time off to do other things. Terry: That’s a lot of determination. As far as I know, this project is working very well. With so much determination, it seems that we are very optimistic about the future of blockchain. Kevin: Yeah, blockchain is the intersection of two directions that I like very much. As a developer, I also pay attention to and study economics and sociology. Therefore, it is the first time that technology has been extended to these two fields, which really makes me think that blockchain is a thing that can change the world. Therefore, I have been looking for the right opportunity to do it in a better way. Now I am very happy to have this opportunity. Terry: So, let’s talk about how I got into blockchain. I first heard about bitcoin very early, about seven or eight years ago, when we were working together at a consulting firm, and there was an internal discussion about bitcoin, and I thought it was funny. Later, when I had the opportunity to further study bitcoin, I thought it was awesome, but I didn’t want to work in this industry. At that time, the only thing you could do in the industry was to mine or buy a few coins. And that continued until the concept of blockchain, taken out of Bitcoin and used in other projects like Ethereum and Bitshare, made you think that there was something else going on with the technology beyond Currency. And that got me really interested in what I could do with this technology. Then there was an opportunity when my good gay friend Jan dragged me to an exchange. Being an exchange is not so much about blockchain, but when you get into the environment, you study the technology, the implementation and the possibilities. After the exchange, I really got into blockchain to do something. During the whole process, I also had a lot of doubts. I found that blockchain and Startup methods are different. For example, if you do Startup, you will learn the methodology of Startup. Usually, when you make a product, you have to find a pain point. You have to make sure that you solve a problem, an existential problem, so that you can start from an existential perspective. However, I found that when working on blockchain, there would be a phenomenon: everyone has a hammer in hand, but they don’t know where the problem is. And from my point of view at the time, it was a mistake to start a business. I’ve been puzzled by what blockchain can be used for, which is different from the process we used to start a business. Then I realized that the Internet in its earliest days had a hammer, but I didn’t know where the nail was. A revolutionary, subversive thing, it is to change, it does not start from fix a pain point. It’s that you have a better Archiecture, a better foundation for the future world, and you’re going to build it slowly. It’s not a Startup approach. After I thought clearly about these things, I was relieved of this concern and really invested 500% in the technology boom of blockchain. I am also the founder of a public chain. Jan: I can add two words to your confusion. Well, we now know that blockchain is an answer, but we still don’t know what it is. Like you said, a lot of revolutionary things start out that way. My experience overlaps with yours. I’ve talked about it in many places. I’ve worked on many, many projects related to blockchain. Unlike Daniel and Terry, I worked on a license chain project before I worked on a public chain project. We worked on that project for a long time and gained a lot of experience. Today I want to make a public chain, but also to want to accumulate their previous experience, formed a different idea to realize.

Terry: So far Jan, you’ve worked on both public chains (worked on Ethereum) and alliance chains. But no matter developers or investors, now when people mention the alliance chain is not too sexy, there is no way out. At that time, when you were doing the public chain, why would you want to do the alliance chain instead of continuing to develop on the public chain? Jan: There were two reasons for doing alliance chains in the context of that time. It was early 2016, and the alliance chain had just emerged, which introduced the traditional BFT consensus into the blockchain to form a new design. It was new at the time, it was fascinating, and we could see a lot of possibilities. I see a lot of things from a technical point of view, not focused on revenue. I think it’s a very interesting idea. At that time, Eris Industry should have been the first to introduce BFT consensus into blockchain (transforming Ethereum). R3 has formed an alliance to do the same for the financial industry. So it’s very exciting to see that a lot of their ideas that seemed to hold true at the time still hold true today. I remember it was early 2016, we Ethfans did a lot of meetups, and I talked about why we needed Permissioned Blockchain. Simply put, we implement bearer assets on the Bitcoin blockchain, but in many financial scenarios we need many bearer assets. We need to know who the assets are registered to, and that the identity is clear and traceable, rather than a completely anonymous environment. I think this is a necessary condition if blockchain is to truly achieve commercial landing. Because it’s hard to imagine all this business happening in an anonymous environment.

