The 这 Crypto
Story 加密货币故事

There was a moment not so long ago when I thought, “What if I’ve had this crypto thing all wrong?” I’m a doubting normie who, if I’m being honest, hasn’t always understood this alternate universe that’s been percolating and expanding for more than a decade now. If you’re a disciple, this new dimension is the future. If you’re a skeptic, this upside-down world is just a modern Ponzi scheme that’s going to end badly—and the recent “crypto winter” is evidence of its long-overdue ending. But crypto has dug itself into finance, into technology, and into our heads. And if crypto isn’t going away, we’d better attempt to understand it. Which is why we asked the finest finance writer around, Matt Levine of Bloomberg Opinion, to write a cover-to-cover issue of Bloomberg Businessweek, something a single author has done only one other time in the magazine’s 93-year history (“What Is Code?,” by Paul Ford). What follows is his brilliant explanation of what this maddening, often absurd, and always fascinating technology means, and where it might go. —Joel Weber, Editor, Bloomberg Businessweek
还记得不久前的一刻，我想：“如果我一直误解了加密货币这一切？”我是一个怀疑的普通人，老实说，我并不总是理解这个已经存在了十多年的另一个宇宙。如果你是一个信徒，这个新维度就是未来。如果你是一个怀疑者，这个颠倒的世界只是一个现代庞氏骗局，最近的“加密货币寒冬”是它即将结束的证据。但是，加密货币已经渗透到金融、技术和我们的思想中。如果加密货币不会消失，我们最好尝试理解它。这也是为什么我们邀请了 Bloomberg Opinion 的顶尖金融作家 Matt Levine 撰写了 Bloomberg Businessweek 的封面故事，这是该杂志 93 年历史中仅有的第二次由单一作者完成的（第一次是 Paul Ford 的“What Is Code?”）。以下是他对这个让人困惑、常常荒谬却总是迷人的技术的精彩解释，以及它可能的发展方向。—Joel Weber，Bloomberg Businessweek 编辑

I
Ledgers, Bitcoin, Blockchains
_ledgers、比特币、区块链

If you have money, what you have is an entry in your bank’s database saying how much money you have. If you have a share of stock, what you have is generally an entry on a list—kept by the company or, more likely, some central intermediary¹—of who owns stock.
如果你有钱，你拥有的其实是你银行数据库中的一条记录，表明你拥有多少钱。如果你拥有股票，一般来说，你拥有的就是一份名单上的记录——由公司或更可能是某个中央中介机构保存的——记录谁拥有股票。

If you own a house, things are slightly different. There’s a house involved. But your ownership of that house is probably written down in some database; in the US this often means there’s a record of you buying the house—your title—in a filing cabinet in the basement of some county clerk’s office. (It’s not a very good database.) In many ways the important thing here is the house: You have a key to the front door; your stuff is there; your neighbors will be unsurprised to see you leaving the house in the morning and would be surprised to see someone else coming back in. But in many other ways the important thing is the entry in the database. A bank will want to make sure you have the title before giving you a mortgage; a buyer will want to do the proper procedures to that record before paying you for the house. The key will not suffice.
如果你拥有房产，情况略有不同。这里涉及到房产本身。但是，你对该房产的所有权可能被记录在某个数据库中；在美国，这通常意味着你购买房产的记录——房产所有权证书——被存放在某个县政府办公室地下室的文件柜中。（这不是一个非常好的数据库。）在很多方面，重要的是房产本身：你拥有前门的钥匙；你的东西都在那里；你的邻居不会对你早上离开房产感到惊讶，也不会对其他人回来感到惊讶。但是在其他很多方面，重要的是数据库中的记录。银行在给你贷款之前会确保你拥有所有权证书；买家在支付房产款项之前也会对该记录进行适当的处理。钥匙是不够的。

Lots of other stuff. Much of modern life occurs online. It’s not quite true that your social life and your career and your reputation consist of entries in the databases of Meta Platforms and Google and Microsoft, but it’s not quite false, either.
还有许多其他事情。现代生活的大部分发生在网上。你的人际关系、职业生涯和名誉不完全是由 Meta Platforms、Google 和 Microsoft 的数据库条目所组成的，但也不能说完全不是这样。

Some of this stuff has to do with computers. It’s far more convenient for the money to be computer entries than sacks of gold or even paper bills. Some of it is deeper than that, though. What could it mean to own a house? One possibility is the state of nature: Owning a house means 1) you’re in the house, and 2) if someone else tries to move in, you’re bigger than them, so you can kick them out. But if they’re bigger than you, now they own the house.
有些事情与计算机有关。将钱存在计算机 entries 中比装在金袋或纸币中方便多了。然而有些事情比这更深刻。拥有一个房子是什么意思？一种可能性是自然状态：拥有一个房子意味着 1) 你在房子里，2) 如果其他人试图搬进来，你比他们强大，所以你可以把他们赶出去。但如果他们比你强大，现在他们就拥有了房子。

Another possibility is what you might think of as a village. Owning a house means you live there and your neighbors all know you live there, and if someone else tries to move in, then you and your neighbors combined are bigger than them. Homeownership is mediated socially by a high-trust network of peers.
另一种可能性是，你可能会认为它是一个村庄。拥有房产意味着你居住在那里，你的邻居都知道你居住在那里，如果有人尝试搬进来，那么你和你的邻居加起来比他们更强大。房产所有权是通过一个高信任的同伴网络在社会上得到调节的。

A third possibility is what you might think of as a government. Owning a house means the government thinks you own the house, and if someone else tries to move in, then the government will kick them out.² Homeownership is mediated socially by a government. The database is a way for the government to keep track. You don’t have to trust any particular person; you have to trust the rule of law.
第三种可能性是政府。拥有房产意味着政府认为你拥有这所房产，如果其他人尝试搬进来，那么政府就会将他们赶出去。房产所有权是由政府在社会层面上调节的。数据库是政府跟踪房产所有权的一种方式。你不需要信任特定的个人，而是需要信任法治。

Money is a bit like that, too. Sacks of gold are a fairly straightforward form of it, but they’re heavy. A system in which your trusted banker holds on to your sacks for you and writes you letters of credit, and you can draw on those letters at branches of the bank run by your banker’s cousin—that’s pretty good, though it relies on trust between you and the banker, as well as the banker and the banker’s cousin. A system of impersonal banking in which the tellers are strangers and you probably use an ATM anyway requires trust in the system, trust that the banks are constrained by government regulation or reputation or market forces and so will behave properly.
钱也有点像这样。金币袋是一种非常直接的形式，但它们很重。有一个系统，你信任的银行家为你保管金币袋，并为你开具信用函，你可以在银行家的堂弟开设的银行分行上提取这些信用函——这非常好，只是它依赖你和银行家之间的信任，以及银行家和银行家的堂弟之间的信任。在一个匿名银行系统中，出纳员是陌生人，你可能使用自动柜员机，无论如何都需要信任系统，信任银行受到政府监管、声誉或市场力量的约束，因此会行为得当。

Saying that modern life is lived in databases means, most of all, that modern life involves a lot of trust.
现代生活是在数据库中度过的，这最重要的一点是，现代生活需要大量的信任。

Sometimes this is because we know them and consider them to be trustworthy. More often it means we have an abstract sense of trust in the broader system, the system of laws and databases and trust itself. We assume that we can trust the systems we use, because doing so makes life much easier than not trusting them and because that assumption mostly works out. It’s a towering and underappreciated achievement of modernity that we mostly do trust the database-keepers,
有时候这是因为我们认识他们，并认为他们是值得信任的。更多时候，这意味着我们对更广泛的系统拥有抽象的信任感，即法律、数据库和信任体系本身。我们假设我们可以信任我们使用的系统，因为这样做使生活变得比不信任他们更容易，同时这种假设通常也能奏效。这是现代社会一个高耸且被低估的成就，即我们大多数时候都信任数据库的管理者。

and that they mostly are trustworthy.
他们大多数是值得信任的。

But we don’t always trust them, and they’re not always trustworthy.
但是我们并不总是信任他们，他们也并不总是值得信任的。

Sometimes they just aren’t. There are banks you can’t trust to hold your money for you and places where you can’t trust the rule of law to regulate them. There are governments you can’t trust not to seize your money from the banks, or falsify election results, or change the property registry and take your house. There are social media companies you can’t trust not to freeze your account arbitrarily. Most people in the US, most days, live in a high-trust world, where it’s easy and reasonable to trust that the intermediaries who run the databases that shape our lives will behave properly. But not everyone everywhere lives like that.
有时候它们不可信任。有些银行不可信任，无法确保它们为你保管钱款；有些地方法律规则不可靠，无法监管它们。有些政府不可信任，不会从银行中没收你的钱款、篡改选举结果、更改房产登记册并夺走你的房子。有些社交媒体公司不可信任，随意冻结你的账户。美国的大多数人在大多数日子里生活在一个高信任度的世界中，在这里很容易相信那些管理我们生活数据库的中间机构会行为得当。但并不是每个人在每个地方都生活得如此。

Even in the US, trust can be fragile. The 2008 financial crisis caused huge and lasting damage to a lot of people’s trust in the banking system. People trusted banks to do nice, safe, socially productive things, and it turned out they were doing wild, risky things that caused an economic crisis. After that it became harder for many people to trust banks to hold their savings.
即使在美国，信任也可能非常脆弱。2008 年的金融危机对许多人对银行系统的信任造成了巨大和持久的损害。人们原本信任银行会做些良好、安全、有社会效益的事情，但结果发现它们却在做些疯狂、冒险的事情，导致经济危机。从那以后，许多人更难以信任银行来存放自己的储蓄。

Also, though, you might have a philosophical objection to trust. Even if your bank has an absolutely unblemished record of keeping track of your money, that might not be good enough for you. Your bank is, to you, a black box. “How do I know you’ll give me my money back?” you could ask the bank. And the bank will say things like “Here are our audited financial statements” and “We are regulated by the Federal Reserve and insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.” and “We have never not given back anyone’s money.” And you’ll say, “Yes, yes, that’s all fine, but how do I know?” You don’t. Trust is built into the system, a prerequisite. You might want proof.³
此外，你可能会对信任持有哲学上的反对意见。即使你的银行有着绝对无瑕的记录，始终如一地管理你的钱财，这对你来说也许仍然不够。你眼中的银行是一个黑箱。“你如何确保把我的钱退还给我？”你可能会问银行。银行会说类似的话，如“这里是我们的审计财务报表”、“我们受到联邦储备局的监管和联邦存款保险公司的保险”、“我们从未不退还任何人的钱财”。你会说，“是的，是的，这一切都很好，但我如何知道？”你不知道。信任是系统中固有的前提。你可能想要证据。

Even if you’re generally cool with trusting the keepers of modern databases, you might have a more technical objection. These databases aren’t always very good. Lots of the banking system is written in a very old computer language called Cobol; in the US people still frequently make payments—electronic transfers between electronic databases of money—by writing paper checks and putting them in the mail. US stock trades take two business days to settle: If I buy stock from you on a Monday, you deliver the stock (and I pay you) on Wednesday. This isn’t because your broker has to put stock certificates in a sack and bring them over to my broker’s office, while my broker puts dollar bills in a sack and brings them over to your broker’s office, but because the actual process is a descendant of that. It’s slow and manual and sometimes gets messed up; lots of stock trades “fail.”
即使你通常信任现代数据库的管理者，你也可能有技术上的异议。这些数据库并不总是很好。银行系统的大部分是用一种非常古老的计算机语言 Cobol 编写的；在美国，人们仍经常通过写纸质支票并邮寄来进行支付——电子数据库之间的电子转账。美国股票交易需要两天的结算期：如果我在星期一从你那里购买股票，你将在星期三交付股票（我付款给你）。这不是因为你的经纪人需要将股票证书装入袋子并带到我的经纪人办公室，而我的经纪人需要将美元钞票装入袋子并带到你的经纪人办公室，而是因为实际过程是从那时继承下来的。它缓慢、手动，有时会出问题；很多股票交易“失败”。

Don’t even get me started on the property registry. If you buy a house, you have to go to a ceremony—a “closing”—where a bunch of people with jobs like “title company lawyer” mutter incantations that let you own the house. It can take hours.
别提房产登记册了。如果你买了一所房子，你需要参加一个仪式——“结算”——其中一群人拥有像“房产公司律师”这样的工作，他们念念有词，让你拥有这所房子。这可能需要几个小时。

If your model of how a database should work comes from modern computers, the hours of incantations seem insane. “There should be an API,” you might think: There should be an application programming interface allowing each of these databases to interact with the others. If your bank is thinking about giving you a mortgage, it should be able to query the property database automatically and find out that you own your house, rather than send a lawyer to the county clerk’s office. And it should be able to query the Department of Motor Vehicles registry automatically and get your driver’s license for identification purposes, and query your brokerage account automatically and examine your assets.
如果你的数据库工作模型来自现代计算机，那么这些念念有词的小时数看起来简直疯狂。“应该有一个 API，”你可能会想：应该有一个应用程序编程接口，允许这些数据库相互交互。如果你的银行考虑给你一份抵押贷款，它应该能够自动查询房产数据库，查明你拥有这所房子，而不是派律师到县书记员办公室去。同时，它也应该能够自动查询机动车辆管理局登记册，获取你的驾驶执照，以便身份验证，并自动查询你的证券账户，检查你的资产。

Modern life 现代生活
consists of entries 由条目组成
in databases: 在数据库中：

What if we 如果我们
updated 更新
them? 它们？

What if we rewrote all the databases from scratch, in modern computer languages using modern software engineering principles, with the goal of making them interact with one another seamlessly?
假设我们从头开始，用现代计算机语言和现代软件工程原则重写所有数据库，以实现它们之间的无缝交互？

If you did that, it would be almost like having one database, the database of life: I could send you money in exchange for your house, or you could send me social reputation in exchange for my participation in an online class, or whatever, all in the same computer system.
如果你那样做了，那几乎就像拥有一个数据库，生命数据库：我可以用钱换取你的房子，你可以用社交声誉换取我参加在线课程的参与，或者其他什么，都在同一个计算机系统中。

That would be convenient and powerful, but it would also be scary. It would put even more pressure on trust. Whoever runs that one database would, in a sense, run the world. Whom could you trust to do that?
这样做会非常方便和强大，但同时也非常可怕。这将给信任带来更大的压力。谁掌控那个数据库，实际上就掌控了世界。谁值得信任来做这件事？

What if there was one database, and everyone ran it?
假设只有一个数据库，而每个人都在使用它？

In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published a method for everyone to run a database, thus inventing “crypto.”
2008 年，中本聪发布了一种让每个人都能运行数据库的方法，从而发明了“加密货币”。

Well, I’m not sure that’s what Satoshi thought he was doing. Most immediately he was inventing Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, which is the title of his famous white paper.
好吧，我不确定那是否是中本聪想做的事情。他最直接的成就是发明比特币：一种点对点的电子现金系统，这也是他著名的白皮书标题。

What Satoshi said he’d invented was a sort of cash for internet transactions, “an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.” If I want to buy something from you for digital cash—Bitcoin—I just send you the Bitcoin and you send me the thing; no “trusted third party” such as a bank is involved.
佐藤说他发明了一种用于互联网交易的现金，“基于密码学证明而不是信任的电子支付系统，允许任何两方愿意交易直接相互交易，不需要第三方信任机构。”如果我想从你那里购买某样东西，用数字现金——比特币——我只要将比特币发送给你，你就将东西发送给我；不需要“第三方信任机构”，例如银行。

When I put it like that, it sounds as if Satoshi invented a system in which I can send you Bitcoin and nobody else is involved. What he actually invented was a system in which lots of other people are involved.
当我这样说时，听起来像是佐藤发明了一种系统，我可以将比特币发送给你，而没有其他人参与。实际上，他发明了一种系统，其中有许多其他人参与。

Hi! I’m Matt. I’m a former lawyer and investment banker. Now I’m a columnist at Bloomberg Opinion. In my day job, I write about finance. I like finance. It’s fun to write about. It’s a peculiar way of looking at the world, a series of puzzles, a set of structures that people have imposed on economic reality. Often those structures are arcane and off-putting, and it’s satisfying to understand what they’re up to. Everything in finance is accreted on top of a lot of other things in finance. Everything is weird and counterintuitive, and you often have to have a sense of financial history and market practice to understand why anyone is doing any of the things they’re doing.
嗨！我是马特。我曾经是律师和投资银行家，现在我是彭博观点的专栏作家。在我的日常工作中，我写关于金融的文章。我喜欢金融。写关于金融的文章很有趣。这是一种奇怪的看待世界的方式，一系列的谜团，一组人们强加于经济现实的结构。这些结构通常是晦涩难懂的，让人感到满意的是理解它们的用意。在金融领域，所有事情都是建立在许多其他金融事物之上的。所有事情都是怪异的、反直觉的，你经常需要具备金融史和市场实践的知识来理解人们为什么做这些事情。

For the past few years the most polarizing thing in finance has been crypto. Crypto is a set of ideas and products and technologies that grew out of the Bitcoin white paper. But it’s also, let’s be clear, a set of lines on charts that went up. When Satoshi invented Bitcoin, one Bitcoin was worth zero dollars: It was just an idea he made up. At its peak last November, one Bitcoin was worth more than $67,000, and the total value of all the crypto in circulation was something like $3 trillion. Many people who got into crypto early got very rich very fast and were very annoying about it. They bought Lamborghinis and islands. They were pleased with themselves: They thought crypto was the future, and they were building the future and being properly and amply rewarded for it. They said things like “Have fun staying poor” and “NGMI” (“not gonna make it”) to people who didn’t own crypto. They were right and rich and wanted you to know it.
过去几年中，金融领域最具争议的事情就是加密货币。加密货币是一系列来自比特币白皮书的想法、产品和技术。但是，让我们明确一点，加密货币也是图表上的曲线不断上涨。当中本聪发明比特币时，一比特币的价值为零美元：它只是他的一个想法。去年十一月，一个比特币的价值超过了 67000 美元，全体加密货币的总价值约为 3 万亿美元。许多早期进入加密货币的人很快变得非常富有，也非常招人讨厌。他们购买兰博基尼和岛屿。他们对自己感到非常满意：他们认为加密货币是未来，并且他们正在建设未来，并因此获得了充分的回报。他们对不拥有加密货币的人说：“继续贫穷吧”和“NGMI”（“不可能成功”）。他们是正确的、富有的，并且想让你知道这一点。

Many other people weren’t into crypto. They got the not-entirely unjustified impression that it was mostly useful for crime or for Ponzi schemes. They asked questions like “What is this for?” or “Where did all this money come from?” or “If you’re building the future, what is the actual work you’re doing?” or “If you’re building the future, why does it seem so grim and awful?” And the crypto people, often, replied: “Have fun staying poor.”
许多其他人不喜欢加密货币。他们获得了不完全不公平的印象，即加密货币主要用于犯罪或庞氏骗局。他们问了类似“What is this for？”或“What did all this money come from？”或“If you’re building the future, what is the actual work you’re doing？”或“If you’re building the future, why does it seem so grim and awful？”的问题。加密货币人士经常回答：“祝你贫穷快乐。”

And then, this year, those lines on charts went down. The price of one Bitcoin fell below $20,000; the total value of crypto fell from $3 trillion to $1 trillion; some big crypto companies failed. If you’re a crypto skeptic, this was very satisfying, not just as a matter of schadenfreude but also because maybe now everyone will shut up about crypto and you can go back to not paying attention to it. For crypto enthusiasts, this was just a reason to double down on grinding: The crash would shake out the casual fans and leave the true believers to build the future together.
然后，这一年，那些图表上的线条下降了。一个比特币的价格跌破了 20,000 美元；加密货币的总价值从 3 万亿美元降至 1 万亿美元；一些大型加密货币公司倒闭。如果你是加密货币怀疑论者，这非常令人满意，不仅仅是出于幸灾乐祸，也因为现在每个人都可以不再关注加密货币了。对于加密货币爱好者来说，这只是一个理由，让他们继续努力：崩溃将淘汰掉非真正的粉丝，留下真正的信仰者一起建设未来。

In a sense it’s a dumb time to be talking about crypto, because the lines went down. But really it’s a good time to be talking about crypto. There’s a pause; there’s some repose. Whatever is left in crypto is not just speculation and get-rich-quick schemes. We can think about what crypto means—divorced, a little bit, from the lines going up.
从某种意义上说，现在讨论加密货币有点愚蠢，因为行情下跌了。但实际上，现在是讨论加密货币的好时机。现在有一个暂停，有一些喘息的机会。加密货币剩下的不仅仅是投机和快速致富的方案。我们可以思考加密货币的真正含义——至少有一点脱离涨势的影响。

