2017.11.30 比特币是一种可以征服世界的错觉

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BUSINESS
Bitcoin Is a Delusion That Could Conquer the World
The cryptocurrency’s current price is completely unreal. Then again, so is money.

By Derek Thompson

Dado Ruvic / Reuters
NOVEMBER 30, 2017
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A bar of gold. A disk of iron. A chain of beads. A card of plastic. A slip of cotton-linen paper. These things are worthless. One cannot eat them, or drink them, or use them as a blanket. But they are valuable, too. Their value comes from the simplest thing. People believe they are money, and so they are.

If every currency is a consensual delusion, then bitcoin, a digital cryptocurrency that changes hands over the internet, feels more like a consensual hallucination on psychedelic drugs. The concept of bitcoin was born in a detailed white paper published in late 2008 by a pseudonymous “Satoshi Nakamoto.” By 2013, one bitcoin was worth $12. As of this writing, it’s worth more than $10,000. Its value has doubled in the last two months alone. For any currency’s value to increase by 100 percent in eight weeks is, to use a technical term, bonkers. If the Japanese yen or American dollar did the same, their economies would plunge into an infernal deflationary spiral.


Throughout history, currency has taken one of two forms: physical assets, like gold or beads, and fiat currency, like government-backed paper and coins. Bitcoin and its brethren introduce a third category: digital currencies that run on a combination of game theory, economics, and cryptography—thus, cryptocurrencies. If all money is the sharing of an illusion, bitcoin wants to build a better way to share it.

Like many people, I’ve long regarded bitcoin’s rise with both wonder and confusion.  To help me make sense of it, I started calling cryptocurrency experts and academics to ask, is bitcoin just a dumb bubble, like 17th-century tulip bulbs? An investment hedge, like gold? A currency, like dollars? The answers I got weren’t satisfyingly unanimous. I heard “all of the above” and “none of the above” and “nobody knows for sure, yet.”

Toward a More Perfect Money

What’s wrong with dollars, anyway? If you ask me, very little. I like my credit card. I don’t even mind cash.

But to others, the dollar’s dangers are glaringly obvious: a single omnipotent entity, the federal government, strictly controlling money supply and the rules that govern it. Some worry that the creation of too many dollars will lead to out-of-control inflation. “Cypherpunks have dreamed of fully decentralized electronic payment systems for decades” that would allay these concerns, writes Timothy Lee, a senior tech-policy reporter at Ars Technica who has long been on the bitcoin beat. Most digital-currency ideas, however, had the same tragic flaw—replicability. Just about everything that exists online (think text, photos, or files) can be copied. Fear of rampant counterfeiting would spell death for a digital currency.


Bitcoin solved this problem with the blockchain, an online ledger that records and validates all peer-to-peer payments to eliminate double-spending. For those inclined to less-than-legal behavior, it helps that the blockchain encrypts transactions to provide anonymity. The payment network is maintained by bitcoin “miners,” a decentralized group of individuals with powerful computers that approve transactions and are rewarded with new bitcoins for their work. The total possible supply of bitcoin in the world is capped. Thus, bitcoin solves both of the cryptopunk money problems—the blockchain thwarts centralization, and the planned scarcity of bitcoins checks inflation.

The blockchain is an ingenious and potentially transformative technology. People like Marc Andreessen, the well-known venture capitalist, have predicted that it could become the scaffolding of the entire economy, like the internet. Here’s a taste of the transformative vision from an interview Andreessen held with The Washington Post:

Digital stocks. Digital equities. Digital fundraising for companies. Digital bonds. Digital contracts, digital keys, digital title, who owns what—digital title to your house, to your car … You’ve got digital voting, digital contracts, digital signatures … And then every aspect of financial services: insurance contracts, insurance derivatives, currency exchange, remittance—on and on and on.

Nobody knows for sure whether the blockchain will transform the economy of the future, as Andreessen foresees. What’s clearer, however, is that it has not transformed the economy of today. While the number of bitcoin transactions is growing every year, it’s nothing close to a mass-market consumer technology, like Google, or Netflix, or even PayPal. Bitcoin remains cumbersome to use (the typical transaction can take up to 10 minutes) and the price is extremely volatile. It is, for now, a frankly terrible currency built on top of a potential transformative technology.

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Which leads to perhaps the most obvious question: If bitcoin appears to have flopped as a mass-market currency, why has it so suddenly succeeded as an investment vehicle?

Up, Up, and Away

There are countless theories about why bitcoin’s valuation has gone berserk. But for the purpose of time and sanity, let’s reduce them to four mega-arguments.

