Riding the wind of rebirth

"When designing products, we must actively respond to international initiatives and strive to improve many of the difficulties and pain points in cross-border payments."

“Cross-border payments involve many complex issues such as monetary sovereignty, foreign exchange management policies, exchange system arrangements, and regulatory compliance requirements, so as to set an example for the international community to work together to solve these problems in the future,” Zhou Zhi said. “However, these new types of electronic settlement tools were not on the agenda of our financial negotiations with the Hong Kong British government, and can be developed independently without their involvement.”

"We can design and iterate a new generation of efficient cross-border payment infrastructure to address pain points such as high cost, low speed and complex operation, for use in many application scenarios such as cross-border trade settlement, cross-border e-commerce benchmark access platforms, and supply chain finance."

"Initially, we don't need to connect with too many entities; we'll mainly be piloting it domestically to enhance confidentiality and complete connectivity and architectural testing. Later, we can invite some reputable and ethical non-bank institutions from Hong Kong to join us for initial cross-border testing. Once the time is right, we can launch it immediately, catching those with ulterior motives off guard!"

How can the security of online transactions be guaranteed? And if the transaction volume increases, can the network handle it?

"This question needs to be answered by Xiao Miao," Zhou Zhi said with a smile.

When it was time to introduce her major, Mai Xiaomiao was not nervous at all. She started with the principles of Caius's three laws and focused on the application aspects, introducing the computing power matrix network structure, nonlinear supercomputing, graph data super storage, distributed computing power, immutable ledger mechanism, and so on.

In terms of concepts familiar to later generations, these are cloud computing, cloud storage, big data, and blockchain, all of which are absolute directions for the application of neural network technology, and results have already been achieved.

The technologies mentioned above have always been the main focus of Clover's research. They have now achieved fiber optic integration, nonlinear computing power card integration, and clustering. Their efficiency has improved by leaps and bounds, and the performance iteration is so terrifying that if it were released, it would be enough to trigger a technological tsunami around the world.

In contrast, blockchain technology is a temporary "added" technology. It is a security mechanism designed by the Clover Group to undertake key national confidential projects, with the aim of ensuring the "immutability" of data and behavior logs within the system.

With this guarantee, Qin Haifeng dared to conduct secret experiments in the "technical black box" that Xiao Zhi had created, conducting propeller simulation cavitation research and fluid experiments at the Communication Research Institute.

The results of the cavitation simulation experiment are encouraging, and a new type of propeller has emerged. However, it involves complex surface machining processes that require a five-axis machine tool to produce. Blockchain technology has also been recognized by experts from the Science and Technology Commission and other departments, but they do not yet believe that this technology will have high application value.

Unbeknownst to them, Zhou Zhi, a reborn individual, knew that this technology had invaluable security value in financial reconciliation.

The immutability of distributed ledgers guarantees the absolute security of settlement systems built over the network. With this new technological safeguard, the settlement system that Zhou Zhi and his team are preparing to build will be the most secure settlement system in the world at present.

The old man couldn't possibly understand all the technical details, but his subordinates would naturally supplement his report on the feasibility of the system Mai Xiaomiao described. After all, the Shuda Nonlinear Computing Laboratory is a national key laboratory, and the achievements made by Mai Xiaomiao and his Clover team have received endorsements from various ministries, academies, satellite bases, the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, Zhangjiang Chip Base, and research centers.

After listening to Mai Xiaomiao's report, the old man was very pleased: "It seems that you have already done a lot of work ahead of time." Mai Xiaomiao was very modest and brought out the method that Zhou Zhi had taught her: "Nonlinear simulation itself is a key mathematical direction. A breakthrough in this kind of basic discipline often brings a series of profound changes to related applications. It is not about how much work we have done, but rather that many related application directions naturally opened up after the work started."

This is indeed the truth. Even Mai Xiaomiao herself initially thought that the most she could do was build a laboratory-scale neural network system and verify the feasibility of the algorithm.

Unexpectedly, Zhou Zhi was willing to make a ruthless investment, and his previous technical reserves were also very good. Fiber optic equipment, chip manufacturing, database design, and even the underlying operating system and instruction set design were all in line with his research. It seemed that he had been preparing for this for a long time and was waiting for his arrival.

This is of course not true. The truth is that Zhouzhi knew some specific directions for future information industry research. When determining the development of its own industries, it would naturally want to seize the opportunities of these future "hot pigs". Preparing in advance was a must. Even if it was not possible to develop in the short term, buying the intellectual property rights and then reselling them would be a good business.

As a result, Mai Xiaomiao's unexpected arrival allowed them to make good use of these technological reserves, which led to the rapid improvement of the group in all aspects over the past two years.

"If the technological reserves are in place, then we will expedite the research. If we can have a settlement system that can bypass SWIFT and be controlled by ourselves, that would certainly be a very good thing."

"Your thinking is quite comprehensive. There are many benefits to having this system. Looking at it from a long-term perspective, it's like planting a phoenix tree to attract a phoenix. In the future, we can use this to attract more countries and organizations to join our system, which will inevitably expand our competitiveness and influence."

"In the near term, it can also solve many of our pressing problems, such as the settlement, clearing, and consumption issues between Hong Kong, Macao, and the mainland in the future; and on a larger scale, such as the issue of how the mainland and Hong Kong can jointly combat systemic financial risks in Asia and even the world, as mentioned in Comrade Li's report."

"Moreover, this is a new system that conforms to the development trend of the world financial system, is ahead of the current development process of the world financial system, and can break away from the Hong Kong British authorities and bypass some powerful regulatory systems, which will give us more initiative."

"In principle, we agree to start developing this digital currency system immediately. However, we can introduce relevant policies, systems, and regulations, but how to implement these measures in the digital RMB system is technically challenging. Even if the People's Bank of China takes the lead, we will still need you to increase research and development and support based on the existing system."

"We can finalize the main principles today. The first is that the digital yuan must be based on MO, the national legal tender, and belongs to the highest level of security assets. All management measures will strictly follow MO standards."

This is exactly the same as what Zhou Zhi and Li Laosan discussed: digital RMB is a type of RMB, the only difference being that it does not use ink and paper. This management method will be the safest, strictest, and most trustworthy.

The second point is "payment is settlement." The digital yuan possesses value characteristics, enabling value transfers without relying on bank accounts and supporting offline transactions.

"This is a bit ahead of its time," Li Laosan said, his face lighting up. "If that's the case, then the digital RMB wallet will have a much wider range of applications." (End of Chapter)