I don’t have strong feelings either way about the value of crypto. I like finance. I think it’s interesting. And if you like finance—if you like understanding the structures that people build to organize economic reality—crypto is amazing. It’s a laboratory for financial intuitions. In the past 14 years, crypto has built a whole financial system from scratch. Crypto constantly reinvented or rediscovered things that finance had been doing for centuries. Sometimes it found new and better ways to do things.
我对加密货币的价值并不持有强烈的看法。我喜欢金融。我认为金融很有趣。如果你喜欢金融——如果你喜欢理解人们建立的经济现实结构——加密货币简直令人惊叹。它是一个金融直觉的实验室。在过去的 14 年中，加密货币从零开始建立了一个完整的金融系统。加密货币不断地重新发明或重新发现了金融界几百年来的成果。有时它找到新的、更好的方法来做事。

Often it found worse ways, heading down dead ends that traditional finance tried decades ago, with hilarious results.
经常它找到更糟糕的方法，走向传统金融几十年前尝试过的死胡同，结果非常可笑。

Often it hit on more or less the same solutions that traditional finance figured out, but with new names and new explanations. You can look at some crypto thing and figure out which traditional finance thing it replicates. If you do that, you can learn something about the crypto financial system—you can, for instance, make an informed guess about how the crypto thing might go wrong—but you can also learn something about the traditional financial system: The crypto replication gives you a new insight into the financial original.
通常情况下，它会找到与传统金融业相同或相似的解决方案，但使用新的名称和解释。你可以查看某个加密项目，弄清楚它是复制哪个传统金融项目。如果你这样做，你可以了解加密金融系统的一些信息——例如，你可以对加密项目可能出错的方式做出明智的猜测——同时，你也可以了解传统金融系统：加密复制为你提供了对金融原始版本的新见解。

Also, I have to say, as someone who writes about finance, I have a soft spot for stories of fraud and market manipulation and smart people putting one over on slightly less smart people. Often those stories are interesting and illuminating and, especially, funny. Crypto has a very high density of stories like that.
此外，我必须说，我作为一名金融撰稿人，对欺诈和市场操纵的故事，以及聪明人欺骗稍微不那么聪明的人的故事有着特别的 weakness。这些故事通常既有趣又有启发性，尤其是非常幽默。加密货币领域中充满了这样故事。

And so, now, I write a lot about crypto. Including quite a lot right here.
于是，现在，我写了很多关于加密货币的文章。包括这里的许多篇章。

I need to give you some warnings. First, I don’t write about crypto as a deeply embedded crypto expert. I’m not a true believer. I didn’t own any crypto until I started working on this article; now I own roughly $100 worth. I write about crypto as a person who enjoys human ingenuity and human folly and who finds a lot of both in crypto.
我需要提醒你一些事情。首先，我不是作为一个深入嵌入的加密货币专家来写关于加密货币的文章。我不是一个真正的信仰者。在开始写这篇文章之前，我不拥有任何加密货币，现在我拥有大约 100 美元的加密货币。我写关于加密货币的文章，是因为我喜欢人类的聪明才智和人类的愚蠢，并且在加密货币中发现了很多这两方面的内容。

Conversely, I didn’t sit down and write 40,000 words to tell you that crypto is dumb and worthless and will now vanish without a trace. That would be an odd use of time. My goal here is not to convince you that crypto is building the future and that if you don’t get on board you’ll stay poor. My goal is to convince you that crypto is interesting, that it has found some new things to say about some old problems, and that even when those things are wrong, they’re wrong in illuminating ways.
相反，我没有坐下来写 4 万字来告诉你加密货币是愚蠢的、毫无价值的，现在就会消失得无影无踪。那将是一个奇怪的时间使用方式。我的目标不是说服你加密货币正在建设未来，如果你不加入就会贫穷。我的目标是说服你，加密货币是有趣的，它发现了一些关于旧问题的新看法，即使这些看法是错误的，也是以启发的方式错误的。

Also, I’m a finance person. It seems to me that, 14 years on, crypto has a pretty well-developed financial system, and I’m going to talk about it a fair bit, because it’s pretty well-developed and because I like finance.
另外，我是一名金融人士。对我来说，十四年过去了，密码货币已经拥有了相当成熟的金融系统，我将会详细讨论它，因为它非常成熟，也因为我喜欢金融。

A financial system is, well, a series of databases. It’s a way to shuffle around claims on tangible stuff; it’s an adjunct to the real world. A financial system is good if it makes it easier for farmers to grow food and families to own houses and businesses to make awesome computer games, if it helps to create and distribute abundance in real life. A financial system is bad if it trades abstract claims in ways that enrich the people doing the trading but don’t help anyone else.
金融系统其实是一系列数据库。它是将有形资产的所有权转移的方式，是现实世界的辅助工具。金融系统是好的，如果它使农民更容易种植粮食、家庭更容易拥有房屋、企业更容易制作出色的电脑游戏，并帮助创造和分配现实生活中的丰裕。如果金融系统只是交易抽象的所有权，以便交易者自身获利，而不帮助其他人，那么它就是坏的。

I … ehhh … uh. A salient question in crypto, for the past 14 years, has been: What is it good for? If you ask for an example of a business that actually uses crypto, the answers you’ll get are mostly financial businesses: “Well, we built a really great exchange for trading crypto.” Cool, OK. Sometimes these answers are plausibly about creating or distributing abundance: “Crypto lets emigrants send remittances cheaply and quickly.” That’s good. Often they’re about efficient gambling. Gambling is fun, nothing against it. But a financial system that was purely about gambling would be kind of limited.
过去 14 年来，密码学领域中一个突出的问题是：它有什么用途？如果你问哪些企业真正使用密码学，得到的答案大多是金融业务：“嗨，我们建立了一个非常棒的加密货币交易所。”好吧，OK。有时这些答案是关于创造或分配财富的：“密码学让移民能够快速廉价地汇款。”这很好。经常它们是关于高效赌博的。赌博是有趣的，我并不反对。但是一个纯粹以赌博为目的的金融系统将是相当有限的。

Meanwhile, crypto’s most ardent boosters say crypto is about building real, useful things. Crypto will redefine social relationships, and gaming, and computers. It will build the metaverse. Crypto is the vital component of the next leap in the internet; crypto will build “web3” to replace our current “web2.” Maybe? If you ask for an example of a business that actually uses crypto, you’ll get a ton of real, lucrative financial businesses, then some vague theoretical musings like “Well, maybe we could build a social media network on web3?”
同时，密码货币最坚定的支持者们称，密码货币是关于构建真正有用的东西的。密码货币将重新定义社交关系、游戏和计算机。它将构建元宇宙。密码货币是互联网下一个飞跃的关键组件；密码货币将构建“web3”，取代我们当前的“web2”。或者？如果你问哪些企业真正使用密码货币，你将得到一堆真正的、利润丰厚的金融业务，然后是一些模糊的理论猜测，例如“嗯，也许我们可以在 web3 上构建一个社交媒体网络？”

It’s still early. Maybe someone will build a really good social media network on web3. Maybe in 10 years, crypto and blockchains and tokens will be central to everything that’s done on the internet, and the internet will be (even more than it is now) central to everything that’s done in human life, and the crypto early adopters will all be right and rich while the rest of us will have fun staying poor, and schoolchildren will say, “I can’t believe anyone ever doubted the importance of Dogecoin.”
仍然为时尚早。也许有人会在 web3 上建立一个真正优秀的社交媒体网络。也许十年后，密码货币、区块链和代币将成为互联网上一切活动的核心，而互联网将（比现在更甚）成为人类生活中一切活动的核心，那时早期采用密码货币的人都会正确富有，而我们其他人将乐于贫穷，并且学校孩子们会说：“我不敢相信有人曾经怀疑过狗狗币的重要性。”

I don’t want to discount that possibility, and I do want to speculate about it a little bit, maybe sketch a picture of what that might mean. I’m not going to give you a road map for how we’ll get there. I’m not a tech person, and I’m not a true believer. But it is worth trying to understand what crypto could mean for the future of the internet, because the implications are sometimes utopian and sometimes dystopian and sometimes just a modestly more efficient base layer for stuff you do anyway. Plus the finance is cool, and it’s cool now.
我不想低估那种可能性，我想对此进行一些猜测，可能勾勒出它可能意味着什么的图景。我不打算为你提供一条到达那里的路线图。我不是技术专家，也不是真正的信仰者。但是，尝试理解加密技术对互联网未来的影响是值得的，因为其影响有时是乌托邦式的，有时是反乌托邦式的，有时只是使你日常所做的事情变得更高效一些。此外，加密金融非常酷，现在也很酷。

Before we go on, let me say some things about some names. First, “crypto.” This thing I’m writing about here: There’s not a great name for it. The standard name, which I’ll use a lot, is crypto, which I guess is short for “cryptocurrency.” This is not a great name, because 1) it emphasizes currency, and a lot of crypto is not particularly about currency, and 2) it emphasizes cryptography, and while crypto is in some deep sense about cryptography, most people in crypto are not doing a ton of cryptography. You can be a crypto expert or a crypto billionaire or a leading figure in crypto without knowing much about cryptography, and people who are cryptography experts sometimes get a bit snippy about the crypto people stealing their prefix.
在我们继续之前，让我说说一些名字的事情。首先，“加密货币”（crypto）。我在这里写的这个东西：它没有一个很好的名字。标准名字是我将经常使用的“加密货币”，我猜是“加密货币”的缩写。这不是一个很好的名字，因为 1）它强调货币，而很多加密货币并不特别关心货币，2）它强调密码学，而加密货币在某种深层意义上是关于密码学的，但大多数加密货币人并不做很多密码学工作。你可以是加密货币专家、加密货币亿万富翁或加密货币领军人物，而不需要知道很多密码学知识，而密码学专家有时会对加密货币人“偷走”他们的前缀感到有点儿不高兴。

There are other names for various topics in crypto—
加密领域中有多个主题的别称—

—and they’re sometimes used broadly to refer to a lot of what’s going on in crypto, but it’s not like they’re great either. So I’ll mostly stick with “crypto” as the general term.
它们有时被广泛用于指代加密货币领域中的许多事情，但它们也不是非常出色。所以，我主要会使用“加密货币”这个通用术语。

Second, “Satoshi Nakamoto.” That’s a pseudonym, and whoever wrote his white paper has done a reasonably good job of keeping himself, herself, or themselves pseudonymous ever since. (There’s a lot of speculation about who the author might be. Some of the funnier suggestions include Elon Musk and a random computer engineer named, uh, Satoshi Nakamoto. I’m going to call Satoshi Nakamoto “Satoshi” and use he/him pronouns, because most people do.)
其次是“中本聪”这个笔名，而白皮书的作者至今仍然做得很好地保持匿名。（关于作者的真实身份有很多猜测，一些比较有趣的猜测包括埃隆·马斯克和一个名叫中本聪的随机计算机工程师。我将称呼中本聪为“聪”并使用他/他的代词，因为大多数人都是这样做的。）

A related point. Other than (maybe?) Satoshi, basically everyone involved in cryptocurrency is a hilariously outsize personality. It’s a good bet that if you read an article about crypto, it will feature wild characters. (One story in Bloomberg Businessweek last year mentioned “sending billions of perfectly good US dollars to the Inspector Gadget co-creator’s Bahamian bank in exchange for digital tokens conjured by the Mighty Ducks guy and run by executives who are targets of a US criminal investigation.”) Except this one! There won’t be a single exciting person in this whole story. My goal here is to explain crypto, so that when you read about a duck guy doing crypto you can understand what it is that he’s doing.
相关一点是，除了（可能是）中本聪外，几乎所有参与加密货币的人都具有夸张的个性。如果你读到一篇关于加密货币的文章，很可能会遇到一些疯狂的人物。（去年《彭博商业周刊》的一篇报道提到，“将数十亿美元汇入《Inspector Gadget》创作者在巴哈马的银行，以换取由《 Mighty Ducks》人物创造的数字代币，而这些代币由受到美国刑事调查的高管管理。”）但是，这篇文章例外！这里不会出现任何激动人心的人物。我的目标是解释加密货币，以便当你读到关于鸭子哥哥做加密货币的事情时，你能理解他在做什么。

Cryptography is the study of secret messages, of coding and decoding. Most of what I talk about in this article won’t be about cryptography; it will be about, you know, Ponzis. But the base layer of crypto really is about cryptography, so it will be helpful to know a bit about it.
加密学是研究秘密信息的编码和解码的学科。大部分我在这篇文章中讨论的内容不会是关于加密学的，而是关于庞氏骗局。但是加密货币的基础层确实是关于加密学的，所以了解一点加密学知识会很有帮助。

The basic thing that happens in cryptography is that you have an input (a number, a word, a string of text), and you run some function on it, and it produces a different number or word or whatever as an output. The function might be the Caesar cipher (shift each letter of a word by one or more spots in the alphabet, so “Caesar” becomes “Dbftbs”), or pig Latin (shift the first consonants of the word to the end and add “-ay,” so “Caesar” becomes “Aesar-say”), or something more complicated.
密码学中最基本的事情是，你拥有一个输入（一个数字、一个单词、一个文本字符串），然后对其应用某个函数，产生一个不同的数字、单词或其他输出。这个函数可能是凯撒密码（将单词中的每个字母在字母表中移动一个或多个位置，因此“Caesar”变成了“Dbftbs”），或猪拉丁语（将单词的第一个辅音移到末尾并添加“-ay”，因此“Caesar”变成了“Aesar-say”），或者更复杂的东西。

A useful property in a cryptographic function is that it be “one-way.”⁴ This means it’s easy to turn the input string into the output string, but hard to do it in reverse; it’s easy to compute the function in one direction but impossible in the other. (The classic example is that multiplying two large prime numbers is quite straightforward; factoring an enormous number into two large primes is hard.) The Caesar cipher is easy to apply and easy to reverse, but some forms of encoding are easy to apply and much more difficult to reverse. That makes them better for secret codes.
密码函数中一个有用的特性是它是“单向”的。这意味着将输入字符串转换为输出字符串很容易，但反之则很难；在一个方向上计算函数很容易，而在另一个方向上则是不可能的。（经典的例子是乘两个大素数非常简单；而将一个庞大的数字分解为两个大素数则很难。）凯撒密码很容易应用和反转，但有些编码形式很容易应用却很难反转。这使它们更适合秘密代码。

One example of this is a “hashing” function, which takes some input text and turns it into a long number of a fixed size. So I could run a hashing function on this article—a popular one is called SHA-256, which was invented by the National Security Agency⁵—and generate a long, incomprehensible number from it. (To make it more incomprehensible, it’s customary to write this number in hexadecimal, so that it will have the digits zero through 9 but also “a” through “f.”) I could send you the number and say, “I wrote an article and ran it through a SHA-256 hashing algorithm, and this number was the result.” You’d have the number, but you wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails of it. In particular, you couldn’t plop it into a computer program and decode it, turning the hash back into this article.
这是一个“散列”函数的例子，它可以将某些输入文本转换为固定大小的长数字。因此，我可以将这篇文章输入到一个散列函数中——一个流行的例子是 SHA-256，它是由美国国家安全局开发的——并生成一个长的、无法理解的数字。（为了使这个数字更加难以理解，通常将其写成十六进制形式，这样它将包含从 0 到 9 的数字，以及从 “a” 到 “f” 的字母。）我可以将这个数字发送给你，并说：“我写了一篇文章，并将其输入到 SHA-256 散列算法中，结果就是这个数字。”你将拥有这个数字，但你无法理解它的含义。特别是，你不能将其输入到计算机程序中，并将其解码回这篇文章。

The hashing function is one-way; the hash tells you nothing about the article, even if you know the hashing function. The hashing function basically shuffles the data in the article: It takes each letter of the article, represented as a binary number (a series of bits, 0s and 1s), and then shuffles around the 0s and 1s lots of times, mashing them together until they are all jumbled up and unrecognizable. The hashing function gives clear step-by-step instructions for how to shuffle the bits together, but they don’t work in reverse.⁶ It’s like stirring cream into coffee: easy to do, hard to undo.
哈希函数是单向的；哈希值不会告诉你文章的任何信息，即使你知道哈希函数。哈希函数基本上是将文章中的数据混淆：它将文章中的每个字母表示为二进制数字（一系列的 0 和 1），然后将这些 0 和 1 混淆很多次，直到它们变得完全不可识别。哈希函数提供了明确的步骤指令来混淆这些位，但这些指令不能逆向工作。 ⁶ 这就像搅拌奶油入咖啡：容易做，但很难逆向。

Applying a SHA-256 algorithm will create a 64-digit number for data of any size you can imagine. Here’s a hash of the entire text of James Joyce’s 730-page novel Ulysses:
应用 SHA-256 算法将创建一个任意大小数据的 64 位数字。这里是詹姆斯·乔伊斯的 730 页小说《尤利西斯》的整个文本的哈希值：

It fits in the same space as the hash of “Hi! I’m Matt”:
它与“Hi I’m Matt”的哈希值占用相同的空间：

But what if I wrote “Hi, I’m Matt” with a comma? Then:
如果我写“Hi, I’m Matt”，加上一个逗号呢？那么：

There’s no apparent relationship between the numbers for “Hi! I’m Matt” and “Hi, I’m Matt.” The two original inputs were almost exactly identical; the hash outputs are wildly different. This is a critical part of the hashing function being one-way: If similar inputs mapped to similar outputs, then it would be too easy to reverse the function and decipher messages. But for practical purposes, each input maps to a random output.⁷
“Hi I’m Matt”和“Hi, I’m Matt.”这两个数字之间没有明显的关系。两个原始输入几乎相同，但哈希输出却截然不同。这是哈希函数单向性的关键部分：如果相似输入映射到相似输出，那么就太容易逆向函数并破译消息了。但从实际目的来说，每个输入都映射到一个随机输出。 ⁷

What’s the point of a secret code that can’t be decoded? For one thing, it’s a way to verify. If I sent you a hash of this article, it wouldn’t give you the information you need to re-create the article.⁸ But if I then sent you the article, you could plop that into a computer program (the SHA-256 algorithm) and generate a hash. And the hash you generate will exactly match the number I sent you. And you’ll say, “Aha, yes, you hashed that article all right.” It’s impossible for you to decode the hash, but it’s easy for you to check that I had encoded it correctly.
一个不能被解密的秘密代码有什么用？一种用途是验证。如果我将这篇文章的哈希发送给你，它不会提供你重新创建文章所需的信息。 ⁸ 但是，如果我然后将文章发送给你，你可以将其输入计算机程序（SHA-256 算法）并生成哈希。然后，你生成的哈希将与我发送的数字完全匹配。你会说：“aha，yes，你确实对文章进行了哈希。”你无法解密哈希，但很容易检查我是否正确地编码了它。

This would be dumb to do with this article, but the principle has uses. A simple, everyday one is passwords. If I have a computer system and you have a password to log in to the system, I need to be able to check that your password is correct. One way to do this is for my system to store your password and check what you type against what I’ve stored: I have a little text file with all the passwords, and it has “Password123” written next to your username, and you type “Password123” on the login screen, and my system checks what you type against the file and sees that they match and lets you log in. But this is a dangerous system: If someone steals the file, they would have everyone’s password. It’s better practice for me to hash the passwords. You type “Password123” as your password when setting up the account, and I run it through a hash function and get back
这样做文章可能很愚蠢，但这个原则有用处。一个简单的、日常的例子是密码。如果我有一个计算机系统，你有一个密码来登录系统，我需要能够检查你的密码是否正确。这样做的一种方法是我的系统存储你的密码，然后检查你输入的密码与存储的密码是否匹配：我有一个小文本文件，其中包含所有密码，旁边写着你的用户名，你在登录屏幕上输入“Password123”，我的系统检查你输入的密码与文件中的密码是否匹配，如果匹配就让你登录。但是，这是一个危险的系统：如果有人偷走了文件，他们就会拥有所有人的密码。因此，我更应该对密码进行哈希处理。你在设置账户时输入“Password123”作为密码，我将其通过哈希函数处理，得到

and I store that on my list. When you try to log in, you type your password, and I hash it again, and if it matches the hash on my list, I let you in. If someone steals the list, they can’t decode your password from the hash, so they can’t log in to the system.⁹
并将其存储在我的列表中。当你尝试登录时，你输入密码，我再次对其进行哈希处理，如果哈希值与列表中的哈希值匹配，我就让你登录。如果有人偷走了列表，他们无法从哈希值中解密出你的密码，因此无法登录系统。