1. Venture capital (and a green light from the feds) got the ball rolling.

For the first five years of bitcoin’s existence, venture capital’s interest in bitcoin-related products and companies was minimal. After all, the very idea of cryptocurrency was infamous for its association with online black markets like Silk Road, where criminals used digital tokens to anonymously sell drugs and other illegal stuff. (In fact, one could argue that bitcoin’s rising valuation is just a bet that its most dubious uses—say, avoiding taxes or laundering money—will keep rising.) It seemed for a while that the U.S. government might try to crush the ostensible competitor of the almighty dollar.

But in November 2013, shortly after the FBI shut down Silk Road, several senators praised bitcoin and other virtual currencies at an official hearing as “legitimate financial services.” Senatorial droning on C-SPAN doesn’t always move markets. But when it does, it really does. The value of bitcoin tripled within the month to $900, and venture capital got its green light. VC investments in bitcoin rose from nearly nothing in 2012 to $400 million in 2014 and $600 million in 2016. Bitcoin didn’t yet have an obvious mainstream purpose. But it had something even more valuable: legitimacy from Washington, with curiosity and cash from Silicon Valley.


2. It’s digital gold.

People have long described bitcoin as digital gold. In early November, Bloomberg reported that “buy bitcoin” had overtaken “buy gold” as an online search phrase, suggesting that bitcoin’s rising valuation could be partly due to investors seeing it as the precious metal’s trendy equivalent. Like gold or silver, bitcoin is scarce (by design) and a popular hedge for inflation hawks, worrywarts, conspiracy theorists, and other antiestablishment investors who believe the global economy is always a month away from implosion or hyperinflation.

There is another important way that bitcoin is like gold: Its reputation is much bigger than its market. In any given week, $34 billion in bitcoin is traded, according to The Wall Street Journal, less than 1 percent of the global foreign-exchange market.

As New York University professor and so-called “dean of valuation” Aswath Damodaran quipped, bitcoin could become the world’s reserve cryptocurrency or the biggest bust of the century. “Right now it’s not a very good currency, because it’s not a good medium of exchange and it’s not a good store of value, because it’s too volatile,” he told CNBC. He offered a more probable outcome for bitcoin: “gold for Millennials.”


3. It’s the reserve currency of the ICO market.

What’s an ICO? An “initial coin offering” is essentially a way for a company to crowdsource funds without selling shares. Instead of accepting public money in exchange for equity, as in an initial public offering, or IPO, an ICO offers digital tokens denominated in a new cryptocurrency.

The conventional wisdom on ICOs is somewhat split. Some see it as an ingenious way for founders to quickly raise money without relying on the gatekeepers of venture capital. Others point out that it’s easy way to con poor dolts looking to buy into the crypto frenzy. And what a frenzy it is: In 2017, the ICO market exploded, raising more than $2 billion for new companies.

There are several ways that the ICO craze feeds, and is fed by, the bitcoin boom. First, some analysts believe that the most lucrative ICOs are driven, not only by gullible rubes, but also by bitcoin millionaires who want to diversify their investments without paying tax by cashing out of cryptocurrencies, which would trigger a capital-gains tax. ICOs fulfill that need.

Second, many ICO investors first convert their cash into bitcoin before buying tokens in a new cryptocurrency. As Tim Lee argues, this makes bitcoin the “reserve currency” of the crypto economy. Just as the U.S. dollar benefits from its status as the world’s reserve currency, accepted worldwide in lieu of or in exchange for the local currency, the same is often true of bitcoin in cryptocurrency markets. It’s possible that these factors work together in a feedback loop, where bitcoin millionaires seeking diversification raise the profile of ICOs, which increase the value of bitcoin.


This much is clear: Bitcoin’s valuation has gone nuts in tandem with the (perhaps equally nuts) boomlet in ICOs.

4. Maybe it’s just this simple: Bitcoin is an unprecedentedly dumb bubble built on ludicrous speculation.

It seems strange to call a currency a bubble. But lacking more specific terminology, bubble seems like the only word that would apply.

Even if one buys the argument that blockchain is brilliant, cryptocurrency is the new gold, and bitcoin is the reserve currency of the ICO market, it is still beyond strange to see any product’s value double in six weeks without any material change in its underlying success or application. Instead, there has been a great and widening divergence between bitcoin’s transaction volume (which has grown 32 times since 2012) and its market price (which had grown more than 1,000 times).

