In yet another blockchain news item emanating from China this week, multiple reports are sharing that China’s potential “president for life,” Xi Jinping, recently named blockchain as one of a triumvirate of new technologies (including IoT and AI) that will drive, “a new industrial revolution.”
Xi reportedly made the comments at a conference convened by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a self-declared, “linchpin of China’s drive to explore and harness high technology and the natural sciences for the benefit of China and the world.” The Academy is located in Beijing.
The string of news indicating that China has begun to highly favour industry blockchain of late follows a solid year of bad news from China regarding persistent state crackdowns on independent cryptocurrencies and related schemes there.
Industry blockchain, as experts will tell you, is a very different animal than Bitcoin: a borderless, autonomous, automated payment network built to allow anyone interested to transmit bitcoins without fear of government censure.
The Chinese government recently ranked Bitcoin 13th in a list of 28 cryptocurrencies it supposedly evaluated. The report was released mid-May.
4/ Detailed scores of the first crypto ratings by CCID Research, China’s Ministry of Industry & Information Technology pic.twitter.com/7LiJIWokge
— cnLedger [Not giving away ETH] (@cnLedger) May 17, 2018
[clickToTweet tweet=”Xi Jinping, recently named #blockchain as one of a triumvirate of new technologies (including IoT and AI) that will drive, ‘a new industrial revolution” quote=”Xi Jinping, recently named #blockchain as one of a triumvirate of new technologies (including IoT and AI) that will drive, ‘a new industrial revolution”]
The list was subsequently ridiculed by serious Bitcoiners because it ranked the purported privacy and very new cryptocurrency Verge as technologically superior to Bitcoin.
The Verge blockchain was badly hacked last week; Bitcoin code, in the nine years since its release, has never been hacked.
Bitcoin experts like Andreas Antonopoulos have characterized Bitcoin as “battle-hardened” for having successfully fended off close to a decade of attacks of cyber-attacks.
Perhaps naively, GCP newsroom wondered aloud if Xi’s recent presidential nod and his government’s recent list of rankings might mean China is softening it’s overall stance on crypto.
One also might wonder whether or not China has managed to overcome numerous blockchain inefficiencies that have led some experts in the west to call for governments and businesses to implement simpler and cheaper forms of encrypted digital ledgers.
Blockchain or modified-blockchain regardless, China is certainly publicizing blockchain.
A press release dated May 22nd and posted on the Chinese Academy of Sciences website states, “hundreds of companies (are)adopting the technology (in China).”
“By the end of March 2018, there were 456 blockchain technology companies in the country, forming a complete industrial chain,” said the release.
[clickToTweet tweet=”China: By the end of March 2018, there were 456 #blockchain technology companies in the country, forming a complete industrial chain” quote=”China: By the end of March 2018, there were 456 #blockchain technology companies in the country, forming a complete industrial chain”]