There are other, more crypto-nerdy uses for hashing. One is a sort of time stamping. Let’s say you predict some future event, and you want to get credit when it does happen. But you don’t want to just go on Twitter now and say, “I predict that the Jets will win the Super Bowl in 2024,” to avoid being embarrassed or influencing the outcome or whatever. One thing you could do is write “the Jets will win the Super Bowl in 2024” on a piece of paper, put it in an envelope, seal the envelope, and ask me to keep it until the 2024 Super Bowl, after which you’ll tell me either to open the envelope or burn it. But this requires you and everyone else to trust me.
哈希还有其他更为“密码学 nerdy”的用途。其中一种是时间戳。假设你预测某个未来事件，并想在它发生时获得认可。但你不想现在就在 Twitter 上说“我预测 Jet 队将在 2024 年赢得超级碗”，以免感到尴尬或影响结果什么的。有一件事你可以做的是写下“Jet 队将在 2024 年赢得超级碗”，把它放在信封里，封好信封，然后请我保管到 2024 年超级碗后，你会告诉我是否打开信封或烧毁它。但这需要你和所有人信任我。

Another, trustless thing you could do is type “the Jets will win the Super Bowl in 2024” into a cryptographic hash generator, and it will spit out:
另一种不需要信任的方法是，你可以将“Jet 队将在 2024 年赢得超级碗”输入加密哈希生成器，它将生成：

and then you can tweet,
然后你可以发推特，

Everyone will say, “Well, aren’t you annoying,” but they won’t be able to decode your prediction. And then in a while, when the Jets win the Super Bowl, you can say, “See, I called it!” You retweet the hashed tweet and the plain text of your prediction. If anyone is so inclined, they can go to a hash calculator and check that the hash really matches your prediction. Then all the glory will accrue to you.
每个人都会说：“哇，你真烦人”，但是他们无法解密你的预测。然后，等 Jets 队赢得超级碗后，你可以说：“看，我早就预测到了！”你重新发布加密后的推文和你的预测原文。如果有人愿意，他们可以去哈希计算器那里检查哈希是否真的匹配你的预测。然后所有荣誉都会归于你。

Aside from hashing, another important one-way function is public-key encryption. I have two numbers, called a “public key” and a “private key.” These numbers are long and random-looking, but they’re related to each other: Using a publicly available algorithm, one number can be used to lock a message, and the other can unlock it. The two-key system solves a classic problem with codes: If the key I use to encrypt a message is the same one you’ll need to decode it, at some point I’ll have to have sent you that key. Anyone who steals the key in transit can read our messages.
除了哈希函数外，另一个重要的单向函数是公钥加密。我有两个数字，称为“公钥”和“私钥”。这些数字很长，看起来很随机，但它们之间有关联：使用公开可用的算法，一個数字可以用来锁定消息，而另一个数字可以解锁它。这个双钥系统解决了代码中一个经典的问题：如果我用来加密消息的密钥也是你需要用来解密的密钥，那么我最终将不得不将该密钥发送给你。任何在传输过程中窃取密钥的人都可以读取我们的消息。

With public-key encryption, no one needs to share the secret key. The public key is public: I can send it to everyone, post it on my Twitter feed, whatever. The private key is private, and I don’t give it to anyone. You want to send me a secret message. You write the message and run it through the encryption algorithm, which uses 1) the message and 2) my public key (which you have) to generate an encrypted message that you send to me. Then I run the message through a decryption program that uses 1) the encrypted message and 2) my private key (which only I have) to generate the original message, which I can read. You can encrypt the message using my public key, but nobody can decrypt it using the public key. Only I can decrypt it using my private key. (The function is one-way as far as you’re concerned, but I can reverse it with my private key.)
在公钥加密中，没有人需要共享秘钥。公钥是公开的：我可以将其发送给每个人，发布在我的 Twitter 账户上，等等。私钥是私有的，我不将其给任何人。你想给我发送一条秘密信息。你写下信息，然后使用加密算法对其进行加密，该算法使用 1) 信息和 2) 我的公钥（你拥有）生成一个加密信息，然后将其发送给我。然后，我使用解密程序对信息进行解密，该程序使用 1) 加密信息和 2) 我的私钥（只有我拥有）生成原始信息，我可以阅读。你可以使用我的公钥对信息进行加密，但是没有人可以使用公钥对其进行解密。只有我可以使用私钥对其进行解密。（从你角度看，这个函数是一条单行道，但是我可以使用私钥将其逆转。）

A related idea is a “digital signature.” Again, I have a public key and a private key. My public key is posted in my Twitter bio. I want to send you a message, and I want you to know that I wrote it. I run the message through an encryption program that uses 1) the message and 2) my private key. Then I send you 1) the original message and 2) the encrypted message.
一个相关的想法是“数字签名”。同样，我拥有一个公钥和一个私钥。我的公钥发布在我的 Twitter 个人资料中。我想给你发送一条信息，并且我想让你知道是我写的。我使用加密程序对信息进行加密，该程序使用 1) 信息和 2) 我的私钥。然后，我将 1) 原始信息和 2) 加密信息发送给你。

You use a decryption program that uses 1) the encrypted message and 2) my public key to decrypt the message. The decrypted message matches the original message. This proves to you that I encrypted the message. So you know that I wrote it. I could’ve just sent you a Twitter DM instead, but this is more cryptographic.
你使用解密程序对信息进行解密，该程序使用 1) 加密信息和 2) 我的公钥对信息进行解密。解密后的信息与原始信息匹配。这证明了我加密了信息。所以你知道是我写的。我本可以直接给你发送一条 Twitter DM，但是这更加加密。

Imagine a simple banking system in which bank accounts are public: There’s a public list of accounts, and each one has a (public) balance and public key. I say to you: “I control account No. 00123456789, which has $250 in it, and I’m going to send you $50.” I send you a digitally signed message saying “here’s $50,” and you decode that message using the public key for the account, and then you know that I do in fact control that account and everything checks out. That’s the basic idea at the heart of Bitcoin, though there are also more complicated ideas.
想象一个简单的银行系统，其中银行账户是公开的：有一份公开的账户列表，每个账户都有一个（公开的）余额和公开密钥。我对你说：“我控制账户编号 00123456789，该账户有 250 美元，我将向你发送 50 美元。”我发送一条数字签名的消息，内容是“这里有 50 美元”，然后你使用该账户的公开密钥解码该消息，从而知道我确实控制该账户，一切都检查通过。这是比特币核心思想的基本概念，尽管还有更多复杂的想法。

The simple form of Bitcoin goes like this. There’s a big public list of addresses, each with a unique label that looks like random numbers and letters, and some balance of Bitcoin in it. An address might have the label “1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa”¹⁰ and a balance of 68.6 Bitcoin. The address acts as a public key.¹¹ If I “own” those Bitcoin, what that means is I possess the private key corresponding to that address, effectively the password accessing the account.
比特币的简单形式是这样的：有一份大型公开的地址列表，每个地址都有一个独特的标签，看起来像随机数字和字母，并且有一定的比特币余额。一个地址可能有标签“1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa” ¹⁰ ，余额为 68.6 比特币。该地址充当公开密钥 ¹¹ 。如果我“拥有”这些比特币，那意味着我拥有该地址对应的私钥，实际上是账户的密码。

Because I have the private key, I can send you a Bitcoin by signing a message to you with my private key. You can check that signature against my public key and against the public list of addresses and Bitcoin balances. That information is enough for you to confirm that I control the Bitcoin that I’m sending you, but not enough for you to figure out my private key and steal the rest of my Bitcoin.
因为我拥有私钥，所以我可以通过使用私钥签名消息将比特币发送给你。你可以将签名与我的公钥和公众地址列表及比特币余额进行核对。那足够让你确认我控制着要发送给你的比特币，但不足以让你猜出我的私钥并窃取我的其他比特币。

That kind of means I can send you a Bitcoin without you trusting me, or me trusting you, or either of us trusting a bank to verify that I have the money. “We define an electronic coin as a chain of digital signatures,” Satoshi wrote. The combination of public address and private key is enough to define a coin. Cryptocurrency is called cryptocurrency because it’s a currency derived from cryptography.
这意味着我可以在不需要你信任我、我信任你或我们信任银行来验证我拥有资金的情况下将比特币发送给你。萨托西写道：“我们将电子币定义为数字签名链。”公钥和私钥的组合足以定义一枚币。加密货币之所以被称为加密货币，是因为它是来自密码学的货币。

You’ll notice that all we’ve done here is exchange a message, and somehow called the result of that a currency. The traditional financial system isn’t so different: Banks don’t move around sacks of gold or even very many paper bills. They’re keepers of databases. What happens, roughly, when I make a $100 payment to you is my bank sends a message to your bank telling it to update its ledger.
你会注意到，我们这里所做的只是交换了一条消息，然后奇怪地将结果称为货币。传统金融系统也没什么不同：银行不搬运金砖或大量纸币。它们是数据库的管理者。当我向你支付 100 美元时，大致上是我的银行向你的银行发送一条消息，告诉它更新账簿。

Similarly, in Bitcoin the messages change a (public) ledger of who holds what. But who maintains that? The rough answer is that the Bitcoin network—thousands of people who use Bitcoin and run its software on their computers—keeps the ledger, collaboratively and redundantly. There are thousands of copies of the ledger; every node on the network has its own list of how many Bitcoin are in each address.
类似地，在比特币中，这些消息改变了一个公共账簿，记录谁拥有什么。但是谁来维护这个账簿呢？大致的答案是比特币网络——成千上万使用比特币并在他们的计算机上运行其软件的人——共同和冗余地维护着这个账簿。网络中的每个节点都有其自己的账簿副本，记录每个地址中的比特币数量。

Then, when we do a transaction—when I send you a Bitcoin—we don’t just do it privately; we broadcast it to the entire network so everyone can update their lists. If I send you a Bitcoin from my address, and my signature on the transaction is valid, everyone will update their ledgers to add one Bitcoin to your address and subtract one from mine.
然后，当我们进行交易——当我向你发送比特币时——我们不仅仅私下进行；我们将其广播到整个网络，以便每个人可以更新他们的列表。如果我从我的地址向你发送比特币，并且我的交易签名有效，每个人都会更新他们的账本，将一比特币添加到你的地址并从我的地址中扣除。

The ledger is not really just a list of addresses and their balances; it’s actually a record of every single transaction.¹² The ledger is maintained by everyone on the network keeping track of every transaction for themselves.¹³
账本不仅仅是一个地址和余额的列表；它实际上是每笔交易的记录。 ¹² 账本是由网络上的每个人自己跟踪每笔交易来维护的。 ¹³

That’s nice! But now, instead of trusting a bank to keep the ledger of your money, you’re trusting thousands of anonymous strangers.
这很好！但是现在，你不再信任银行来保存你的钱，而是信任成千上万的匿名陌生人。

Well it’s not quite as bad as that. Each transaction is provably correct: If I send a Bitcoin from my address to yours and sign it with my private key, the network will include the transaction; if I try to send a Bitcoin from someone else’s address to yours and don’t have the private key, everyone on the network can see that it’s fake and won’t include the transaction. Everyone runs open-source software to update the ledger for transactions that are verifiable. Everyone keeps the ledger, but you can prove that every transaction in the ledger is valid, so you don’t have to trust them too much.
嗯，这还不算太糟。每笔交易都是可证明的正确的：如果我从我的地址将比特币发送到你的地址，并用我的私钥签名，网络就会包括这笔交易；如果我尝试从别人的地址将比特币发送到你的地址，但没有私钥，每个人在网络上都可以看到这是假的，不会包括这笔交易。每个人都运行开源软件来更新可验证的交易的账簿。每个人都保留账簿，但你可以证明账簿中的每笔交易都是有效的，所以你不需要太信任他们。

Incidentally, I am saying that “everyone” keeps the ledger, and that was probably roughly true early in Bitcoin’s life, but no longer. There are thousands of people running “full nodes,” which download and maintain and verify the entire Bitcoin ledger themselves, using open-source official Bitcoin software. But there are millions more not doing that, just having some Bitcoin and trusting that everybody else will maintain the system correctly. Their basis for this trust, though, is slightly different from the basis for your trust in your bank. They could, in principle, verify that everyone verifying the transactions is verifying them correctly.
顺便说一下，我说“每个人”都保留账簿，这在比特币早期可能大致正确，但现在不再是这样。有数千人运行“完整节点”，它们下载、维护和验证整个比特币账簿，使用官方比特币开源软件。但还有数百万人没有这样做，只是拥有些比特币，并信任其他人会正确地维护系统。他们的信任基础与你信任银行的基础略有不同。他们原则上可以验证每个人验证交易的正确性。

Notice, too, that there’s a financial incentive for everyone to be honest: If everyone is honest, then this is a working payment system that might be valuable. If lots of people are dishonest and put fake transactions in their ledgers, then no one will trust Bitcoin and it will be worthless. What’s the point of stealing Bitcoin if the value of Bitcoin is zero?
另外，还有一个金融激励机制，鼓励每个人诚实：如果每个人都诚实，那么这就是一个可能有价值的支付系统。如果许多人不诚实，并将假交易添加到他们的账簿中，那么没有人会信任比特币，它将一文不值。偷窃比特币有什么意义，如果比特币的价值是零？

This is a standard approach in crypto: Crypto systems try to use economic incentives to make people act honestly, rather than trusting them to act honestly.
这是在加密领域中的标准做法：加密系统尝试使用经济激励来使人们诚实行事，而不是信任他们诚实行事。

That’s most of the story, but it leaves some small problems. Where did all the Bitcoin come from? It’s fine to say that everyone on the network keeps a ledger of every Bitcoin transaction that ever happened, and your Bitcoin can be traced back through a series of previous transactions. But traced back to what? How do you start the ledger?
这几乎是整个故事，但它留下了一些小问题。比特币从哪里来？说每个人在网络上都保留着每一笔比特币交易的账簿，你的比特币可以追溯到一系列之前的交易。但是追溯到什么？如何启动账簿？

Another problem is that the order of transactions matters: If I have one Bitcoin in my account and I send it to you, and then I send it to someone else, who actually has the Bitcoin? This seems almost trivial, but it’s tricky. Bitcoin is a decentralized network that works by broadcasting transactions to thousands of nodes, and there’s no guarantee they’ll all arrive in the same order everywhere. And if everyone doesn’t agree on the order, bad things—“double spending,” or people sending the same Bitcoin to two different places—can happen. “Transactions must be publicly announced,” wrote Satoshi, “and we need a system for participants to agree on a single history of the order in which they were received.”
另一个问题是交易顺序很重要：如果我账户中有一比特币，我将其发送给你，然后又将其发送给其他人，谁真正拥有这比特币？这似乎非常简单，但实际上很棘手。比特币是一个去中心化的网络，它通过向数千个节点广播交易来运作，但不能保证所有节点都以相同的顺序接收交易。如果大家不能就交易顺序达成一致，坏事就会发生——“双重支付”，或将同一比特币发送到两个不同的地方。佐藤写道：“交易必须公开宣布，我们需要一个系统，使参与者同意交易的顺序历史。”

That system, I’m sorry to say, is the blockchain.
那个系统，我很抱歉地说，就是区块链。

Every Bitcoin transaction is broadcast to the network. Some computers on the network—they’re called “miners”—compile the transactions as they arrive into a group called a “block.” At some point, a version of a block becomes, as it were, official: The list of transactions in that block, in the order in which they’re listed, becomes canonical, part of the official Bitcoin record. We say that the block has been “mined.”¹⁴ In Bitcoin, a new block is mined roughly every 10 minutes.¹⁵
比特币每笔交易都会被广播到网络上。一些网络上的计算机——它们被称为“矿工”——将到达的交易编译成一个称为“块”的组。某个时候，一个块的版本就会变得“官方”：该块中交易的列表，以它们被列出的顺序，变得规范化，成为比特币官方记录的一部分。我们说该块已经被“挖掘”。 ¹⁴ 在比特币中，大约每 10 分钟就会挖掘出一个新的块。 ¹⁵

The miners then start compiling a new block, which will also eventually be mined and become official. Here’s where hashing becomes important. That new block will refer to the block before it by containing a hash of that block—this confirms that the block before it 1) is correct and accepted by the network and 2) came before it in time. Each block will refer to the previous block in a chain—oh, yes, a blockchain. The blockchain creates an official record of what transactions the network has agreed on and in what order. The hashes are time stamps; they create an agreed order of transactions.
矿工然后开始编译一个新的区块，该区块最终也将被挖掘并成为官方的。在这里，哈希变得非常重要。该新区块将通过包含前一个区块的哈希来引用前一个区块——这确认了前一个区块 1）是正确的并被网络接受的，2）是在时间上排在前面的。每个区块将通过链式引用前一个区块——哦，是的，一个区块链。区块链创建了网络上达成一致的交易记录及其顺序。哈希是时间戳；它们创建了交易的顺序。

You could imagine a simple system for doing this. Every 10 minutes a miner proposes a list of transactions, and all the computers on the Bitcoin network vote on it. If it gets a majority, it becomes official and is entered into the blockchain.
你可以想象一个简单的系统来实现这一点。每 10 分钟，矿工提出一份交易列表，然后比特币网络上的所有计算机投票。如果获得多数票，它将成为官方的并被记录到区块链中。

Unfortunately this is a bit too simple. There are no rules about who can join the Bitcoin network: Anyone who hooks up a computer and runs the open-source Bitcoin software can do it. You don’t have to prove you’re a good person, or even a person. You can hook up a thousand computers if you want.
不幸的是，这太简单了。加入比特币网络没有任何规则：任何人只要连接计算机并运行开源的比特币软件就可以做到这一点。你不需要证明你是一个好人，或者甚至是一个人。你可以连接一千台计算机，如果你愿意。

This creates a risk of what’s sometimes called a “Sybil attack,” named not after the ancient Greek prophetesses but, rather, after the 1973 book about a woman who claimed to have multiple personalities. The idea of a Sybil attack is that, in a system where the ledger is collectively maintained by the group and anyone can join the group without permission, you can spin up a bunch of computer nodes so that you look like thousands of people. Then you verify bad transactions to yourself, and everyone is like, “Ah, well, look at all of these people verifying the transactions,” and they accept your transactions as the majority consensus, and either you manage to steal some money or you at least throw the whole system into chaos.
这样做会带来一种所谓的“西比尔攻击”的风险，该名称并不是来自古希腊女预言家，而是来自 1973 年的一本关于一个女人声称拥有多重人格的书籍。西比尔攻击的想法是，在一个由集体维护的账本系统中，任何人都可以无需许可加入该系统，你可以启动一大批计算机节点，使自己看起来像成千上万的人。然后，你可以验证一些恶意交易，大家都会说：“哇，看看这些人都在验证交易”，然后他们会接受你的交易作为多数人的共识，或者你可以偷走一些钱，或者至少可以将整个系统扔进混乱中。

The solution to this is to make it expensive to verify transactions.
解决这个问题的方法是使交易验证变得昂贵。

To mine a block, Bitcoin miners do an absurd and costly thing. Again, it involves hashing. Each miner takes a summary of the list of transactions in the block, along with a hash of the previous block. Then the miner sticks another arbitrary number—called a “nonce”—on the end of the list. The miner runs the whole thing (list plus nonce) through a SHA-256 hashing algorithm. This generates a 64-digit hexadecimal number. If that number is small enough, then the miner has mined the block. If not, the miner tries again with a different nonce.
在挖掘一个区块时，比特币矿工会做一些荒谬而昂贵的事情。再次，这涉及到哈希运算。每个矿工都会将区块中的交易列表摘要与前一个区块的哈希值结合起来，然后矿工会在列表末尾添加一个任意数字——称为“nonce”。矿工会将整个列表（包括 nonce）通过 SHA-256 哈希算法运行。这将生成一个 64 位十六进制数字。如果该数字足够小，那么矿工就挖掘了该区块。如果不够小，矿工就会尝试使用不同的 nonce。

What “small enough” means is set by the Bitcoin software and can be adjusted to make it easier or harder to mine a block. (The goal is an average of one block every 10 minutes; the more miners there are and the faster their computers are, the harder it gets.) Right now, “small enough” means that the hash has to start with 19 zeros. A recent successful one looked like this:
比特币软件定义了什么是“足够小”，可以调整以使挖矿变得更容易或更难。目标是每 10 分钟平均挖出一个块；矿工越多、计算机越快，挖矿就越难。目前，“足够小”意味着哈希值必须以 19 个零开头。最近一个成功的哈希值看起来像这样：