Surveys show that the vast majority of bitcoin owners are buying and holding bitcoin to exchange them for dollars. Let’s be clear: If the predominant use case for any asset is to buy it, wait for it to appreciate, and then to exchange it for dollars, it is a terrible currency. That is how people treat baseball cards or stamps, not money. For most of its owners, bitcoin is not a currency. It is a collectible—a digital baseball card, without the faces or stats.


* * *
The explosion of bitcoin’s value has been pretty silly. But great things can be born of such silliness.

As Dan Gross wrote in his book Pop!, the soapsuds of burst bubbles often fertilize the next generation’s breakthrough technologies. Before the national telegraph, train system, and tech giants, there was a telegraph bubble, a train bubble, and (who could forget?) a dot-com and online-retail bubble. The blockchain, like each of those technologies, has the potential to become a critical piece of infrastructure for the digital economy, even if the price of bitcoin is crashing as you read this paragraph.

In my most illuminating conversation about bitcoin, I spoke with Christian Catalini, a professor of technology at MIT Sloan School of Management. He began by reciting the three classic purposes of money: unit of account (you can measure income in dollars), store of value (you can hold dollars in your wallet and they won’t “go bad”), and medium of exchange (give somebody dollars and they’ll trust the value). Would bitcoin meet all three criteria? Maybe, he said. But maybe it won’t—and it won’t matter.

“You could imagine that in the future there might be a cryptocurrency that is mostly a store of value, like gold,” he said. “It would be decentralized, and robust, but with high transaction fees. I might use it to buy a house, but not a coffee. On the other hand, others might be more useful for smaller payments. With digital tech, maybe we can have many different kinds of currencies, which altogether unbundle store of value from medium of exchange.”


What seems most certain is that the future of money will test our conventional definitions—of currencies, of bubbles, and of initial offerings. What’s happening this month with bitcoin feels like an unsustainable paroxysm. But it’s foolish to try to develop rational models for when such a market will correct itself. Prices, like currencies, are collective illusions. And the history of American bubbles suggests that national hallucinations, like the over-construction of the rail system in the 19th century, can undergird the very real transformations of the next generation, even after they go pop.

Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of the Work in Progress newsletter.



业务
比特币是一种可以征服世界的错觉
加密货币目前的价格是完全不真实的。话说回来，钱也是如此。

作者：Derek Thompson

Dado Ruvic / 路透社
2017年11月30日
共享
一根金条。一块铁盘。一条珠子的链子。一张塑料的卡片。一张棉麻纸片。这些东西毫无价值。人们不能吃它们，不能喝它们，也不能用它们做毯子。但它们也是有价值的。它们的价值来自于最简单的事情。人们相信它们是钱，所以它们就是钱。

如果每一种货币都是一种合意的错觉，那么比特币，一种通过互联网转手的数字加密货币，感觉更像是一种服用迷幻药的合意的幻觉。比特币的概念诞生于一个化名为 "中本聪 "的人在2008年底发表的详细白皮书。到2013年，一个比特币价值12美元。截至目前，它的价值已经超过1万美元。仅在过去两个月，它的价值就翻了一番。对于任何货币的价值在八周内增加100%，用一个技术术语来说，是疯狂的。如果日元或美元也这样做，它们的经济将陷入地狱般的通缩漩涡。


纵观历史，货币采取两种形式之一：实物资产，如黄金或珠子，以及法定货币，如政府支持的纸张和硬币。比特币和它的兄弟们引入了第三类：在博弈论、经济学和密码学的结合上运行的数字货币--即加密货币。如果所有的钱都是对一种幻觉的分享，那么比特币想要建立一种更好的分享方式。

像许多人一样，我长期以来对比特币的崛起既好奇又迷惑。 为了帮助我理解它，我开始给加密货币专家和学者打电话询问，比特币只是一个愚蠢的泡沫，像17世纪的郁金香球茎？一个投资保值，像黄金？一种货币，像美元？我得到的答案并不是令人满意的一致的。我听到了 "以上皆是 "和 "以上皆非"，以及 "目前还没有人知道"。

迈向更完美的货币

美元到底有什么问题？如果你问我，几乎没有。我喜欢我的信用卡。我甚至不介意现金。

但对其他人来说，美元的危险是显而易见的：一个单一的全能实体，即联邦政府，严格控制货币供应和管理规则。有些人担心，创造太多的美元会导致失控的通货膨胀。长期关注比特币的《阿斯科技》(Ars Technica)高级技术政策记者蒂莫西-李(Timothy Lee)写道："Cypherpunks几十年来一直梦想着完全去中心化的电子支付系统"，这将缓解这些担忧。然而，大多数数字货币的想法都有一个悲剧性的缺陷--可复制性。几乎所有存在于网上的东西（如文本、照片或文件）都可以被复制。对猖獗的伪造行为的恐惧会给数字货币带来死亡。