Even today, we are trying to create an identity system on the public chain, whether it is connecting to offline identity systems or reconstructing an identity system in the digital world, but everyone recognizes that the existing public chain lacks an identity system design. So the idea that we could change the architecture of our entire system and do something new by putting identity into the blockchain, which was the license chain, was very attractive at the time. So you definitely want to look into it. That’s one reason. The other reason is that when you see something new, whether it has potential or not, you want to know about it and try to do it. I thought the licensing chain was a very exciting new area. It was only in 2016, and considering that environment, many public chain projects did not take off. In 2017, there was another wave of public chain to cover the license chain. Various ideas have emerged, such as a licensing chain or an alliance chain that is not a blockchain without a Token. But I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding here, because by design, there’s no rule that an alliance chain can’t have tokens, it’s just that the alliance chain you’re looking at doesn’t have tokens in it, so these are not essential attributes of an alliance chain or a license chain. So, from today’s perspective, both the license chain and the alliance chain are very promising and should have a place in the future. There are several reasons for this: first, as mentioned earlier, in many scenarios there is a need for identity, and the license chain is a natural, identity-based blockchain system; Second, the license chain and the alliance chain, which has a smaller consensus and fits more scenarios. The scope of the public chain is global, the consensus scope of Bitcoin is all the miners in the world, and so is Ethereum. But does everything really require a global consensus? That’s not necessarily true. So, in the future, I think consensus will be hierarchical, and at the bottom, the most basic, the most expensive, the slowest, will be the worldwide consensus. However, if we look up layer by layer, the scope of consensus will become smaller and smaller, so we can discuss whether to use blockchain or what blockchain should be used where the scope of consensus is smaller. So based on those two things, I think there’s a lot of potential for the future of the licensing chain. Some time ago, I wrote an article titled “Will public or alliance chains succeed in the future? To discuss the problem.

Terry: So, having or not having coins is not the essential difference and attribute of the alliance chain. The main difference is the scope of consensus, or the access mechanism of consensus? So what’s the essential difference? Jan: I think the main difference is the scope of consensus. Terry: Interesting, so the alliance chain can have coins. Jan: Right. Alliance chains can have coins. It’s not that technology can’t do it, it just doesn’t exist. Of course, it is not because the alliance chain has money that it has value. It can also have no value. It is not that an alliance chain without tokens is worthless. These are not valid. I see no need to limit my imagination in the early stages of blockchain development.

Terry: We’ve been around the world for a couple of anchors. I know Jan and Kevin just got back from Germany, and of course we’ve been to America a lot. Daniel and I will also go to the American community to communicate. I would like to hear your views on the differences in the blockchain atmosphere between China and the US.

Daniel: I think the differences far outweigh the similarities. This is related to our domestic environment. Many of the things we now use and the development of the blockchain industry come from Europe and North America, which are relatively advanced in development. They first form articles and discuss topics before they are spread to China. When we first went to Silicon Valley, the Bay Area, and talked to those blockchain practitioners, I found that their focus was far ahead of what was popular in China. The mainstream community in China is following what the West has settled down, while North America and Europe are leading the development of the industry. So, I think the whole blockchain atmosphere in China and the US is completely different, the whole difference is very big. Terry: In this case, the domestic lag is very strong. Kevin: I think the foreign community, the developers are very active. Since I am a developer myself, many of my friends, including entrepreneurs I met in the start-up process, are engaged in the start-up development of blockchain. Whether it’s on an open source level, an engineering level, an entrepreneurial level, a lot of people are already using this tool to express themselves, and I think that’s great. We went to a Meetup in Silicon Valley, and it was all about technology. Or they have an idea, or a product, and they want to hear from us, and that feels really good. On the contrary, the activities about investment and currency price are very, very rare in my life. Jan: I think the difference between the developer community is not just the blockchain developer community, but between China and the US, or the foreign developer community. Regardless of the industry, foreign communities are more open and collaborative. Because we’re engineers, long-time GitHub users, and have written about open source projects. We often observe other open source projects on GitHub, and it is obvious that there are few open source projects in China and more in foreign countries. Of course, we do see more and more Open source projects in China in recent years, but relatively speaking, it is still much less than overseas. In fact, open source is a natural thing to form cooperation and interaction, maybe because we have few open source projects, so it is more difficult to form open cooperation. Open collaboration means you and I don’t even know each other, you’re in one city, I’m in another city, you’re in one company, I’m in another company, but we can form a collaboration through GitHub: you create projects, I modify documents, etc. This kind of cooperation, I think the domestic community is relatively less. Open source is an important thing, especially in the blockchain space. In a traditional project, not being open source might be normal, but in a blockchain project, not being open source makes no sense. Blockchain itself is the software that creates trust, and you can’t create trust without open source. The most famous example is Kenneth Thompson[1], who accepted The Turing Award for his work on hacking a Compiler in his lab. You can search for “The Ken Thompson Hack”. This is a classic example of trust not being created because there is no open source code. The title of his talk was “Reflections on trust [2],” a talk about trust [3].