It’s like a game of 20 questions where you’re constantly guessing a number that will work. Except you get no clues, and it’s many, many, many times more than 20 guesses. It is vanishingly, vanishingly unlikely that any particular input—any list of transactions plus a nonce—will hash to a number that starts with 19 zeros. The odds are roughly 75 sextillion-to-1 against. So the miners run the hash algorithm over and over again, trillions of times, guessing a different nonce each time, until they get a hash with the right number of zeros.¹⁶ The total hash rate of the Bitcoin network is something north of 200 million terahashes per second—that is, 200 quintillion hash calculations per second, which is 1) a lot but 2) a lot fewer than 75 sextillion. It takes many seconds—600 on average—at 200 quintillion hashes per second to guess the right nonce and mine a block.
这就像玩 20 个问题的游戏，你不断猜测一个有效的数字。只是你没有任何线索，而猜测的次数远远超过 20 次。任何特定的输入——任何交易列表加上一个随机数——哈希到以 19 个零开头的可能性微乎其微。概率大约是 75 sextillion 比 1。因此，矿工不断运行哈希算法，猜测不同的随机数，直到他们得到一个正确的哈希值。 ¹⁶ 比特币网络的总哈希率超过 200 万 terahashes 每秒——即每秒 200 quintillion 次哈希计算，这是一个很大的数字，但远远小于 75 sextillion。平均需要 600 秒，在 200 quintillion 次哈希计算每秒的情况下，猜测正确的随机数并挖出一个块。

This is a race. Only one miner gets to mine a block, and that miner gets rewarded with Bitcoin. To mine a block is also to “mine” new coins—to pry them out of the system after much computational work, like finding a seam of gold after picking through rock. Hence the metaphor.
这是一场竞赛。只有一个矿工能够开采一个区块，并获得比特币奖励。开采一个区块也意味着“开采”新币——在系统中经过大量计算工作后，找到新的币，就像在岩石中找到金矿一样。因此，这是一个隐喻。

When miners find the right number of zeros, they publish the block and its hash to the Bitcoin network. Everyone else reviews the block and decides if it’s valid. (“Valid” means all the transactions on the list are valid, the hash is correct, it has the right number of zeros, etc.) If they do, then they start work on the next block: They take the hash of the previous block, plus the transactions that have come in since then, plus a new nonce, and try to find a new hash. Each block builds on the one before.
当矿工找到正确的零数时，他们将区块及其哈希值发布到比特币网络。其他人则审核该区块，决定其是否有效。（“有效”意味着列表上的所有交易都是有效的，哈希值正确，零数正确等等。）如果他们审核通过，则开始工作于下一个区块：他们取前一个区块的哈希值，加上自那时以来收到的交易，再加上一个新的随机数，然后尝试找到一个新的哈希值。每个区块都是基于前一个区块的。

All of this is incredibly costly: Miners need special hardware to do all of these hashing calculations over and over again, and these days run huge farms of always-on computers. Mining Bitcoin uses as much electricity as various medium-size countries. This is not great for the environment. The most famous description of Bitcoin, attributed to a Twitter poster, might be:
所有这些都是非常昂贵的：矿工需要特殊的硬件来进行这些哈希计算，并且这些天他们运行着巨大的、始终在线的计算机群。挖掘比特币使用的电力相当于一些中等规模国家的电力。这对环境不是很友好。比特币最著名的描述，来自一位 Twitter 用户，可能是：

And it is in some sense purely wasteful. People sometimes say Bitcoin miners are, like, solving difficult math problems to do their mining, but they aren’t, really. They’re brute-force guessing quintillions of numbers per second to try to get the right hash. No math problems are being solved, and nothing is added to the world’s knowledge, by those quintillions of guesses.
从某种意义上说，这完全是浪费。人们有时说比特币矿工在解决困难的数学问题，以便进行挖矿，但实际上他们不是。他们每秒猜测数十万亿个数字，试图获得正确的哈希值。这些猜测并没有解决任何数学问题，也没有为世界的知识贡献任何东西。

But the miners are solving an important problem for Bitcoin, which is the problem of keeping its network and its ledger of transactions secure. It’s demonstrably costly to confirm Bitcoin transactions, so it’s hard to fake, hard to run a Sybil attack. That’s why Satoshi, and everyone else, calls this method of confirming transactions “proof of work.” If you produce the right hash for a block, it proves you did a lot of costly computer work. You wouldn’t do that lightly.
但是矿工们正在解决比特币的一个重要问题，即保持其网络和交易记录的安全。确认比特币交易的成本是明显的，因此很难伪造，很难实施 Sybil 攻击。这就是为什么中本聪和其他人将这种确认交易的方法称为“工作量证明”。如果你为一个块生成了正确的哈希值，那就证明你进行了大量昂贵的计算工作。你不会轻易地做这种事情。

Proof-of-work mining is a mechanism for creating consensus among people with an economic stake in a system, without knowing anything else about them. You’d never mine Bitcoin if you didn’t want Bitcoin to be valuable. If you’re a Bitcoin miner, you’re invested in Bitcoin in some way; you’ve bought computers and paid for electricity and made an expensive, exhausting bet on Bitcoin. You have proven that you care, so you get a say in verifying the Bitcoin ledger. And you get paid. You get paid Bitcoin, which gives you even more of a stake in the system.
工作量证明挖矿是一种在系统中拥有经济利益的人之间达成共识的机制，不需要知道他们的其他任何信息。你永远不会挖掘比特币，除非你想让比特币变得有价值。如果你是一名比特币矿工，那么你一定以某种方式投资了比特币；你购买了计算机，支付了电费，并为比特币进行了昂贵、疲惫的赌注。你已经证明了你关心，所以你有权验证比特币账本。而且你还会得到报酬。你会得到比特币，这将使你在系统中拥有更多的利益。

These Bitcoin come out of nowhere; they’re generated by this mining, by the core Bitcoin software. In fact, all Bitcoin are generated by mining; there was never an initial allocation of Bitcoin to Satoshi Nakamoto or to early investors or anyone else. This is the answer to the question of where Bitcoin come from: They were all mined.
这些比特币来自无中生有；它们是通过矿工活动和核心比特币软件生成的。事实上，所有比特币都是通过矿工活动生成的；从来没有对萨托西·中本托或早期投资者等人的初始比特币分配。这是比特币来自何处的答案：它们都是通过矿工活动生成的。

Originally the mining reward, which is set by the software, was 50 Bitcoin per block; currently it’s 6.25 Bitcoin. One important point about these mining rewards is that they cost Bitcoin users money. Every block—roughly every 10 minutes—6.25 new Bitcoin are produced out of nowhere and paid to miners for providing security to the network. That works out to more than $6 billion per year.¹⁷ This cost is indirect: It is a form of inflation, and as the supply of Bitcoin grows,¹⁸ each coin in theory becomes worth a little less, all else being equal. Right now, the Bitcoin network is paying around 1.5% of its value per year to miners.
最初，矿工奖励是由软件设置的，每个区块 50 比特币；目前是 6.25 比特币。关于这些矿工奖励的一个重要点是，它们会花费比特币用户的钱。每个区块——大约每 10 分钟——6.25 个新的比特币会被创造出来，并支付给矿工，以换取他们为网络提供的安全保障。这相当于每年超过 60 亿美元。这笔费用是间接的：它是一种通货膨胀，当比特币供应增加时，每枚币的理论价值就会减少，其他条件不变。目前，比特币网络每年支付给矿工的价值约为其总价值的 1.5%。

That’s lower than the inflation rate of the US dollar. Still, it’s worth noting. Every year, the miners who keep the Bitcoin system secure capture a small but meaningful chunk of the total value of Bitcoin. Bitcoin users get something for that $6 billion:¹⁹
这甚至低于美元的通胀率。然而，这仍然值得注意。每年，保护比特币系统安全的矿工们都会获得比特币总价值的一小部分。为那 60 亿美元，比特币用户们得到了什么： ¹⁹

If you can make a lot of money mining Bitcoin, a lot of people will want to mine Bitcoin. This will make it harder for one person to accumulate most of the mining power in Bitcoin. If one person or group got a majority of the mining power, they could do bad things: They could mine a bad block—double-spending coins, reversing recent transactions, etc. (This is called a “51% attack.”) When there are billions of dollars up for grabs for miners, people will invest a lot of money in mining, and it will be expensive to compete with them. And if you invested billions of dollars to accumulate a majority of the mining power in Bitcoin, you would probably care a lot about maintaining the value of Bitcoin, and so you’d be unlikely to use your powers for evil.
如果挖掘比特币可以赚很多钱，那么很多人都会想挖掘比特币。这将使得一个人积累大多数的挖掘能力变得更加困难。如果一个人或团体获得了大多数的挖掘能力，他们可以做坏事：他们可以挖掘一个坏的区块——双花币、逆转最近的交易等。（这被称为“51%攻击”）。当有数十亿美元的奖励等待矿工时，人们会投资很多钱来挖掘，并且与他们竞争将变得非常昂贵。如果你投资了数十亿美元来积累大多数的挖掘能力，你可能非常关心维护比特币的价值，因此你不太可能使用你的权力来做坏事。

II
What Does It Mean? 这是什么意思？

So, huh, that’s neat. OK, then. I’ve described in some detail the workings of the thing, Bitcoin, that Satoshi Nakamoto invented. But let’s take a step back: What exactly is it that he invented?
哦，嗯，这很有趣。好吧，那么。我已经详细描述了比特币的工作原理，这是 Satoshi Nakamoto 发明的东西。但是，让我们退一步：他到底发明了什么？

The simplest answer is that he invented Bitcoin.
最简单的答案是，他发明了比特币。

BITCOIN IS A BIG THING.
比特币是一个大事情。

At its peak, the total value of Bitcoin in the world was more than $1 trillion. There are thousands of articles about it; it has lots of investors and fans and believers. Some of these people are called “Bitcoin maximalists”; they believe that the only really interesting and valuable thing in the world of crypto is Bitcoin. Those people could stop here, I guess. There it is, Bitcoin.
在其巅峰时，比特币在全球的总价值超过了 1 万亿美元。有成千上万篇关于它的文章；它有很多投资者、粉丝和信仰者。其中一些人被称为“比特币最大主义者”；他们认为，crypto 世界中唯一真正有趣和有价值的东西就是比特币。那些人可能可以停下来了。那里就是比特币。

Here, though, I want to keep going. I want to talk about different ways that you might generalize Satoshi’s invention. There are different ways to interpret what Satoshi was up to and what he accomplished, and each interpretation points you to a different direction for crypto.
不过，我想继续下去。我想讨论 Satoshi 的发明可以被泛化的不同方式。有不同的方式来解释 Satoshi 在做什么和他所取得的成果，每种解释都会指向 crypto 的不同方向。

A minimal generalization of Bitcoin is something like: Satoshi invented a technology for people to send numbers to one another. That’s not nothing. Before Satoshi, I could’ve written you an email that said “132.51,” but you’d have no way of knowing whether I had the 132.51 on my computer or whether I’d already sent the 132.51 to someone else, and you’d have no way of proving to other people that you now had the 132.51 on your computer and could send it to them.
比特币的一个最小泛化是这样的：萨托西发明了一种技术，让人们可以互相发送数字。这不是什么都没有。在萨托西之前，我可以给你发一封电子邮件，说“132.51”，但是你不知道我是否已经在电脑上拥有了 132.51，或者我是否已经将其发送给了其他人，你也无法证明你现在拥有了电脑上的 132.51 并可以将其发送给其他人。

I realize that paragraph sounds very stupid, because it is. You definitely have 132.51 on your computer, as well as every other conceivable number; computers can generate numbers arbitrarily and more or less for free. Open a spreadsheet, type “132.51,” and there you go. In a sense, the technological accomplishment of Bitcoin is that it invented a decentralized way to create scarcity on computers. Bitcoin demonstrated a way for me to send you a computer message so that you’d have it and I wouldn’t, to move items of computer information between us in a way that limited their supply and transferred possession.
我意识到上一段话听起来很愚蠢，因为它确实如此。你肯定拥有电脑上的 132.51，以及其他任何可能的数字；计算机可以任意生成数字，几乎不花费任何成本。打开电子表格，输入“132.51”，就这样了。在某种意义上，比特币的技术成就是它发明了一种去中心化的方式来在计算机上创造稀缺性。比特币展示了一种方式，让我可以将电脑信息发送给你，使你拥有它，而我不再拥有，将信息从我们之间转移，限制供应并转移所有权。

But the technological accomplishment is not the whole story, arguably not even the most important part. The wild thing about Bitcoin is not that Satoshi invented a particular way for people to send numbers to one another and call them payments. It’s that people accepted the numbers as payments.
但是技术成就是不整个故事，可能甚至不是最重要的部分。比特币的野蛮之处不是萨托西发明了一种特殊的方式，让人们可以互相发送数字并称之为支付，而是人们接受了这些数字作为支付。

There’s nothing inherent in the technology that would make that happen. People might have read the Bitcoin white paper and said, “Huh, this is a cool way to send payments, but your problem is that you aren’t sending dollars, you’re sending this thing you just made up, and who wants that?” Well, most of them did say that, initially. But lots of people eventually decided that Bitcoin was valuable.
技术本身并没有什么固有的特性会导致这种情况。人们可能读过比特币白皮书，然后说：“哇，这是一种很酷的支付方式，但你的问题是你不是发送美元，而是发送你刚刚创造出来的东西，谁想要那种东西？”嗯，大多数人最初确实这么说。但是，许多人最终决定比特币是有价值的。

That’s weird! Satoshi was like,
这太奇怪了！中本聪就像，

And enough people were like,
而足够多的人就像，

that now crypto is a trillion-dollar business. That social fact, that Bitcoin was accepted by many millions of people as having a lot of value, might be the most impressive thing about Bitcoin, much more than the stuff about hashing.
现在加密货币已经是一家万亿美元的生意了。这一社会事实，比特币被数百万人接受为具有很高价值的，可能是比特币最让人印象深刻的事情，比哈希相关的东西更重要。

Here’s another extremely simple generalization of Bitcoin:
这是比特币另一个非常简单的概括：

As Bitcoin became more visible and valuable, people just … did … that? There was a rash of cryptocurrencies that were sometimes subtle variations on Bitcoin and sometimes just lazy knockoffs. “Shitcoins” is the mean name for them.
比特币变得更受关注和有价值时，人们就……做了那样？出现了一大批加密货币，有时是比特币的微妙变种，有时只是懒惰的山寨货。“垃圾币”是它们的贬义称呼。

In 2013 two software engineers threw together a cryptocurrency and gave it a logo of Doge, the talking shiba inu meme. They called it Dogecoin, and it was a parody of the coin boom. It’s worth about $8 billion today. I’m not going to explain that to you. Nobody is going to explain that to you. Certainly the guys who invented Dogecoin don’t understand it; one of them has taken to Twitter to say he hates it. It’s just, like, if you’re making up an arbitrary token that trades electronically, and you hope people will buy it for no particular reason, you might as well make it fun. Slap a talking dog on it; give people stuff to make jokes about online.
2013 年，两名软件工程师匆忙创造了一种加密货币，并将其标志设为会说话的柴犬 meme Doge。他们将其命名为狗狗币，是对币圈热潮的讽刺。今天它的价值约为 80 亿美元。我不想向你解释这件事。没人会向你解释这件事。狗狗币的创造者们也不理解它；其中一人甚至在 Twitter 上说他讨厌它。这只是，如果你创造了一个任意的电子交易 token，希望人们无缘无故地购买它，你可能会让它变得有趣。给它贴上一个会说话的狗的标志，让人们在线上开玩笑。

Incidentally, here’s a fun argument that was made against Bitcoin early in its life:
顺便说一下，有人曾经对比特币早期提出了一个有趣的反对意见：

This argument turned out to be mostly wrong. Socially, cryptocurrency is a coordination game; people want to have the coin that other people want to have, and some sort of abstract technical equivalence doesn’t make one cryptocurrency a good substitute for another. Social acceptance—legitimacy—is what makes a cryptocurrency valuable, and you can’t just copy the code for that.
这个论点证明大部分是错误的。从社会角度看， cryptocurrency 是一个协调游戏；人们想要拥有其他人想要拥有的币，而某种抽象的技术等同性并不使一个 cryptocurrency 成为另一个的良好替代。社会接受——合法性——是使 cryptocurrency 有价值的东西，你不能只是复制代码来获得它。

That’s a revealing fact: What makes Bitcoin valuable isn’t the elegance of its code, but its social acceptance.²⁰ A thing that worked exactly like Bitcoin but didn’t have Bitcoin’s lineage—didn’t descend from Satoshi’s genesis block and was just made up by some copycat—would have the same technology but none of the value.
这是一个启示的事实：使比特币有价值的不是代码的优雅，而是社会接受。 ²⁰ 一件东西如果像比特币一样工作，但没有比特币的血统——没有来自萨托西的创世区块，而只是某个抄袭者编造的——就会拥有相同的技术，但没有价值。

Here’s another generalization of Bitcoin:
这是比特币的另一个概括：

This may not sound that great to you. But it’s very interesting as a matter of finance theory. Modern portfolio theory demonstrates that adding an uncorrelated asset to a portfolio can improve returns and reduce risk. Big institutions will invest in timberland or highway tolls or hurricane insurance, because they think that those things won’t act just like stocks or bonds, that they’ll diversify their portfolios, that they’ll hold up even in a world where stocks go down.
这可能听起来不太吸引人。但是，从金融理论角度来说，这非常有趣。现代投资组合理论表明，添加一个不相关的资产到投资组合中可以提高回报和降低风险。大型机构会投资于林地、高速公路通行费或飓风保险，因为他们认为这些东西不会像股票或债券那样运作，它们会分散投资组合，即使股票下跌也能保持不变。

To the extent that the price of Bitcoin 1) mostly goes up, though with lots of ups and downs along the way, and 2) goes up and down for reasons that are arbitrary and mysterious and not tied to, like, corporate earnings or the global economy, then Bitcoin is interesting to institutional investors.
在比特币的价格主要上涨（尽管途中有很多起伏），且涨跌原因是任意的、神秘的，不与公司收益或全球经济挂钩的情况下，比特币对机构投资者来说非常有趣。

There are variations. For instance:
有些变化。例如：

Well, those are some things that people said. In practice, it turns out that the price of Bitcoin is pretty correlated with the stock market, especially tech stocks. Bitcoin hasn’t been a particularly effective inflation hedge: Its price rose during years when US inflation was low, and it’s fallen this year as inflation has increased. The right model of crypto prices might be that they go up during broad speculative bubbles when stock prices go up, and then they go down when those bubbles pop. That’s not a particularly appealing story for investors looking to diversify. You want stuff that goes up when the broad bubbles pop!
好吧，这些都是人们所说的。在实践中，事实证明比特币的价格与股票市场高度相关，特别是科技股。比特币并不是一种非常有效的通胀避险工具：其价格在美国通胀率低的年份上涨，而今年随着通胀率上涨而下跌。加密货币价格的正确模型可能是：在广泛的投机泡沫中，当股票价格上涨时，它们也上涨，而当泡沫破裂时，它们下跌。这不是投资者寻求多样化的特别吸引人的故事。你想要的是当大泡沫破裂时上涨的东西！

I’m not going to dwell on the meme-stock phenomenon here—I dwelt on it in this publication last December. But one important possibility is that the first generalization of Bitcoin, that an arbitrary tradeable electronic token can become valuable just because people want it to, permanently broke everyone’s brains about all of finance.
我不想在这里详细讨论 meme 股票现象——我去年十二月在这本出版物中已经讨论过了。但有一种重要可能性是，Bitcoin 的第一次泛化，即任意可交易的电子 token 只因为人们想要它就变得有价值，永久地改变了所有人对金融的看法。

Before the rise of Bitcoin, the conventional thing to say about a share of stock was that its price represented the market’s expectation of the present value of the future cash flows of the business. But Bitcoin has no cash flows; its price represents what people are willing to pay for it. Still, it has a high and fluctuating market price; people have gotten rich buying Bitcoin. So people copied that model, and the creation of and speculation on pure, abstract, scarce electronic tokens became a big business.
在 Bitcoin 崛起之前，对股票的传统看法是，其价格代表了市场对业务未来现金流的预期价值。但 Bitcoin 没有现金流；其价格代表了人们愿意为它支付的金额。然而，它具有高且波动的市场价格；人们通过购买 Bitcoin 变得富有。于是，人们复制了这个模式，纯粹抽象的稀缺电子 token 的创造和投机变成了一个大业务。

A share of stock is a scarce electronic token. It’s also something else! A claim on cash flows or whatever. But one thing that it is is an electronic token that’s in more or less limited supply. If you and your friends online want to make jokes and invest based on those jokes, then, depending on your sense of humor and which online chat group you’re in, you might buy either Dogecoin or GameStop Corp. stock, and for your purposes those things are not that different.
一只股票是一种稀缺的电子 token。它也是其他东西！对现金流的索赔或其他什么。但是，它确实是一种电子 token，供应量大致有限。如果你和你的在线朋友想根据幽默感和所在的在线聊天群来投资，那么，你可能会购买 Dogecoin 或 GameStop Corp. 的股票，对你来说，这两种东西没什么不同。