比特币用区块链解决了这个问题，区块链是一个在线账本，记录并验证所有点对点的支付，以消除重复消费。对于那些倾向于不太合法的行为，区块链对交易进行加密以提供匿名性。支付网络由比特币 "矿工 "维护，这是一个由拥有强大计算机的个人组成的分散群体，他们批准交易并因其工作而获得新的比特币奖励。世界上可能的比特币总供应量是有上限的。因此，比特币解决了加密朋克货币的两个问题--区块链阻碍了中央集权，而比特币的计划性稀缺性则抑制了通货膨胀。

区块链是一项巧妙的、潜在的变革性技术。像著名的风险投资家马克-安德森（Marc Andreessen）这样的人预言，它可能成为整个经济的支架，就像互联网一样。以下是安德烈森接受《华盛顿邮报》采访时，对转型愿景的体会。

数字股票。数字化股票。公司的数字集资。数字化债券。数字合同、数字钥匙、数字所有权、谁拥有什么--你的房子、你的汽车的数字所有权......你有数字投票、数字合同、数字签名......然后是金融服务的各个方面：保险合同、保险衍生产品、货币兑换、汇款--等等。

没有人确定区块链是否会像Andreessen预见的那样，改变未来的经济。然而，更清楚的是，它并没有改变今天的经济。虽然比特币的交易数量每年都在增长，但它完全没有接近大众市场的消费技术，比如谷歌，或者Netflix，甚至是PayPal。比特币的使用仍然很麻烦（典型的交易可能需要长达10分钟），而且价格非常不稳定。就目前而言，它是一种建立在潜在变革性技术之上的坦率的糟糕的货币。

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这也许导致了一个最明显的问题。如果比特币作为一种大众市场的货币似乎已经失败了，为什么它作为一种投资工具却突然成功了呢？

上升，上升，然后离开

关于比特币的估值为何如此疯狂，有无数的理论。但为了节省时间和理智，让我们把它们缩减为四个巨大的论点。

1. 1.风险资本（和联邦调查局的绿灯）让球滚动。

在比特币存在的前五年，风险资本对比特币相关产品和公司的兴趣很小。毕竟，加密货币的想法因其与丝绸之路等在线黑市的联系而臭名昭著，在那里，犯罪分子使用数字代币来匿名销售毒品和其他非法物品。(事实上，人们可以说，比特币的估值上升只是一个赌注，赌它最可疑的用途--比如，避税或洗钱--将继续上升）。有一段时间，美国政府似乎可能会试图粉碎这个万能的美元的表面竞争者。

但在2013年11月，联邦调查局关闭丝绸之路后不久，几位参议员在一次官方听证会上称赞比特币和其他虚拟货币是 "合法的金融服务"。参议员在C-SPAN上喋喋不休并不总是能推动市场。但当它发生时，它真的会。比特币的价值在一个月内翻了三倍，达到900美元，风险投资也开了绿灯。风险投资对比特币的投资从2012年的几乎没有上升到2014年的4亿美元和2016年的6亿美元。比特币当时还没有一个明显的主流用途。但它有更有价值的东西：来自华盛顿的合法性，以及来自硅谷的好奇心和现金。


2. 它是数字黄金。

人们早就把比特币描述为数字黄金。11月初，彭博社报道说，"购买比特币 "已经超过了 "购买黄金"，成为一个在线搜索短语，这表明比特币的估值上升可能部分是由于投资者将其视为贵金属的时尚替代品。像黄金或白银一样，比特币是稀缺的（通过设计），是通货膨胀鹰派、忧虑主义者、阴谋论者和其他反体制投资者的热门对冲工具，他们认为全球经济总是在一个月后就会内爆或恶性通货膨胀。

还有一个重要的方式，就是比特币像黄金一样。它的声誉比它的市场大得多。据《华尔街日报》报道，在任何一个星期，比特币的交易量为340亿美元，不到全球外汇市场的1%。

正如纽约大学教授和所谓的 "估值院长 "阿斯瓦特-达莫达兰(Aswath Damodaran)所说，比特币可能成为世界上的储备加密货币或本世纪最大的破产。"现在它不是一个很好的货币，因为它不是一个好的交换媒介，也不是一个好的价值储存，因为它太不稳定了，"他告诉CNBC。他为比特币提供了一个更可能的结果："千禧一代的黄金"。


3. 3.它是ICO市场的储备货币。

什么是ICO？"首次代币发行 "本质上是一个公司在不出售股票的情况下众筹资金的方式。ICO不是像首次公开募股那样接受公众资金以换取股权，而是提供以新加密货币计价的数字代币。