I can’t help but make a joke here. There are many closed-source blockchain projects in China, which I think is a very amazing phenomenon. I don’t know if there are closed-source blockchain projects anywhere else, but I know there are in China (because I’m in China), which is a weird thing. There will also be open cooperation between investment institutions and communities in the United States. I like many foreign VC Crypto Fund founders very much. They will write investment theories and analysis of various projects on their blogs. Whether their background is in investment or technology, they share their views. It’s not uncommon to see a banner in an article that reads, “Thanks XX for your advice on this article.” Or I see an article that someone else has written, and I have some opinions about it, and I write another article. This is like a GitHub collaboration, except instead of writing code, it’s a discussion and evolution of ideas. I think an open external environment is a very important thing for a project. You get to see what other people are thinking and what other people are suggesting, and then because of the open collaboration, the collision of those ideas, the whole industry is moving forward. So, I think that’s a big difference between China and the United States, and we don’t see that kind of discussion very often in China. Kevin: Speaking of investors, after contacting with project investors recently, we found that there is a common understanding among American investors that a good project does not lack money, and only providing financial support is insufficient. Investors not only as the project’s currency holders, investors, but also become your ecological construction participants, will be very active for the development of ecological suggestions. The other day, I came back from Chicago and saw that one of our investors had set up a research team, hiring a bunch of Ph.D.s, to help out on a variety of research levels for his investments. Many investors in the United States are doing these things, which I think is good. Terry: After listening to what you said, I won’t add anything. To sum up, first, in general, the blockchain atmosphere in China is speculative, and foreign countries have a better atmosphere for technology development. This is a very strange feeling. Second, Jan mentioned open source. We anchors have all come from open source. It is in our blood to embrace open source. Everything we do is open source, and we do podcasts as a way to promote open source.

Terry: Given that the previous Teahour Episode was three hours long and we didn’t know if the audience liked it, our Meta episodes are tightly compressed and will be updated frequently. Now, there’s a tradition from Teahour, which I hope will continue to Forkit, where each guest shares a Pick, a Pick of whatever you recommend. Daniel: I usually share something I’ve seen or bought in the last week or two. This time I’m sharing hardware. It’s cheap. Let me make it clear that I am a rice fan, but I never use a Mi phone, I use an iPhone. I really like xiaomi for things other than phones. Today I recommend xiaomi’s wireless charger, which supports fast charging. If you have an Apple or a phone that supports wireless fast charging, his wireless charger is perfect. You can buy a bunch of them, put one in your home, one in your office, and put it there to recharge.

It’s especially good for heavy phone users like us, especially iphones, and other phones with very weak batteries. And its price is very cheap, cost-effective, you can buy a lot of friends around. If I had to add to that, I would recommend mi’s USB TypeC power adapter. Jan: I’d like to recommend a Keyboard. Although I’m a Thinkpad user, I already have a better built-in Keyboard than the other laptop, but I want to go higher. I also have an external CODE Keyboard in my office.

I don’t know if you have read a Blog called Coding Horror[4]. The CODE Keyboard is a new Keyboard developed by the Coding Horror writers in collaboration with WASD. I bought its 87-key white-axis keyboard before and found it to be very useful. I really like the 87-key keyboard because it cuts out unwanted areas. It’s also a standard keyboard, unlike some other popular keyboards, which are weird and can make you feel uncomfortable. Even if you have to use someone else’s keyboard, you’ll still feel comfortable. The white axis keyboard has an interesting feel, medium sound and is much smaller than the Green axis, making it a good fit for programmers. Kevin: I recommend something a little bit more academic: a paper called Blockchain Economics, which was written by two professors at Princeton university, and you can Google it. At present, when discussing the design of Blockchain Token Economics, everyone fails to consider that Blockchain is easy to be forked, and the competition caused by the forking is not thought of by many projects now. Terry: I know this show has a large audience of developers. As a classic developer, how should I approach blockchain development? I recommend Mastering Bitcoin, a book for getting started with blockchain. The tonality of this book is very suitable for developers, and it is highly recommended that you use this book as the first book for getting started with blockchain development. OK, that’s all for today. Let’s Forkit, see you next time