Here’s another, very different generalization of Bitcoin. In its sharpest form, it’s mostly attributed to programmer Vitalik Buterin, another colorful character whom we won’t discuss.²¹ It goes like this:
这是比特币另一个非常不同的概括。在其最尖锐的形式中，它主要归因于程序员维塔利克·布特林，另一个我们不讨论的有趣人物。它是这样子的：

4. LET’S DO THE SAME THING, BUT MAKE IT A GOOD COMPUTER.
4. 让我们做同样的事情，但制造一台好的计算机。

The computer that Vitalik²² invented is generally called Ethereum, or the Ethereum Virtual Machine: It’s a virtual computer, distributed among thousands of redundant nodes. Each node knows the “state” of the computer—what’s in its memory—and each transaction on the system updates that state.
维塔利克发明的计算机通常被称为以太坊或以太坊虚拟机：它是一台虚拟计算机，分布在成千上万个冗余节点上。每个节点都知道计算机的“状态”—它的内存中的内容—每笔交易都会更新该状态。

Ethereum works a lot like Bitcoin: People create transactions, they broadcast them to the network, the transactions are included in a block, the blocks get chained together, everyone can see every transaction, etc. The currency of the Ethereum blockchain is called … I dunno, it’s common to call it “Ether,” though sometimes people say “Ethereum,” and often they just write “ETH.” (Similarly, Bitcoin is sometimes written “BTC.”) In conversation it’s mostly shortened to “Eth,” pronounced “Eeth.”
以太坊的工作方式与比特币非常相似：人们创建交易，然后将其广播到网络，交易被包含在一个块中，块被链接在一起，每个人都可以看到每笔交易，等等。以太坊区块链的货币通常被称为“以太”，有时人们也说“以太坊”，而且经常简写为“ETH。”（类似地，比特币有时也被写为“BTC。”）在对话中，它通常被缩短为“Eth”，发音为“以斯。”

But whereas Bitcoin transactions are mostly about sending payments,²³ actions on Ethereum are conceived of more generally: Ethereum is a big virtual computer, and you send it instructions to do stuff on the computer. Some of those instructions are “Send 10 Ether from Address X to Address Y”: One thing in the computer’s memory is a database of Ethereum addresses and how much Ether is in each of them, and you can tell the computer to update the database.
但是，以太坊上的 ²³ 操作与比特币交易不同，以太坊是一个大型虚拟计算机，你可以向其发送指令来执行任务。其中的一些指令是“从地址 X 向地址 Y 发送 10 个以太”：计算机的内存中有一份以太坊地址和每个地址中以太数量的数据库，你可以告诉计算机更新数据库。

But you can also write programs to run on the computer to do things automatically. One sort of program might be: Send 10 Ether to Address Y if something happens. Alice and Bob might want to bet on a football game, or on a presidential election, or on the price of Ether.²⁴ They might write a computer program on the Ethereum Virtual Machine to do that. The program would have its own Ethereum account where it could keep Ether, and its programming logic would say something like “if the Jets win on Sunday”—or “if Joe Biden wins the election,” or “if Ether trades above $1,500 on November 1”—“then send the money in this account to Alice; otherwise send it to Bob.” Alice and Bob might then each send one Ether to the account, and it would whir along for a bit checking the football scores or the election results or the Ether price,²⁵ and then when it had an answer to its question—who won the game or the election or is Ether above $1,500—it would automatically resolve the bet and send two Ether to the winner.
但是你也可以编写程序在计算机上自动执行任务。一种程序可能是：如果某事发生，则将 10 个以太币发送到地址 Y。Alice 和 Bob 可能想赌足球比赛、总统选举或以太币的价格。他们可能会编写一个在以太坊虚拟机上运行的计算机程序来实现这一点。该程序将拥有自己的以太坊账户，可以存储以太币，其编程逻辑将说些类似于“如果 Jet 队周日赢了”—或“如果 Joe 赢了选举”，或“如果以太币在 11 月 1 日交易价格超过 1500 美元”—“那么将账户中的钱发送给 Alice；否则将发送给 Bob。” Alice 和 Bob 可能然后各自将一个以太币发送到账户，然后它将检查足球比赛的结果、选举结果或以太币的价格，直到它找到问题的答案——谁赢了比赛或选举，或者以太币是否超过 1500 美元，然后自动解决赌注并将两个以太币发送给赢家。

Or you could have a program that says: “If anyone sends one Ether to this program, the program will send them back something nice.” “Something nice” is pretty hazy there, and frankly it’s pretty hazy in actual practice, but in concept anything that you can put into a computer program could be the reward here. So “send me one Ether and I will send you back a digital picture of a monkey” would be one possible program, and I guess it sounds like I’m joking, but for a while digital pictures of monkeys were selling for millions of dollars on Ethereum. Or there’s a thing called the Ethereum Name Service, or ENS, which allows people to register domain names like “matthewlevine.eth” and use them across various Ethereum functions. You send Ether to the ENS program, and it registers that name to you—you send in money, and it sends you back a domain.
或者你可以编写一个程序，说：“如果有人向这个程序发送一个以太币，这个程序将回馈一些好东西。”这里的“好东西”非常模糊，实际上也非常模糊，但从概念上讲，任何可以编入计算机程序的东西都可以作为回馈。因此，“发送我一个以太币，我将回馈一张数字猴子图片”就是一个可能的程序，我猜这听起来像是在开玩笑，但有一段时间数字猴子图片在以太坊上卖出了数百万美元。或者还有一个叫以太坊命名服务（ENS）的东西，它允许人们注册像“matthewlevine.eth”这样的域名，并在各种以太坊功能中使用它们。你向 ENS 程序发送以太币，它就会将该名称注册给你——你付钱，它回馈一个域名。

The standard analogy here is a vending machine: A vending machine is a computer in the real world, where you put in a dollar and you get back something that you want. You don’t negotiate with the vending machine, or make small talk about the weather while it rings you up. The vending machine’s side of the transaction is entirely automated. Its programming makes it respond deterministically to you putting in money and pressing buttons.
这里的标准类比是一个自动售货机：自动售货机是一个现实世界中的计算机，你投入一美元，然后得到你想要的东西。你不与自动售货机进行谈判，也不与它闲聊天气，而它只是根据你投入钱和按下的按钮来响应。其编程使其对你投入钱和按下的按钮做出确定的响应。

In the crypto world, these programs are called “smart contracts.” The name is a bit unfortunate. A smart contract is a computer program that runs on the blockchain. Some smart contracts look like contracts: Alice and Bob’s bet on the price of Ethereum looks a lot like a financial derivative, which is definitely a contract. Some smart contracts look like vending machines: They sit around in public waiting for people to put money in, and then they spit out goods. A vending machine is not exactly a normal contract, but it is a transaction, and people who are into philosophizing about contracts like thinking about vending machines.
在加密世界中，这些程序被称为“智能合约”。这个名字有点不幸。智能合约是一种在区块链上运行的计算机程序。一些智能合约看起来像合约：Alice 和 Bob 对以太坊价格的赌注看起来很像金融衍生品，这当然是一个合约。一些智能合约看起来像自动售货机：它们公开等待人们投入钱，然后吐出商品。自动售货机不是正常的合约，但它是一个交易，而哲学家们喜欢思考自动售货机。

But some smart contracts just look like, you know, computer programs. The concept is more general than the name. In the Ethereum white paper, Vitalik Buterin wrote:
但是，一些智能合约只是看起来像计算机程序。这个概念比名字更广泛。在以太坊白皮书中，Vitalik Buterin 写道：

Note that “contracts” in Ethereum should not be seen as something that should be “fulfilled” or “complied with”; rather, they are more like “autonomous agents” that live inside of the Ethereum execution environment, always executing a specific piece of code when “poked” by a message or transaction, and having direct control over their own ether balance and their own key/value store to keep track of persistent variables.
注意，以太坊中的“合约”不应该被看作是需要“履行”或“遵守”的东西；相反，它们更像“自治代理”，它们生活在以太坊执行环境中，总是在收到消息或交易时执行特定的代码，并且直接控制自己的以太币余额和自己的键值存储，以跟踪持久变量。

There are limits: Ethereum is a distributed computer, but it doesn’t have a keyboard and a monitor. It would be hard to play Call of Duty on the Ethereum Virtual Machine. But Ethereum’s blockchain and smart contracts can serve as sort of a back end to other types of programs. Developers build
有些限制：以太坊是一个分布式计算机，但它没有键盘和监控器。在以太坊虚拟机上玩《使命召唤》是很难的。但是，以太坊的区块链和智能合约可以作为其他类型程序的后端。开发者构建

or decentralized apps, on Ethereum and other blockchains. These are computer programs that mostly run on the web (perhaps on some centralized or cloud server) but keep some of their essential data on the blockchain. You play a computer game, and your character’s attributes are stored on the blockchain. A normal program on the game company’s servers renders the character’s sword on your screen, but the fact that she has the sword is stored on the blockchain.
或去中心化应用程序，在以太坊和其他区块链上运行。这些是计算机程序，大多数在网上运行（可能在某些中心化或云服务器上），但将一些关键数据存储在区块链上。你玩一个计算机游戏，你的角色属性存储在区块链上。游戏公司的服务器上的正常程序在你的屏幕上渲染角色的剑，但她拥有剑的事实存储在区块链上。

One other limit is that it’s a slow computer. The way Ethereum executes programs is that you broadcast the instructions to thousands of nodes on the network, and they each execute the instructions and reach consensus on the results of the instructions. That all takes time. Your program needs to run thousands of times on thousands of computers.
另一个限制是，这是一台慢计算机。以太坊执行程序的方式是，你将指令广播到网络上的数千个节点，然后它们各自执行指令，并就指令的结果达成一致。这一切都需要时间。你的程序需要在数千台计算机上运行数千次。

Computers and network connections are pretty fast these days, and the Ethereum computer is fast enough for many purposes (such as transferring Ether, or keeping a database of computer game characters). But you wouldn’t want to use this sort of computer architecture for extremely time-sensitive, computation-intensive applications. You wouldn’t want, like, a self-driving car running on the Ethereum Virtual Machine. You wouldn’t want thousands of computers around the world redundantly calculating how far you are from hitting someone before you could brake.
当今的计算机和网络连接非常快，以太坊计算机足够快，适合许多目的（例如转移以太币或保持计算机游戏角色的数据库）。但是，你不想使用这种计算机架构来运行极其时间敏感、计算密集型的应用程序。你不想让一辆自动驾驶汽车在以太坊虚拟机上运行。你不想让全球数千台计算机冗余地计算你与撞击某人的距离，然后才能刹车。

This distributed computer, the Ethereum Virtual Machine, takes its basic design from Bitcoin. There are blocks, everyone can see them, they are chained together, transactions are signed with private keys, everything is hashed, etc. It’s just that, in addition to sending money to people, you can send computer instructions to the blockchain, and the blockchain will execute them.
这台分布式计算机，即以太坊虚拟机，其基本设计来自比特币。有块，每个人都可以看到它们，它们是链式连接的，交易是使用私钥签名的，一切都是哈希的，等等。只是除了向人们发送钱款外，还可以向区块链发送计算机指令，并且区块链将执行它们。

What that means is that there are thousands of computers each running nodes of the Ethereum network, and all those computers will agree about what happens on that network, who sent money to whom, and what computer instructions executed when. The fact that Ethereum is a distributed, virtual computer means that all those actual computers can come to a consensus about what operations executed when. And the reason this was possible is that Bitcoin showed how a decentralized computer network could reach consensus. The stuff with the hashing and the mining and the nonces and the electricity: That is Bitcoin’s consensus mechanism, proof of work (or PoW).
这意味着有成千上万台计算机，每台计算机都在运行以太坊网络的节点，而所有这些计算机都会就网络上的事件达成一致，谁向谁发送了钱款，以及什么时候执行了计算机指令。以太坊是一台分布式虚拟计算机，这意味着所有这些实际计算机可以就执行的操作达成一致。这之所以可能，是因为比特币展示了如何让一个去中心化的计算机网络达成一致。那关于哈希、挖矿、随机数和电力等东西：那是比特币的共识机制，工作量证明（或 PoW）。

Until last month, it was also Ethereum’s. There were some technical differences, but the basic mechanics were pretty similar. Miners did a bunch of hashes of block data, and whoever found the right hash first mined the block and got a reward. Because this was expensive and wasted a lot of resources, it demonstrated a commitment to the Ethereum ecosystem. But the waste itself was bad.
直到上月，它也是以太坊的共识机制。有一些技术上的差异，但基本机理非常相似。矿工对块数据进行了一系列哈希运算，谁先找到正确的哈希谁就挖掘了块并获得奖励。因为这非常昂贵且浪费了大量资源，从而展示了对以太坊生态系统的承诺。但是这种浪费本身就是坏的。

And so, on Sept. 15, after years of planning, Ethereum switched to a new consensus mechanism: Ethereum now uses something called proof of stake (or PoS). The basic ideas remain the same. People do transactions and broadcast them to the Ethereum network. A bunch of computers—in PoW they’re called “miners,” in PoS they’re called “validators”—work to compile these transactions into an official ordered list, called the blockchain. Anyone with a computer can be a miner/validator; the protocol is open to everyone. But the miners/validators have to prove their commitment to the system to mine/validate blocks. In PoW, the way you prove that is by using a lot of electricity to do hashes. In PoS, the way you prove that is by having a lot of Ether.
于 9 月 15 日，在多年的规划后，Ethereum 转换到了一个新的共识机制：Ethereum 现在使用所谓的权益证明机制（或 PoS）。基本思想保持不变。人们进行交易并将其广播到 Ethereum 网络。一群计算机——在 PoW 中称为“矿工”，在 PoS 中称为“验证者”——工作将这些交易编译成一个官方的有序列表，称为区块链。任何人都可以使用计算机成为矿工/验证者；协议对所有人开放。但是，矿工/验证者需要证明他们对系统的承诺，以挖掘/验证区块。在 PoW 中，证明的方式是使用大量电力进行哈希运算。在 PoS 中，证明的方式是拥有大量以太币。

Oversimplifying a bit, the general mechanics are:
简言之，总体机理是：

I mean, that’s the concept, but when I write it out like that, it sounds more manual than it is. Nobody is sitting around reviewing every transaction and agonizing over whether it’s legitimate. The validators are just running the official open-source Ethereum software. It is all pretty automatic, and you can run it on a laptop with good backup power and a solid internet connection. The big outlay may be the $40,000 to buy Ether. It’s not hard to contribute to the consensus. It’s hard to override it. But being an honest validator is pretty easy.
我的意思是，这的确是概念，但当我把它写出来时，听起来比实际情况更手动。没有人会坐在那里逐一审核每笔交易，苦恼于它是否合法。验证者只是运行官方的开源以太坊软件。这一切都非常自动化，你可以在一台配有良好备用电源和稳定互联网连接的笔记本电脑上运行。唯一的高昂开销可能是花费 4 万美元购买以太币。加入共识并不难。难的是推翻它。但是，作为一个诚实的验证者非常容易。

When we discussed proof-of-work mining, I said that crypto systems are designed to operate on consensus among people with an economic stake in the system. PoW systems demonstrate economic stake in a cleverly indirect way: You buy a bunch of computer hardware and pay for a lot of electricity and do a bunch of calculations to prove you really care about Bitcoin. PoS systems demonstrate the economic stake directly: You just invest a lot of money in Ethereum and post it as a bond, which proves you care.
当我们讨论工作量证明挖矿时，我说过，密码系统旨在在系统中拥有经济利益的人之间达成共识。工作量证明系统以间接的方式证明经济利益：你购买大量计算机硬件，支付大量电费，进行大量计算，以证明你真正关心比特币。权益证明系统直接证明经济利益：你只是投资大量以太币，并将其作为抵押品，证明你关心。

This is more efficient, in two ways. First, it uses less electricity. Burning lots of electricity to do trillions of pointless math calculations a second, in a warming world, seems dumb. Proof of stake uses, to a first approximation, no electricity. You’re simply keeping a list of transactions, and you just have to compile the list once, not 200 quintillion times. The transition to PoS cut Ethereum’s energy usage by something like 99.95%.
这种方式更高效，原因有二。首先，它使用的电力更少。在这个温暖的世界中，烧掉大量电力来进行数万亿次无用的数学计算，每秒钟都很愚蠢。权益证明几乎不使用电力。你只是维护一份交易列表，只需要编译一次列表，而不是 200 万亿次。以太坊转换到权益证明后，能源使用率降低了约 99.95%。

Second, PoS more directly measures your stake in the system. You demonstrate your stake in Ethereum by 1) owning Ether and 2) putting it at risk²⁸ to validate transactions. To take control of the PoS system and abuse it for your own nefarious purposes, you need to own a lot of Ether, and the more you own, the less nefarious you’ll want to be. “Proof of stake can buy something like 20 times more security for the same cost,” Vitalik has argued.
其次，权益证明（PoS）更直接地衡量您在系统中的权益。在以太坊中，您可以通过两种方式证明自己的权益：1）拥有以太币（Ether），2）将其风险用于验证交易。要控制 PoS 系统并将其用于自己的不正当目的，您需要拥有大量以太币，而您拥有的以太币越多，您就越不想做不正当的事情。维塔利克曾经论证说：“权益证明可以以相同的成本获得大约 20 倍的安全性。”

Here’s how a Bitcoin miner makes money:
这是比特币矿工赚钱的方式：

Here’s how an Ethereum validator makes money:
这是以太坊验证者如何赚钱的：

There’s still some computer hardware involved—you have to run software to compile and check transactions—but not much of it; again, it can be a laptop. The capital investment isn’t in computers but in the relevant cryptocurrency. The transaction is very close to: “Invest a lot of cryptocurrency and then get paid interest on that cryptocurrency.”
仍然需要一些计算机硬件——你需要运行软件来编译和检查交易——但不需要太多；再次，这可以是一台笔记本电脑。资本投资不在计算机上，而在相关的加密货币中。交易非常接近于：“投资大量加密货币，然后获得该加密货币的利息。”

You can make it even easier on yourself. Instead of downloading the software to run a full Ethereum validator node, and depositing 32 Ether, you can hand your Ether over to someone else and let them be a validator. It doesn’t need to be 32 Ether: If you have 1 Ether, and 31 other people each have 1 Ether, and you all pool your Ether together, then you have enough to stake, validate transactions, and earn fees. And then you each can have a cut of the fees. The work of validating transactions can be completely separated from the actual staking of Ether.
你可以让事情变得更容易。 Instead of 下载软件来运行完整的以太坊验证节点，并存入 32 个以太币，你可以将以太币交给别人，让他们成为验证者。这不需要 32 个以太币：如果你有 1 个以太币，另外 31 个人各有 1 个以太币，你们都可以将以太币汇集在一起，然后你就有足够的以太币来赌注、验证交易和赚取费用。然后，你每个人都可以获得一部分费用。验证交易的工作可以完全与实际的以太币赌注分开。

And in fact a lot of Ethereum validation runs through crypto exchanges such as Coinbase, Kraken, and Binance, which offer staking as a product to their customers. (The biggest is a thing called Lido Finance, which isn’t an exchange but a sort of decentralized staking pool.) The customers keep their Ether with the exchange anyway, so they might as well let the exchange stake it for them and earn some interest.
事实上，大量以太坊验证都是通过像 Coinbase、Kraken 和 Binance 这样的加密货币交易所进行的，这些交易所为客户提供赌注产品。（最大的一个是叫 Lido Finance 的东西，它不是交易所，而是一种去中心化的赌注池。）客户本来就将以太币存放在交易所中，所以他们可能会让交易所为他们赌注并赚取一些利息。

Yes: interest. If you’re putting crypto into a staking pool, what it looks like to you is simply earning interest on your crypto: You have 100 tokens, you lock them up for a bit, you get back 103 tokens. The stuff about validating transactions occurs in the background, and you don’t really have to worry about it. You just get a percentage return on your money—around 4% now, but maybe less after fees—from locking it up. (Before you compare that to the passive income you might earn on, say, a bond, remember this is paid in volatile Ether.)
是的：利息。如果你将加密货币投入质押池，看起来你只是在加密货币上赚取利息：你有 100 个令牌，锁定它们一段时间，然后你将获得 103 个令牌。验证交易的过程发生在背景中，你不需要太担心。你只是从锁定中获得了一定的回报——现在大约是 4%，但可能会因为费用而减少——（在你将其与债券等的被动收入进行比较时，请记住这是以易变的以太币支付的）。