关于ICO的传统智慧有些分裂。一些人认为它是创始人快速筹集资金的一种巧妙方式，而不依赖于风险资本的看门人。其他人则指出，这是骗取那些想买入加密货币狂热的可怜的傻瓜的简单方法。而这是一场狂热。2017年，ICO市场爆炸性增长，为新公司筹集了超过20亿美元。

ICO热潮以多种方式滋养着比特币的繁荣，也被比特币的繁荣所滋养。首先，一些分析家认为，最有利可图的ICO不仅是由容易受骗的人推动的，也是由比特币百万富翁推动的，他们希望通过兑现加密货币来分散他们的投资，而不需要缴税，这将引发资本利得税。ICOs满足了这一需求。

其次，许多ICO投资者在购买新的加密货币的代币之前，首先将他们的现金转换成比特币。正如Tim Lee所说，这使得比特币成为加密经济的 "储备货币"。正如美元受益于其作为世界储备货币的地位，在全世界范围内被接受以代替或交换当地货币一样，在加密货币市场上，比特币往往也是如此。这些因素有可能在一个反馈循环中共同发挥作用，寻求多样化的比特币百万富翁提高了ICO的知名度，而ICO则提高了比特币的价值。


这一点很清楚：比特币的估值与ICO的蓬勃发展（也许同样疯狂）同步进行，已经疯了。

4. 4.也许事情就是这么简单。比特币是一个建立在可笑的投机上的空前愚蠢的泡沫。

把一种货币称为泡沫似乎很奇怪。但由于缺乏更具体的术语，泡沫似乎是唯一适用的词。

即使人们相信区块链是辉煌的，加密货币是新的黄金，以及比特币是ICO市场的储备货币的说法，看到任何产品的价值在六周内翻倍，而其基本的成功或应用没有任何实质性的变化，这仍然是非常奇怪。相反，比特币的交易量（自2012年以来增长了32倍）和它的市场价格（曾增长了1000多倍）之间出现了巨大且不断扩大的分歧。

调查显示，绝大多数的比特币持有者购买和持有比特币是为了将其兑换成美元。我们要清楚：如果任何资产的主要使用情况是购买它，等待它升值，然后将其兑换成美元，那么它就是一种糟糕的货币。这就是人们对待棒球卡或邮票的方式，而不是金钱。对于大多数人来说，比特币不是一种货币。它是一种收藏品--数字棒球卡，没有面孔或统计资料。


* * *
比特币价值的爆炸是相当愚蠢的。但伟大的事情可以从这种愚蠢中诞生。

正如丹-格罗斯在他的《流行！》一书中写道，泡沫破裂的肥皂泡往往会给下一代的突破性技术施肥。在国家电报、火车系统和科技巨头之前，有一个电报泡沫，一个火车泡沫，以及（谁能忘记？）一个网络公司和在线零售泡沫。区块链，就像这些技术中的每一个，都有可能成为数字经济的关键基础设施，即使在你阅读这段文字时，比特币的价格正在崩溃。

在我关于比特币的最有启发性的谈话中，我与麻省理工学院斯隆管理学院的技术教授克里斯蒂安-卡塔里尼交谈。他首先背诵了货币的三个经典用途：记账单位（你可以用美元衡量收入），价值储存（你可以把美元放在你的钱包里，它们不会 "变坏"），以及交易媒介（给别人美元，他们会相信价值）。比特币能满足所有三个标准吗？也许吧，他说。但是，也许它不会，而且这并不重要。

"你可以想象，未来可能会有一种加密货币，它主要是一种价值储存，就像黄金一样，"他说。"它将是去中心化的，而且很强大，但交易费用很高。我可能用它来买房子，但不是买咖啡。另一方面，其他人可能对小规模的支付更有用。有了数字技术，也许我们可以有许多不同种类的货币，这就把价值储存和交换媒介完全分开了。"


最确定的是，货币的未来将考验我们对货币、泡沫和首次发行的传统定义。这个月发生在比特币身上的事情感觉像是一场不可持续的阵痛。但是，试图为这样一个市场何时会自我纠正制定合理的模型是愚蠢的。价格，像货币一样，是集体的幻觉。而美国泡沫的历史表明，国家的幻觉，如19世纪铁路系统的过度建设，可以支撑起下一代非常真实的变革，即使在它们爆炸之后。

德里克-汤普森（Derek Thompson）是《大西洋》杂志的工作人员，也是《工作进展》通讯的作者。