Crypto has found a novel way to create yield. We’ll talk about others later—crypto has a whole business of “yield farming”—but this is one. You can deposit your crypto into an account, and it will pay you interest. It will pay you interest not for the reason banks generally do—because they’re lending your money to some other customer who will make use of it—but because you are, in your small way, helping to maintain the security of the transaction ledger.
加密货币已经找到了一种新的创收方式。我们稍后会讨论其他方式——加密货币有一个完整的“收益耕作”业务——但这是其中的一种。你可以将加密货币存入账户，它将支付你利息。它支付你利息不是因为银行通常那样——因为它们将你的钱借给其他客户使用——而是因为你以自己的方式帮助维护交易账本的安全。

Another difference between Ethereum and Bitcoin is that transaction fees are much more important in Ethereum.
Ethereum 和比特币之间的另一个区别是交易费用在 Ethereum 中更加重要。

The basic reason is that every transaction in Bitcoin is more or less the same: “X sends Y Bitcoin to Z.” In Ethereum, though, there are transactions like “Run this complicated computer program with 10,000 steps.” That takes longer. Thousands of nodes on the Ethereum network have to run and validate each computational step of each contract. If a contract requires a lot of steps, then it will use a lot more of validators’ time and computer resources. If it requires infinite steps, it would crash the whole thing.
基本原因是比特币中的每笔交易基本相同：“X 将 Y 比特币发送给 Z”。然而，在 Ethereum 中，有像“运行这个复杂的计算程序，需要 10,000 步骤”的交易。那需要更长时间。Ethereum 网络上的成千上万个节点需要运行和验证每个合约的每个计算步骤。如果合约需要很多步骤，那么它将使用更多的验证者时间和计算资源。如果它需要无限步骤，那么它将崩溃整个系统。

To address this issue, Ethereum has “gas,” which is a fee that people and smart contracts pay for computation. Each transaction specifies 1) a maximum gas limit (basically a number of computational steps) and 2) a price per unit of gas. If the transaction uses up all its gas—if it takes more steps to execute than the gas limit—it fails (and still pays the gas fee). This deters people from sending superlong transactions that clog the network, and it absolutely prevents them from clogging the network forever.
为了解决这个问题，Ethereum 引入了“gas”机制，即人们和智能合约为计算付费的费用。每笔交易都指定了 1) 最大 gas 限额（基本上是计算步骤的数量）和 2) 每单位 gas 的价格。如果交易使用了所有的 gas——如果执行交易需要的步骤超过 gas 限额——那么交易将失败（仍然需要支付 gas 费用）。这阻止了人们发送超长交易，从而阻塞网络，并且绝对防止了网络被永久阻塞。

In early Ethereum, the gas fees, as well as built-in mining rewards, were paid to the miner who mined a block. Since the move to PoS, the built-in rewards are lower (because it’s much less expensive to be a validator than a miner, so you don’t need to get paid as much). And now some of the gas fees are “burned” (the Ether just vanishes) instead of being paid to validators. The basic result is that Ether as a whole is paying less for security under PoS than it used to.
在早期的 Ethereum 中，gas 费用以及内置的挖矿奖励都是支付给挖矿者谁挖掘了一个块。自从转移到 PoS 后，内置的奖励降低了（因为成为验证者比挖矿者更便宜，所以不需要支付那么多）。现在，一些 gas 费用被“烧毁”（以太币直接消失），而不是支付给验证者。基本结果是，以太币整体为安全支付的费用在 PoS 下降低了。

There are still gas fees, though, and some of them still go to validators. And generally speaking, the more you offer to pay for gas, the faster your transaction will be executed: If Ethereum is busy, paying more for gas gets you priority for executing your transactions. It is a shared computer where you can pay more to go first.
尽管如此，仍然存在 gas 费用，一些仍然支付给验证者。一般来说，你为 gas 支付的越多，交易执行的速度就越快：如果 Ethereum 很忙，为 gas 支付更多可以让你的交易优先执行。这是一个共享计算机，你可以支付更多来优先执行。

One thing a smart contract can do in Ethereum is create new cryptocurrencies. These cryptocurrencies are generally called “tokens.”
以太坊智能合约可以做的一件事是创建新的加密货币。这些加密货币通常被称为“令牌”。

Why would you want to do this? One reason we already talked about:
为什么你想这样做？我们已经讨论过的一个原因是：

This is extremely easy to do in Ethereum. (The Ethereum white paper includes a four-line code snippet “for implementing a token system” on Ethereum.) And so there’s the Shiba token, which calls itself “a decentralized meme token that evolved into a vibrant ecosystem.” It’s Dogecoin but on Ethereum, easy. It has a “Woof Paper.”
以太坊上做这件事非常容易。（以太坊白皮书包括一个四行代码片段，用于在以太坊上实现令牌系统。）于是，有了 Shiba 令牌，它自称为“一个去中心化的 meme 令牌，演变成一个繁荣的生态系统。”它就像 Dogecoin，但是在以太坊上，非常容易。它有一个“ Woof Paper”。

But there are lots of other reasons to create cryptocurrencies. If you set up some sort of app that does a thing on the Ethereum system and you want to charge people money for doing that thing, what sort of money should you charge them? Or if you set up a two-sided marketplace that connects people who do a thing with people who want the thing done, what sort of money should the people who want the thing use to pay the people who do the thing?
但是，创建加密货币还有很多其他原因。如果你在以太坊系统上设置了一些应用程序，并想让人们为使用该应用程序付费，那么你应该收取什么样的钱？或者，如果你设置了一个连接提供服务的人和需要服务的人的双向市场，那么需要服务的人应该用什么样的钱来支付提供服务的人？

Dollars are a possible answer, though an oddly hard one: US dollars don’t live on the blockchain, but in bank accounts. Ether is the most obvious answer: You’ve set up an app in Ethereum, so you should take payment in the currency of Ethereum. But a persistently popular answer is: You should take payment in your own currency. People who add value to your service should be paid in your own special token; people who make use of the service should pay for it in that token. And then if the service takes off, the token might become more valuable.
美元是一个可能的答案，虽然是一个奇怪的难题：美元不在区块链上，而是在银行账户中。以太坊的以太币是一个最明显的答案：你已经在以太坊上设置了应用程序，所以你应该收取以太坊的货币。但是一个非常流行的答案是：你应该收取自己的货币。为你的服务添加价值的人应该收取你的特殊令牌；使用服务的人应该用该令牌付费。如果服务获得成功，该令牌可能变得更有价值。

We’ll discuss this idea in more detail later. For now, I’ll just say that Ethereum has a standard for how these sorts of tokens should be implemented, and it’s called ERC-20. And when there are decentralized apps on the Ethereum blockchain, there’s a good chance that they’ll say they have an ERC-20 token.
我们将在后面详细讨论这个想法。现在，我只想说，以太坊有一个标准，用于实现这种令牌的方式，称为 ERC-20。当以太坊区块链上有去中心化应用程序时，他们很可能会说他们拥有 ERC-20 令牌。

One essential property of an ERC-20 token is that it’s fungible—like dollars, or Bitcoin, or Ether. If I create an ERC-20 token called Mattcoin and mint a billion Mattcoins, each of those billion tokens works exactly the same and is exactly interchangeable. They all trade at the same price, and nobody wants, or gets, any particular identified Mattcoin.
ERC-20 代币的一个基本属性是它可以互换——像美元、比特币或以太坊。如果我创建一个名为 Mattcoin 的 ERC-20 代币，并铸造十亿个 Mattcoin，每个 Mattcoin 都完全相同，完全可以互换。它们都以相同的价格交易，没有人想要或获取特定的 Mattcoin。

There’s another way to do a token, though. You could have a series of tokens, each with a number. Token No. 1 in the series is different from Token No. 99, in the sense that Token No. 1 has the number 1 and Token No. 99 has the number 99. This is generally referred to as a nonfungible token, or NFT. The most popular Ethereum standard for NFTs is called ERC-721, and you’ll see that name sometimes.
虽然还有另一种方式来创建代币。你可以创建一系列代币，每个代币都有一个编号。系列中的第 1 个代币不同于第 99 个代币，因为第 1 个代币有编号 1，而第 99 个代币有编号 99。这通常被称为非互换代币或 NFT。以太坊最流行的 NFT 标准被称为 ERC-721，你可能会看到这个名称。

Let me quote a bit of the ERC-721 standard:
让我引用 ERC-721 标准的一部分：

The ERC-721 introduces a standard for NFT, in other words, this type of Token is unique and can have different value than another Token from the same Smart Contract, maybe due to its age, rarity or even something else like its visual. Wait, visual?
ERC-721 引入了 NFT 的标准，也就是说，这种代币是独特的，可以比同一智能合约下的其他代币具有不同的价值，这可能是由于其年龄、稀有性或其他因素，如视觉。等等，视觉？

Yes! All NFTs have a [numerical] variable called tokenId, so for any ERC-721 Contract, the pair contract address, [numerical] tokenId must be globally unique. That said, a dapp can have a “converter” that uses the tokenId as input and outputs an image of something cool, like zombies, weapons, skills or amazing kitties!
是的！所有 NFT 都有一个名为 tokenId 的数字变量，因此对于任何 ERC-721 合约，合约地址和 tokenId 的组合必须在全球范围内是唯一的。话说回来，一个 dapp 可以拥有一个“转换器”，它使用 tokenId 作为输入，并输出一些很酷的图像，例如僵尸、武器、技能或惊人的小猫！

Look how minimal this standard is, despite the zombies and kitties. An NFT consists of a series of numbered tokens, and the thing that makes it an NFT is that it has a different number in its tokenId field from the other tokens in its series.
看看这个标准有多么简单，即使有僵尸和小猫。NFT 由一系列编号的令牌组成，而使其成为 NFT 的是它在 tokenId 字段中的数字不同于系列中的其他令牌。

If you’d like to imagine that this different number makes it something cool, like a zombie, or a kitty, you can! Go right ahead! Or if there’s a computer program—or an Ethereum dapp—that looks at your number and says, “Ah, right, this number corresponds to a zombie with green hair and a fetching scar on his right cheek,” then the computer program is free to say that—and even serve you up a picture of that zombie—and you are free to believe it.
如果你想象这个不同的数字使其变得很酷，例如僵尸或小猫，你可以！请随意！或者，如果有一台计算机程序——或一个以太坊 dapp——它查看你的数字并说：“啊，对，这个数字对应一个绿发僵尸，右脸颊上有一道吸引人的疤痕”，那么计算机程序可以说那样——甚至提供一个僵尸的图片——你可以相信它。

We’ll come back to this.
我们将回到这里。

IT GETS WEIRD. 事情变得很奇怪。

Here’s another important difference between Ethereum and Bitcoin. Bitcoin never raised money; Ethereum did.
这是以太坊和比特币之间的另一个重要区别。比特币从不筹集资金；以太坊筹集了资金。

You can think of Bitcoin as more or less the open-source passion product of one anonymous guy who really likes cryptography. The cost of building the basic system of Bitcoin was Satoshi’s time, which he donated. Then he mined the first Bitcoins and got super rich, probably, but that came later.
你可以把比特币看作一个匿名爱好密码学的人的开源热情项目。建立比特币基本系统的成本是中本聪捐献的时间。然后，他挖出了第一批比特币，可能变得非常富有，但那是在后来的事。

Ethereum was a bit more complicated to build. Vitalik Buterin is the intellectual leader of Ethereum, but there were a bunch of co-founders. There were legal entities. There were programmers. They spent a lot of time on it. They had to pay for food deliveries.
以太坊的建立要复杂得多。维塔利克·布特林是以太坊的知识领袖，但还有许多共同创始人。有法律实体，有程序员。他们花费了很多时间，也需要支付食物配送费用。

You could imagine Vitalik saying: “OK, we are a company, we’re Ethereum Inc., we’re going to start the Ethereum blockchain and make money from it, and we’ll sell shares in Ethereum Inc. to raise the money to build the blockchain. Sell 20% of Ethereum Inc. for cash, get the cash, build the blockchain and, I don’t know, collect royalties. Ethereum Inc. collects 0.01% of every Ethereum transaction forever.” Ethereum was a well-known and much-hyped project even before it launched, and they could easily have found investors.
你可以想象维塔利克说：“好吧，我们是一家公司，我们是以太坊公司，我们要启动以太坊区块链，并从中赚钱，然后我们将以太坊公司的股份卖给投资者，以筹集建立区块链的资金。卖掉以太坊公司 20%的股份，拿到钱，建立区块链，然后，我不知道，收取版税。以太坊公司将从每笔以太坊交易中收取 0.01%的费用，永久下去。”以太坊是一个即使在启动前就备受关注和热议的项目，他们很容易找到投资者。

They didn’t do that, for philosophical and economic reasons. They wanted a decentralized blockchain ecosystem, and having it owned by a corporation would defeat the purpose.²⁹ So they didn’t sell shares. They sold tokens. In July 2014 they sold Ether “at the price of 1000-2000 ether per BTC, a mechanism intended to fund the Ethereum organization and pay for development,” according to Ethereum’s white paper. In all, they sold about 60 million Ether for about $18.3 million, all before the technology itself went live. Ethereum’s genesis block was mined in July 2015. Today there is a total of about 122 million Ether outstanding. Some of that, like Bitcoin, comes from mining or, now, validating. But almost half of it was purchased, before Ethereum was launched, by people who wanted to bet on its success.
他们没有那样做，因为哲学和经济原因。他们想要一个去中心化的区块链生态系统，而由一家公司拥有将违背目的。所以他们没有出售股份，而是出售代币。2014 年 7 月，他们以每 1000-2000 以太坊代币的价格出售以太坊，“根据以太坊白皮书，这是一种旨在为以太坊组织提供资金和支付开发费用的手段。”总共，他们出售了约 6000 万以太坊代币，约价值 1830 万美元，这一切都发生在技术本身上线之前。以太坊的创世区块是在 2015 年 7 月挖掘的。今天，以太坊总共约有 1.22 亿代币流通。其中一些来自挖掘或现在的验证，但几乎有一半是在以太坊推出之前由人们购买的，以赌其成功。

Camila Russo, in her book about Ethereum, wrote:
卡米拉·鲁索在她的以太坊书中写道：

A whole new financing model had been tested. One where a ragtag group of feuding hackers with no business plan and no live product, let alone users or revenue, could raise millions of dollars from thousands of people from all over the world. Before, anyone who wanted to buy stock in big tech firms like Facebook or Google would need a U.S. bank account; things got even more complicated for those who wanted to invest in startups that hadn’t gone to the public markets to raise funds. Now anyone could be an investor in one of the most cutting-edge technology companies out there. All they needed was an internet connection and at least 0.01 Bitcoin.
一种全新的融资模式已经被测试。任何一个由一群争吵的黑客组成的团队，没有商业计划，没有实时产品，更不用说用户或收入，就可以从全球数千人那里筹集数百万美元。以前，任何想要购买像 Facebook 或 Google 这样的大型科技公司股票的人都需要一个美国银行账户；而那些想要投资尚未上市的初创公司的人事情变得更加复杂。现在，任何人都可以投资最尖端的科技公司，只需要一个互联网连接和至少 0.01 比特币。

It worked out well for those investors; that 60 million Ether is worth billions of dollars today.
对那些投资者来说，结果非常好；那 6000 万 Ether 今天价值数十亿美元。

But as a “whole new financing model,” it’s a mixed bag. Many people, particularly securities regulators, think it’s good that startups usually can’t raise money from the general public without at least a business plan. And there’s a sense in which this sale—the Ether “pre-mine,” or “initial coin offering” (ICO)—was the original sin of crypto as a financing tool. A lot of other crypto teams copied Ethereum’s approach, writing up vague plans to build some project and then raising money by preselling tokens that would be useful if the project ever happened. The analogy I’ve tweeted is that ICOs are “like if the Wright Brothers sold air miles to finance inventing the airplane.”
但是作为一种“全新的融资模式”，它是一个混合的结果。许多人，特别是证券监管机构，认为初创企业通常不能从公众那里筹集资金，除非他们至少有一个商业计划。此外，这笔交易——Ether 的“预挖矿”或“首次代币发行”（ICO）——是加密融资工具的原罪。许多其他加密团队模仿了以太坊的方法，编写模糊的计划来建立某个项目，然后通过预售 tokens 筹集资金，这些 tokens 只有在项目实现时才有用。我曾经在推特上发表过一个类比，认为 ICO 就像 Wright 兄弟出售航空里程来资助发明飞机。

There was a 2017 ICO boom in which a lot of projects raised a lot of money by selling tokens that never turned out to be useful. When ragtag groups of hackers with no business plan can raise millions of dollars from anyone with an internet connection, they all will. The odds that any particular one of those non-business-plans will succeed are low. The odds that any particular one will be a scam are high.
2017 年发生了一场 ICO 热潮，许多项目通过出售 tokens 筹集了大量资金，但这些 tokens 从来没有变得有用。当一群没有商业计划的黑客可以从任何有互联网连接的人那里筹集数百万美元时，他们都会这样做。这些非商业计划中任何一个成功的可能性很低，而任何一个都是骗局的可能性很高。

The basic ideas of Ethereum—a distributed computer, smart contracts, dapps, new tokens, etc.—caught on broadly within crypto. Ether is now the second-biggest cryptocurrency (well behind Bitcoin, well ahead of everything else).
以太坊的基本思想——分布式计算机、智能合约、去中心化应用、新代币等——在加密货币领域广泛流行。以太币现在是第二大加密货币（远远落后于比特币，远远领先于其他所有货币）。

But it has a lot of competition: If you’re building smart contracts, there are a lot of other blockchains where you can run them, including
但是，它面临着激烈的竞争：如果您正在构建智能合约，有很多其他区块链可以运行它们，包括

These platforms, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, are called “Layer 1 blockchains,” meaning they’re entirely separate from one another; each Layer 1 blockchain maintains its own ledger. They compete with one another much like other tech platforms do, arguing that they offer better performance, a better environment for developers, a different programming style, better tools.
这些平台，如比特币和以太坊，被称为“第一层区块链”，意思是它们彼此完全独立；每个第一层区块链维护自己的账本。它们之间相互竞争，就像其他技术平台一样，声称提供更好的性能、更好的开发者环境、不同的编程风格、更好的工具。

A famous problem in crypto is the “blockchain trilemma”: Blockchains want to be scalable (they can process a lot of transactions quickly), decentralized (they don’t depend on a few trusted parties), and secure (a minority of computers on the network can’t successfully attack it). But, says the trilemma, you can only choose two of those three.
加密领域中一个著名的问题是“区块链三难题”：区块链想要具备可扩展性（快速处理大量交易）、去中心化（不依赖少数可信方）和安全性（少数网络计算机无法成功攻击）。但是，三难题说，你只能选择这三者中的两个。

Bitcoin and Ethereum chose decentralization and security, which makes them fairly slow computers. Other blockchains are faster but more centralized: If your consensus mechanism is “We trust six computers to verify all transactions,” that’s going to be faster than Bitcoin’s proof-of-work algorithm. But if someone hacks those six computers, look out.
比特币和以太坊选择了去中心化和安全性，这使它们变成了相当慢的计算机。其他区块链速度更快，但更中心化：如果你的共识机制是“我们信任六台计算机来验证所有交易”，那么这将比比特币的工作证明算法更快。但是，如果有人黑了这六台计算机，情况就危险了。

People on the decentralized-and-secure blockchains spend a lot of time thinking about scaling. Often this involves so-called Layer 2 systems, which are built on top of Layer 1 technology such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. For instance, Bitcoin has the Lightning Network, a Layer 2 payment system that basically lets people on the Bitcoin blockchain set up payments to each other without running all of them through the blockchain. This makes the payments faster and cheaper, and they periodically settle on the blockchain for security.
在去中心化和安全的区块链上，人们花费了很多时间思考扩展性问题。通常这涉及到所谓的二层系统，它们建立在比特币和以太坊等一层技术之上。例如，比特币有闪电网络，一个二层支付系统，它基本上允许比特币区块链上的用户之间设置支付，不需要将所有支付都通过区块链。这使得支付速度更快、更便宜，并且它们定期在区块链上结算以确保安全。

Much of the thought in Ethereum these days is about how to scale it so that it can execute large numbers of transactions quickly and cheaply—a prerequisite for building a universal world computer, or frankly even a payments system that can compete with credit cards. Much of the action here is about Layer 2 systems that specialize in doing some sorts of transactions off the main Ethereum blockchain (where space is somewhat scarce and expensive) and then saving the results to that blockchain (where transactions are secure and immutable).³⁰
这些天，Ethereum 的大部分思想都是关于如何扩展它，使其能够快速、廉价地执行大量交易——这是建立一个通用世界计算机或甚至是一个与信用卡竞争的支付系统的前提条件。这里的大部分行动都是关于 Layer 2 系统的，它们专门处理一些交易在主 Ethereum 区块链之外（那里空间稀缺且昂贵），然后将结果保存到该区块链（那里交易是安全且不可更改的）。

Some people in crypto are faithful to a single blockchain: They are Bitcoin maximalists, or Ethereum or Avalanche or Solana loyalists. Many people are generalist dabblers, though. They like buying lots of tokens on lots of blockchains, because they see merit in many blockchain platforms, or because they like it when lines go up.
有些人在加密货币中忠诚于单个区块链：他们是比特币极端主义者，或者 Ethereum、Avalanche 或 Solana 忠诚者。然而，许多人都是泛泛之辈，他们喜欢在多个区块链上购买大量 token，因为他们看到许多区块链平台的价值，或者因为他们喜欢看到曲线上涨。

One result of this is that sometimes you will want to own the token of one blockchain on another blockchain. This comes up a lot in decentralized finance, or DeFi, the system of crypto exchanges and financial products that live on blockchains. If you’re writing smart contracts to trade tokens on the blockchain, those smart contracts—computer programs—will have to run on one particular blockchain. But you might not want to limit yourself to the tokens of that blockchain. (You are, after all, building an exchange.) You might want to write programs on the Ethereum blockchain that trade Bitcoin or write programs on Solana that trade Ether. Say you want to write a smart contract on Solana to swap some Ether for SOL (the Solana token). How do you do that?
这样一个结果是，有时你会想在另一个区块链上拥有某个区块链的代币。这在去中心化金融（DeFi）中经常出现，DeFi 是一个基于区块链的加密货币交易和金融产品系统。如果你正在编写智能合约来在区块链上交易代币，那些智能合约——计算机程序——将不得不在某个特定的区块链上运行。但你可能不想限制自己在那个区块链上的代币。（毕竟，你正在建立一个交易所。）你可能想在以太坊区块链上编写交易比特币的程序，或者在索拉纳区块链上编写交易以太币的程序。假设你想在索拉纳区块链上编写一个智能合约，以交换一些以太币换取 SOL（索拉纳代币）。你如何做到这一点？

You don’t. Your Ether lives on the Ethereum blockchain. “You have Ether” is a fact about the ledger on that blockchain. The Solana blockchain has no record of that. Nor does Ethereum have any record of Solana tokens. It’s all incompatible, separate systems. It’s separate banks and property registers and DMVs all over again.
你不能这样做。你拥有的以太币生活在以太坊区块链上。“你拥有以太币”是该区块链账本上的一个事实。索拉纳区块链没有记录这件事。以太坊也没有索拉纳代币的记录。这一切都是不兼容的、独立的系统。这就像银行、房产登记和车管所等独立系统一样。

That’s an annoying answer and can’t really be right, so there are workarounds. The principal one is called a “bridge.” A bridge is, generally, a smart contract on one blockchain, a smart contract on another blockchain, and some sort of trusted computer program that sits between them and passes messages. If you want to swap some Ether for SOL, you find a bridge. You send your Ether to the bridge’s smart contract in Ethereum, which locks it up: As far as the Ethereum blockchain is concerned, your Ether belongs to the bridge now. The bridge’s off-chain computer program sees this and alerts its Solana smart contract, which gives you the equivalent of the Ether on the Solana blockchain.
这是一个恼人的回答，不能真正正确，所以有变通方法。主要的一种是称为“桥梁”的东西。桥梁通常是一个区块链上的智能合约，另一个区块链上的智能合约，以及在它们之间传递消息的一些可信计算程序。如果你想将一些以太币换成 SOL，你就找到一个桥梁。然后，你将以太币发送到以太坊上的桥梁智能合约，这将锁定它：在以太坊区块链看来，你的以太币现在属于桥梁了。桥梁的离链计算程序看到这件事，并警告其索拉纳智能合约，后者将在索拉纳区块链上给你等值的以太币。

“The equivalent of the Ether” could, I suppose, be some amount of SOL at whatever the current Ether/SOL exchange rate is. (The bridge could also be an exchange.) But the normal approach is to take Ether on Ethereum and give you back “wrapped Ether” (sometimes “wETH”) on Solana. Wrapped Ether is a token issued by the bridge’s smart contract on the Solana blockchain, representing a claim on the bridge’s Ether on the Ethereum blockchain. It is, as it were, Ether on the Solana network.
“以太币的等值”可能是当前以太币/SOL 汇率下的某些 SOL 数量。（桥梁也可以是一个交易所。）但正常的做法是将以太坊上的以太币换成索拉纳上的“包装以太币”（有时称为“wETH”）。包装以太币是桥梁智能合约在索拉纳区块链上发行的一种代币，代表着桥梁在以太坊区块链上的以太币所有权。它实际上是索拉纳网络上的以太币。

Bridges are notorious sites of risk in crypto: A big bridge contract will have a lot of crypto locked up in it, will need to regularly send and receive crypto from strangers, and will have to interoperate between different environments. If you can find a bug in a bridge, you can make a lot of money. People do that pretty regularly. An actual big Solana/Ethereum bridge is called Wormhole; it was hacked this year for about $320 million of wETH.
桥梁是加密货币中著名的风险点：一个大的桥梁合约将锁定大量加密货币，需要定期从陌生人那里发送和接收加密货币，并需要在不同的环境中进行互操作。如果你能在桥梁中找到一个漏洞，你可以赚很多钱。人们经常这样做。一个实际的大型索拉纳/以太坊桥梁叫做 Wormhole；今年它被黑客攻击，损失了约 320 万美元的 wETH。

Here’s a slightly different generalization of Bitcoin:
比特币的一个稍有不同的概括是：

“Modern life consists in large part of entries in databases,” I said, and then I listed a few, starting with money. There’s a reason I started with money, and why Satoshi did, too. A dollar is an entry on a list of dollars. If you have dollars, what you have is an entry in your bank’s database saying how many dollars you have. This entry is the dollars. The bank doesn’t have sacks of gold or a big box of paper currency that the database refers to. It just has the database.
“现代生活的大部分是数据库中的条目，”我说，然后我列举了一些，首先是钱。有一个原因我首先提到钱，也是 Satoshi 那样做的。美元是一份美元列表上的条目。如果你有美元，你拥有的就是银行数据库中的一份条目，表明你有多少美元。这份条目就是美元。银行不拥有金币或纸币的储存，数据库就是它所拥有的。

This is even more true for Bitcoin. There are no paper Bitcoins at all. If the Bitcoin ledger says you have a Bitcoin, then you have a Bitcoin. That’s all a Bitcoin is.
这一点在比特币中更为正确。根本没有纸质比特币。如果比特币账本说你拥有比特币，那么你就拥有比特币。这就是比特币的全部。

Almost nothing else works quite that way, though. If you own a house, in some legal sense the main thing that you own is an entry in a property register. But in some much more important sense, the main thing that you own is the house. If your house burned down, you could not sleep in your deed.
虽然几乎没有其他东西以这种方式运作。如果你拥有房产，在某种法律意义上，你拥有的主要是房产登记簿上的条目。但在更重要的意义上，你拥有的主要是房产。如果你的房子烧毁了，你不能睡在你的房产证上。

Conversely, if someone snuck into the property registry at night and slipped in a new deed saying that they owned your house, and then they showed up at your house to kick you out, you might reasonably raise objections like “But all my stuff is here,” or “But I have the keys to the locks,” or “But all my neighbors know I live here,” or “But this is the address on my driver’s license,” and you might convince everyone—the sheriff, the courts, your mortgage lender—that in fact you own the house and the deed is wrong. The property registry is not definitive for house ownership the way the Bitcoin ledger is definitive for Bitcoin ownership.
相反，如果有人在夜间潜入房产登记簿，添加一份新的房产证，说他们拥有你的房子，然后他们来到你的房子把你赶出去，你可能会提出合理的反对，如“我所有的东西都在这里”，或“我拥有锁的钥匙”，或“我所有的邻居都知道我住在这里”，或“我驾驶证上的地址就是这里”，你可能会说服所有人——警长、法院、抵押贷款机构——事实上你拥有房子，而房产证是错误的。房产登记簿对房产所有权的确定性不像比特币账本对比特币所有权的确定性那样。

But the idea of putting important databases of real-world stuff “on the blockchain”—for some reason the definite article is always used with this stuff, and one shouldn’t worry too much about which blockchain—has a lot of appeal. People are always talking about moving real estate registries or cargo manifests or carbon emissions onto the blockchain.
但是，将重要的现实世界数据库“放到区块链上”—不知何故，这些东西总是使用定冠词，不需要太担心哪个区块链—具有很大的吸引力。人们总是谈论将房产登记或货物清单或碳排放移到区块链上。

This is appealing because, as a database, the blockchain has some nice properties. The important public blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum are secure, open, and permissionless. Anyone can prove they own a Bitcoin, and that ownership can’t be reversed arbitrarily.
这很吸引人，因为作为数据库，区块链有一些很好的特性。像比特币和以太坊这样的重要公共区块链是安全、开放和无需许可的。任何人都可以证明自己拥有比特币，而这种所有权不能被任意撤销。

If you want to build an exchange for trading Ethereum, you can just do it; the blockchain is public, and the standards for building Ethereum programs are open. Building a new system for buying houses is overwhelmingly difficult. You’d need to get lots of banks and county property registries and appraisers on board. But if, somehow, the houses were moved to the blockchain, that would permanently allow for permissionless innovation: Everyone could build programs and exchanges and derivatives and interfaces for house buying, and the best ones could win.
如果你想建立一个以太坊交易所，你可以直接这样做；区块链是公开的，以太坊程序的标准也是开放的。建立一个新的房产购买系统非常困难。你需要让许多银行、县房产登记和评估机构参与。但是，如果房产能移到区块链上，那么将永久允许无需许可的创新：每个人都可以为房产购买建立程序、交易所、衍生品和界面，而最好的那些将会胜出。

The problem is that houses can’t live on the blockchain. They live in the real world. They can burn down and stuff. Connecting the electronic artifact on the blockchain—the house token?—to its real-world referent—the house—is philosophically and practically tricky.
问题是，房产不能生活在区块链上。它们生活在现实世界中。它们可能会被烧毁等等。在区块链上的电子 artifact——房产 token？——与其现实世界参照物——房产——之间的连接在哲学和实践上都是棘手的。

How to make this connection is largely an unsolved problem, and quite possibly an unsolvable one, but also an important one. Crypto’s financial system is well-developed and has some advantages in openness and permissionless innovation over the traditional financial system. If you could ingest the physical world into that financial system, you’d have something cool.
连接建立的方法基本上是一个未解决的问题，可能是一个不可解决的问题，但也是一个重要的问题。加密金融系统已经很发达，相比传统金融系统，在开放性和无需许可的创新方面具有优势。如果你能将物理世界引入该金融系统，你将拥有某些很酷的东西。

A less ambitious version of this is: Look, banks are already keeping lots of databases to track lots of things. Dollars in bank accounts but also loans, tradable securities, derivative contracts, trade financing, all sorts of stuff. Some of those databases are slow, some are written in Cobol, and some require an exchange of faxes to settle transactions. It would be nice if those databases were faster, if they could talk to each other efficiently. It would be nice if JPMorgan Chase’s database could talk to Goldman Sachs’s database, if there weren’t a manual and contentious process of reconciling trades between banks.
这个想法的一个较不 ambitious 版本是：银行已经在跟踪各种事情的数据库中保存了很多数据。银行账户中的美元、贷款、可交易证券、衍生合约、贸易融资等各种东西。其中的一些数据库很慢，有些是用 Cobol 编写的，还有一些需要通过传真来结算交易。如果这些数据库能更快、更高效地相互交流，那就好了。如果摩根大通的数据库能与高盛的数据库相互交流，而不是银行之间交易的 manual 和争议的过程。

In 2010, if you were a loan trader at a bank, and you thought,
2010 年，如果你是一家银行的贷款交易员，并且你想，

and you walked into the CEO’s office and said,
然后你走进了CEO的办公室，说，

the CEO would probably say things like
CEO可能会说类似的话，

But in 2017, if you were a loan trader at a bank, or a blockchain consultant, or frankly a person off the street, and you walked into the office of a bank CEO and shouted the word
但是 2017 年，如果你是一家银行的贷款交易员，或者区块链顾问，或者说是一个街上的普通人，你走进一家银行CEO的办公室，大声喊出这个词

the CEO would hand you a sack of money. Lots and lots and lots of people took advantage of this. “Blockchain” was for a while the sexiest word in finance, and banks were tripping over themselves to announce blockchain initiatives.³¹
如果你拥有 CEO，它就会给你一袋钱。很多很多人都趁机牟利。“区块链”一度是金融界最性感的词汇，银行们也争相宣布区块链计划。

The idea here was sometimes vague, to be honest, but broadly speaking we’re talking about permissioned blockchains, or private blockchains. Big public blockchains are generally not something a banker is going to like. Having all transactions be public is good for security (everyone can verify that everything is correct) but also bad (if your transactions are meant to be secret). It’s also just sort of icky for regulation. “Who makes sure that your transaction records are correct?” a bank regulator will ask, and the bank will answer, “Well, we don’t really know, but we think it’s some mining pools in Russia,” and the regulators will get nervous.
说实话，这里的想法有时很模糊，但总的来说，我们谈论的是许可区块链或私有区块链。大型公共区块链通常不是银行家喜欢的东西。所有交易都是公开的，对安全来说是好的（每个人都可以验证一切是否正确），但也存在坏处（如果你的交易是秘密的）。此外，对监管来说也很不舒服。“谁来确保你的交易记录正确？”银行监管会问，银行会回答，“嗯，我们不知道，但我们认为是俄罗斯的一些矿池”，监管机构就会感到紧张。

But many of the basic ideas of a blockchain—a ledger of every transaction that’s demonstrably shared by every computer on the network—can be implemented privately. If you get together with 11 of your friends and agree that the 12 of you will do transactions with one another, keep a ledger, verify all the transactions, and use cryptographic hash functions to make sure the ledger isn’t changed, then you can just do that. If you all trust each other and don’t let anyone else join the network—or if you let only people you trust join the network—then you don’t have to worry about malicious miners taking over your network. It’s just you and your friends.
块链的许多基本思想——网络上每台计算机共享的一份交易记录——可以私下实现。如果你和 11 个朋友聚在一起，同意 12 人之间进行交易，保持一份记录，验证所有交易，并使用加密散列函数确保记录不被篡改，那么你就可以这样做。如果你们都互相信任，不让其他人加入网络——或者只让你信任的人加入网络——那么你不需要担心恶意矿工接管你的网络。这只是你和你的朋友。

This has advantages for security, particularly for explaining security to bank regulators. You also don’t have to make the blockchain public if you don’t want to, and there are efficiency advantages. It’s only 12 of you confirming transactions, so you can do it faster. Presumably you’re doing this for a reason—you want the ability to do these transactions with each other—so you don’t have to get paid for confirming transactions. You don’t need mining or staking: Those are ways for public blockchains to reach a consensus among people who have to prove they have a commitment to the system. The 12 of you all know one another and built the system, so your consensus is good enough without any further proof. You can just vote on it.
这对安全有优势，特别是在向银行监管机构解释安全时。你也不需要公开区块链，如果你不想公开，也有效率优势。只有 12 个人确认交易，所以你可以更快地完成。假设你这样做是有原因的——你想和其他人进行这些交易——所以你不需要为确认交易获得报酬。你不需要挖矿或抵押：这些是公共区块链在需要证明对系统承诺的人之间达成共识的方式。你和其他 11 个人都认识彼此，建立了这个系统，所以你们的共识足够，不需要进一步的证明。你可以直接投票。

An important fact about Bitcoin is that it’s both a technological method of sending money and the money itself. That is, Bitcoin is a computer system for sending Bitcoins, and a Bitcoin is the thing that the Bitcoin system sends.
比特币的一个重要事实是，它既是一种发送货币的技术方法，也是货币本身。也就是说，比特币是一种用于发送比特币的计算机系统，而比特币是比特币系统发送的东西。

Some of what goes on in crypto is about the technology: People use the ideas of blockchains and smart contracts and so forth to build software. Some of what goes on in crypto is about the money: People call up their brokers to place bets on the prices of crypto tokens going up.
加密货币领域中有一些事情是关于技术的：人们使用区块链和智能合约等想法来构建软件。加密货币领域中的一些事情是关于钱的：人们通过经纪人下注，押注加密货币价格上涨。

But a lot of what goes on in crypto is about both:
但是加密货币领域中有很多事情是关于两者的：

Broadly speaking, the name for this is “web3.” The idea is that the original web was the early development of the internet, when people built decentralized open community-controlled protocols for the internet. “Web 2.0,” or “web2,” was when big tech companies more or less took over the internet; now your experience of the internet is largely mediated through Facebook and Google and Apple and Amazon, and they make tons of money from controlling the internet. No open decentralized project is going to compete with them. But web3 will be when people build decentralized open community-controlled protocols for the internet again and also make lots of money. Because the decentralized protocols won’t be owned by big tech companies, but they won’t be free and owned by no one, either. They’ll be owned by their users.
广义地说，这种概念被称为“web3”。其想法是，原始的互联网是人们为互联网构建去中心化开放社区控制协议的早期发展阶段。“Web 2.0”，或“web2”，是大型科技公司基本上控制了互联网；现在，你对互联网的体验主要是通过 Facebook、Google、Apple 和 Amazon 等公司来实现的，他们从控制互联网中赚取了大量钱财。没有开放的去中心化项目能够与他们竞争。但是，web3 将是人们重新构建去中心化开放社区控制协议的互联网，同时也赚取了大量钱财。因为这些去中心化协议不会被大型科技公司所有，但它们也不会免费、无人所有。它们将被用户所有。

Just kidding: They’ll be owned by venture capitalists who buy tokens in these projects early on and who are the biggest boosters of web3. But also by their users.
开玩笑：它们将被风险投资者所有，这些人早期购买项目代币，并且是 web3 的最大支持者。但同时，也将被用户所有。

Think about what you get when you buy a Bitcoin. One thing you get is a unit of “digital cash”: You can send the Bitcoin to someone else to buy a sandwich or whatever. If this digital cash thing takes off, then lots of people will accept Bitcoin for sandwiches, and this currency that you bought will be very useful.
当你购买比特币时，你会得到什么？一件事是，你会得到一种“数字现金”：你可以将比特币发送给其他人，以购买三明治或其他任何东西。如果这种数字现金概念流行起来，那么很多人将接受比特币作为三明治的支付方式，这种你购买的货币将非常有用。

But another thing you get is a share in the Bitcoin project. Not a share of actual stock, but still a chance to profit from the success of Bitcoin. If this digital cash thing takes off, then lots of people will want Bitcoin to use to buy sandwiches, and there will be a lot of demand for Bitcoin. But only 21 million Bitcoin will ever exist. So each Bitcoin will be more valuable as more people decide to use Bitcoin as their way to transfer digital cash.
但你还会得到比特币项目的一份股份。不像实际股票那样，但你仍然有机会从比特币的成功中获利。如果这种数字现金概念流行起来，那么很多人将想要使用比特币来购买三明治，于是比特币的需求将会很高。但是，只有 2100 万比特币将会存在。因此，当更多人决定使用比特币作为数字现金转移方式时，每个比特币的价值将会增加。

That logic never quite made sense. A convenient currency for digital cash transfer has a stable value, and the rising value of Bitcoin makes it less useful as a currency: If your Bitcoin keep going up in value, you should not spend them on sandwiches. Bitcoin as an appreciating asset will be a bad currency.³² Still, it worked well enough. Bitcoin is used enough for digital transfers of value that it became valuable, and early adopters got rich.
这种逻辑从来没有完全说得通。一个方便的数字现金转移货币应该具有稳定的价值，而比特币的价值上涨却使其作为货币变得不那么有用：如果你的比特币不断升值，你就不应该用它们来购买三明治。作为增值资产的比特币将是一个糟糕的货币。然而，它仍然足够好用。比特币足够用于数字价值转移，以至于变得有价值，而早期的采用者也变得富有。

This is a key financial innovation of crypto:
这是加密货币领域的一项关键金融创新。

Lots of crypto projects have this basic structure. Filecoin is a decentralized system for storing files, where you can pay to store files or get paid for storing files for someone else. You pay, or get paid, in Filecoin. Helium is a decentralized system for wireless hotspots, where you can get paid for running a hotspot or pay for access. You pay, or get paid, in Helium’s tokens. And there are play-to-earn video games such as Axie Infinity, where you pay for tokens to play the game, and get rewarded in the game’s tokens. Participating—storing files, providing Wi-Fi, playing the game—makes you an investor as well as a user.
许多加密货币项目都具有这种基本结构。Filecoin 是一个去中心化的文件存储系统，你可以付费存储文件或为他人存储文件而获得报酬。你可以用 Filecoin 付费或获得报酬。Helium 是一个去中心化的无线热点系统，你可以获得报酬来运行热点或付费来获取访问权限。你可以用 Helium 的代币付费或获得报酬。此外，还有像 Axie Infinity 这样的玩赚游戏，你可以用代币来玩游戏，并在游戏中获得奖励。参与——存储文件、提供 Wi-Fi、玩游戏——使你既是用户也是投资者。

This is potentially powerful because crypto is in the network-effects business. Many crypto projects are useful mainly if lots of other people use them. Bitcoin is a useful payment system if lots of people have Bitcoin and accept it for payments. Ethereum is a useful computing system if lots of people build apps on Ethereum. If you build a decentralized financial exchange or a peer-to-peer marketplace or whatever else on Ethereum, it’s useful if lots of people use it.
这可能非常强大，因为加密货币属于网络效应业务。许多加密货币项目只有在许多其他人使用时才有用。如果许多人拥有比特币并接受比特币支付，比特币就是一个有用的支付系统。如果许多人在以太坊上构建应用程序，以太坊就是一个有用的计算系统。如果你在以太坊上构建一个去中心化的金融交易所或点对点市场 places，或者其他什么东西，只有当许多人使用时才有用。

It’s hard to build a network-effects business from scratch. Early users of a network-effects business won’t get much out of it, because there’s no network yet. You might as well just wait until there are more users. The economics of crypto tokens reverse that. Early users of a crypto network get tokens cheap, and if the network takes off later, then their tokens will be worth a lot. Now there’s an advantage to being early. “Token effects,” people sometimes call this.
从头开始建立一个网络效应业务非常困难。网络效应业务的早期用户不会从中获得太多，因为还没有网络。你可能宁愿等到有更多用户时再加入。加密令牌的经济学则颠倒了这种情况。加密网络的早期用户可以以低廉的价格获得令牌，如果网络后来发展壮大，那么他们的令牌将变得非常值钱。现在，早期加入就有优势了。人们有时称之为“令牌效应”。

Many claims made about web3 are just about taking this basic idea at face value, assuming that it’s good, and applying it in vague ambitious ways. One issue for web3 is that for most consumers, the process of even signing up is going to be baffling—you generally don’t just take out your credit card and start playing a game. You might need to buy Ether on an exchange, then use a bridge to connect to the game’s own special wallet, then trade your Ether for another token you need to buy characters or fight battles or whatever.
有关 web3 的许多 CLAIM 都是基于这个基本想法，认为它是好的，然后以模糊的宏伟方式应用它。web3 的一个问题是，大多数消费者甚至注册的过程都会感到困惑——你通常不会直接拿出信用卡然后开始玩游戏。你可能需要在交易所购买以太币，然后使用桥梁连接到游戏自己的特殊钱包，然后用以太币换取另一个令牌，以便购买角色或战斗等等。

Another problem is the urge to tokenize businesses with no obvious network effects. In July, Esquire published an article about how “The Crypto Revolution Wants to Reimagine Books”:
另一个问题是，将没有明显网络效应的业务 tokenize 的冲动。七月，《Esquire》杂志发表了一篇文章，题为“加密革命想要重新构想图书”：

What if you could own a stake in Harry Potter?
如果你能拥有哈利·波特的一部分股份呢？

What if the book series functioned like a publicly traded company where individuals could “buy stock” in it, and as the franchise grows, those “stocks” become more valuable? If this were the case, someone who purchased just three percent of Harry Potter back when there was only one book would be a billionaire now.
如果图书系列像一家公开交易的公司那样运作，个人可以“购买股份”，随着特许经营的增长，这些“股份”就会变得更加值钱？如果是这样，那么当只有第一本书时购买了哈利·波特三分之一股份的人现在就会成为亿万富翁。

Just imagine how that would affect the reading experience. Suddenly a trip to Barnes & Noble becomes an investment opportunity. Early readers could spot “the next big thing” and make a $100 contribution that becomes $10,000 or even $100,000 if the book’s popularity grows. If readers could own a percentage of the franchise, they might then be incentivized to help that book succeed. They could start a TikTok account to promote the book via BookTok, or use their talents as filmmakers to adapt it to the screen. All of this stands to increase the value of their original investment.
想象一下，这将如何影响阅读体验。突然之间，去巴恩斯＆诺布尔书店变成了投资机会。早期读者可能会发现“下一个大热门”并投资 100 美元，随着书籍的人气增长，投资可能会变成 10,000 美元甚至 100,000 美元。如果读者能够拥有特许经营权的一部分，他们可能会被激励帮助书籍成功。他们可以创建一个 TikTok 账户，通过 BookTok 来推广书籍，或者使用电影制作人的才能将其改编成电影。所有这些都将增加他们最初投资的价值。

You’d feel like a chump reading poetry, wouldn’t you?
你读诗歌时会感到很傻，不是吗？

The bad way to put this is that every web3 project is simultaneously a Ponzi.³³
把这件事说得不好听一点，就是每个 web3 项目同时也是庞氏骗局。

Why would you buy some tokens to join a web3 Facebook competitor? Well, if you like the product, go right ahead. But probably it’s at least in part because you want to get rich off the tokens by selling them to someone else. Why do you think someone else will buy the tokens? Is it because you think they like the product? Or is it because you think they are planning to get rich by selling to a bigger sucker? Where does that end?
你为什么要购买一些 token 加入 web3 Facebook 竞争对手？如果你喜欢产品，那就去吧。但可能至少有一部分是因为你想通过卖给别人来赚钱。你认为别人为什么会买这些 token？是因为你认为他们喜欢产品？还是因为你认为他们计划卖给更大的傻瓜？这究竟会结束在哪里？

Dror Poleg, a writer on business and technology, wrote a blog post about web3 that I think about all the time. The title is “In Praise of Ponzis.” It goes like this:
商业和技术作家 Dror Poleg 写了一篇关于 web3 的博客文章，我经常思考。这篇文章的标题是《庞氏骗局的赞美》。它的内容如下：

I should mention some other web3-ish concepts here. One is a DAO, usually pronounced “dow,” which stands for “decentralized autonomous organization.” DAOs aren’t decentralized autonomous organizations. In the early days, people sometimes thought that’s what they were. “This company runs automatically through smart contracts with no human intervention,” they would say. “It’s never been seen before in human history.” But, no. The thing that runs automatically through smart contracts with no human intervention is a smart contract. A DAO is a way for people to get together to vote to control a pot of money or a protocol on the blockchain.
在这里，我应该提到其他一些 web3 概念。其中一个是 DAO，通常发音为“dow”，代表“去中心化自治组织”。DAOs 并不是去中心化自治组织。早期，人们有时认为它们就是这样。“这家公司通过智能合约自动运行，不需要人工干预，”他们会说。“这是人类历史上前所未有的。”但是，不。通过智能合约自动运行不需要人工干预的是智能合约。DAO 是一种让人们聚集起来投票控制区块链上的资金或协议的方式。

In other words, a DAO is a … company? Like, just a regular company? It has shareholders, who put in money and control it. (Actually, they put in money and get back tokens that give them rights to govern the DAO.) And the shareholders can vote. DAOs are unlike regular companies in that the shareholders (token holders) tend to vote on more stuff: Often there’s a chat room on an app called Discord, and people can propose ideas for the DAO, and there are procedures for holding a vote. Whereas US public companies let shareholders vote in only very constrained and symbolic ways, DAOs tend to let token holders vote on all sorts of stuff and often give them a fair amount of real control of the company. In this, DAOs look more like partnerships than public corporations.³⁴
换言之，DAO 是一家……公司？就像一家普通公司？它有股东，他们投入资金并控制公司。（实际上，他们投入资金并获得令牌，这些令牌授予他们管理 DAO 的权利。）股东可以投票。DAOs 与普通公司不同之处在于股东（令牌持有者）倾向于投票更多事情：通常在 Discord 应用程序上有一个聊天室，人们可以为 DAO 提出想法，并有举行投票的程序。相比之下，美国公开上市公司让股东投票的方式非常有限和象征性，而 DAOs 倾向于让令牌持有者投票所有事情，并经常授予他们公司的实质控制权。在这方面，DAOs 看起来更像合伙企业，而不是公开上市公司。

Some DAOs are the governance mechanisms for big decentralized finance, or DeFi, applications like crypto exchanges and are responsible for setting policies and parameters for how they work. Other DAOs are just weird larks. ConstitutionDAO made some headlines in 2021 for raising a bunch of money from crypto investors to buy a copy of the US Constitution. They failed to buy it, did some DAO voting stuff on what to do next, and ultimately returned most of the money (minus gas fees), and shut down. It was a quick way for people to pool their money online to have fun together. It was a Discord chat with a pool of money.
一些 DAO 是大型去中心化金融（DeFi）应用程序的治理机制，如加密货币交易所，负责设置它们的政策和参数。其他 DAO 只是些奇怪的玩意儿。ConstitutionDAO 在 2021 年曾经引起轰动，筹集了大量加密货币投资者的资金来购买美国宪法的一份副本。他们未能购买成功，进行了一些 DAO 投票活动，决定下一步该怎么做，最后退还了大部分资金（除去 gas fees），并关闭了。它是一个让人们在线上聚集资金、一起娱乐的快速方式。它是一个拥有资金池的 Discord 聊天室。

In the Bitcoin white paper, Satoshi makes a privacy recommendation: “A new key pair should be used for each transaction to keep them from being linked to a common owner.” It’s free and easy to generate new Bitcoin addresses, so every time you accept a payment in Bitcoin, you should do it in a different address. The Bitcoin blockchain is public, sure, so everyone can see every transaction. But the goal is for all of your Bitcoin transactions to be separate, unlinkable, so no one can ever get a full picture of what you’re up to on the blockchain.
比特币白皮书中，中本聪提出了隐私建议：“每笔交易都应该使用新的密钥对，以免被链接到同一个所有者。”生成新的比特币地址非常容易和免费，因此每次接受比特币付款时都应该使用不同的地址。比特币区块链是公开的，当然，每个人都可以看到每笔交易。但是，目标是使所有比特币交易独立、不可追溯，以便没有人能够获得你在区块链上的完整画像。

Meanwhile, in Ethereum there’s the Ethereum Name Service, or ENS, which we talked about earlier. This lets you register a domain name like “matthewlevine.eth” and use it across various Ethereum functions. “Use your ENS name to store all of your addresses and receive any cryptocurrency, token, or NFT,” says its homepage. Venture capitalists sometimes use their ENS domain as their Twitter display name.
同时，在以太坊中，有以太坊命名服务（ENS），我们之前讨论过的。这允许你注册一个域名，如“matthewlevine.eth”，并将其用于各种以太坊功能。其主页称：“使用你的 ENS 名称存储所有地址，并接收任何加密货币、令牌或 NFT。”风险投资家有时会将他们的 ENS 域名用作 Twitter 显示名称。

These are very different philosophies about what you’re doing in the crypto world. Bitcoin is, philosophically, digital cash, anonymous and transactional. Ethereum is, philosophically, something like an open-source programming community, where reputation is what’s valued. And to accumulate reputation, you need a consistent identity. You do all your Ethereum stuff under your real name, or at least your vanity plate.
这些是非常不同的加密世界哲学。比特币在哲学上是数字现金，匿名和交易性的。以太坊在哲学上类似于开源编程社区，其中声誉是被重视的。要积累声誉，你需要一个一致的身份。你在以太坊上所有的事情都使用你的真实姓名，或者至少是你的虚荣牌。

Many of the grand claims that people make about web3 are about reputation and identity. The idea is that you can keep your identity on the blockchain in some immutable, decentralized, transparent, provable form, and then do good stuff with it. You have some crypto wallet that contains not just tokens that you bought, but also tokens you received for doing things. When you graduate from college, your college sends you a Bachelor’s Degree Token, or a series of tokens specifying the courses you took and your grades and maybe what you learned. When you pass your driving test, the DMV sends you a Driver’s License Token. When you go to a professional conference, the conference organization sends you an Attended a Conference Token. When you get promoted at your job, your employer sends you a Senior Blockchain Developer Token. When you help out on an open-source project, the leaders of the project send you a Thanks for Helping With Our Open-Source Project Token. When you post a lot on Reddit, other Reddit users send you Good Post on Reddit Tokens (these exist, and they’re called Community Points). When you help your friend move, your friend sends you a Thanks for Helping Me Move Token. All of these tokens are verifiably signed by their issuers (your college, the DMV, Reddit, your friend), and the issuers have varying degrees of credibility and importance. (These tokens will also, in the general case, be nontransferable: You can’t sell your college degree to someone else.)
关于 web3 的许多宏伟主张都是关于声誉和身份的。其理念是，你可以在区块链上以不可篡改、去中心化、透明、可证明的形式保存你的身份，然后用它做些有价值的事情。你拥有一些加密钱包，其中不仅包含你购买的代币，还包含你因做事而获得的代币。当你从大学毕业时，你的大学会给你一个学士学位代币，或者一系列指定你所修读的课程、成绩和可能学到的知识的代币。当你通过驾驶考试时，交通管理局会给你一个驾驶执照代币。当你参加专业会议时，会议组织会给你一个出席会议代币。当你在工作中获得晋升时，你的雇主会给你一个高级区块链开发者代币。当你帮助开源项目时，项目领导会给你一个感谢你帮助我们开源项目代币。当你在 Reddit 上发帖很多时，其他 Reddit 用户会给你一个 Reddit 好帖代币（这些代币确实存在，称为社区积分）。当你帮助朋友搬家时，你的朋友会给你一个感谢你帮助我搬家代币。所有这些代币都是由其发行者（你的大学、交通管理局、Reddit、你的朋友）可验证签名的，而发行者具有不同程度的可靠性和重要性。（这些代币在一般情况下也将是不可转让的：你不能将你的大学学位卖给别人。）

And then if you’re looking for a job, you’ll show prospective employers your degree tokens and conference tokens and Reddit tokens and whatever else seems relevant.³⁵ And if you go on a decentralized dating app, perhaps you’ll show prospective romantic partners your degree tokens and your cool-hobby tokens and the I’m a Good Romantic Partner in Many Ways Tokens that your exes sent you when you were together.³⁶ I don’t know. These things are more often described as loose utopian sketches than specific programs. When I write them down they sound extremely dystopian to me, but perhaps you disagree.
然后，如果你正在找工作，你将向潜在雇主展示你的学位 token、会议 token、Reddit token 等任何相关的东西。 ³⁵ 如果你使用去中心化的约会应用程序，也许你会向潜在的浪漫伴侣展示你的学位 token、酷爱好 token，以及你前任发送的“我是一个多方面优秀的浪漫伴侣”token 等。我不知道，这些事情通常被描述为乌托邦式的草图，而不是具体的项目。当我写下它们时，它们听起来对我来说非常反乌托邦，但也许你不同意。

Sometimes they’re spelled out a bit more. In May, Vitalik Buterin published a paper, with E. Glen Weyl and Puja Ohlhaver, called Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul. It called for a set of “non-transferable ‘soulbound’ tokens (SBTs) representing the commitments, credentials and affiliations of ‘Souls.’” A soul, in this terminology, is not quite a person, though it is more like a person than it is like a Bitcoin address. A soul could be a person, or an institution (a university, etc.), but a person could also have multiple souls for multiple contexts.
有时候它们被详细地拼写出来。在五月，Vitalik Buterin 发布了一篇论文，与 E. Glen Weyl 和 Puja Ohlhaver 合作，题为《去中心化社会：寻找 Web3 的灵魂》。该论文提出了一个“不可转让的‘灵魂绑定’令牌（SBTs）”的概念，代表“灵魂”的承诺、证书和隶属关系。在这个术语中，灵魂不完全是一个人，但比比特币地址更像是一个人。灵魂可以是一个人，也可以是一个机构（如大学等），而一个人也可以在多个背景下拥有多个灵魂。

“When issuing a tradeable NFT, an artist could issue the NFT from their Soul,” says the paper, beautifully. It would be amazing if theology could be replaced, or perhaps solved, by cryptography. A person’s soul is nothing more than the things and people that she loves, the people who love her, and the impact that she has on the world, and we’ve encoded it on the blockchain, here it is. It would be a bummer to lose the private key to your soul.³⁷
“当艺术家发行可交易的 NFT 时，艺术家可以从他们的灵魂中发行该 NFT，”论文如此美丽地写道。如果神学可以被密码学所取代或解决，那将是非常了不起的。一个人的灵魂不过是她所爱的人和事物、爱她的人，以及她对世界的影响，我们已经将其编码到区块链上了，这就是它。如果失去了灵魂的私钥，那将是非常糟糕的。

Here’s another way to describe what Satoshi did: He created a way to do irreversible transactions on computers.
另一种描述中本聪所做的事情是：他创建了一种在计算机上进行不可逆交易的方式。

Ordinarily, if there’s some database on a computer somewhere, and it changes some data field, it can just change that field back to what it was; those are equivalent, easy things for a computer to do. But the blockchain makes it hard to change things back. If a Bitcoin moves from one address to another address, and that transaction is included in a block, and then a few more blocks are added afterward “confirming” the transaction, then it would take an unfathomable amount of computer work—running hash functions trillions and trillions of times—to rewind the blockchain to remove that transaction. Blockchain is one-way; its ledger is permanent.
通常，如果某个计算机上的数据库改变了某个数据字段，它可以轻松地将该字段恢复到原来的状态；对于计算机来说，这些操作都是等同的、容易的。但是，区块链使得这种恢复变得困难。如果比特币从一个地址转移到另一个地址，并且该交易被包含在一个块中，然后又添加了几个块来“确认”该交易，那么要撤销该交易将需要进行不可思议的计算工作——运行哈希函数数万亿次。区块链是一种单向的账本，它是永久的。

This is nice if you want your ledger to be really secure, hard to hack, backed up in multiple places, though honestly it’s probably an overkill for those purposes. But it’s really nice if you want your ledger to be immune from government meddling. Or, really, anyone’s meddling. Crypto people call any interference with transactions “censorship.” Bitcoin is “censorship-resistant.” You might not trust the government, because, for instance, you live in a repressive dictatorship that controls the banking system and will seize your money from you unjustly.
如果你想要你的账本非常安全、难以入侵、备份在多个地方，那么这非常好。虽然诚实地说，对于这些目的来说这可能是过度杀鸡用牛刀。但是，如果你想要你的账本免受政府干涉，或者说任何人的干涉，那么这非常好。加密货币人士将任何交易干涉称为“审查”。比特币是“审查抵抗”的。例如，你可能不信任政府，因为你生活在一个压制性独裁政权下，该政权控制银行系统，并会不公正地没收你的钱财。

Or you might have other objections. US banks, often though not always in conjunction with US government agencies, are very much in the business of blocking payments. They’ll block payments to organizations designated as terrorists by the government, or to countries sanctioned by the government. But they’ll also block payments to pornographic websites in response to public pressure campaigns. If you’d like to finance terrorism or do business in Iran or consume internet porn, this sort of thing might drive you to embrace crypto. But even if you don’t like terrorism or Iran or porn, this sort of thing might make you nervous. What other forms of commerce might be shut down by the government, or by banks acting independently of the government?³⁸
或者你可能有其他异议。美国银行，经常与美国政府机构合作，也经常阻止支付。它们会阻止向政府指定的恐怖组织或制裁国家的支付。但它们也会在公共压力运动下阻止向色情网站的支付。如果你想资助恐怖主义或在伊朗做生意或消费互联网色情，这种情况可能会驱使你拥抱加密货币。但即使你不喜欢恐怖主义或伊朗或色情，这种情况也可能会使你感到不安。政府或独立于政府的银行可能会关闭哪些形式的商业？

The practical problem with censorship resistance is that the crypto world touches the real world at various points, and those contacts make it hard to be totally free from the pressures of outside influence. A meme in crypto is the “$5 wrench attack,” named for an xkcd web cartoon pointing out that the way to steal someone’s cryptocurrency isn’t by using sophisticated methods to hack his laptop but rather by “hitting him with this $5 wrench until he tells us the password.”
对抗审查的实际问题是，crypto 世界与现实世界在多个点上接触，这些接触使得完全摆脱外部影响的压力变得困难。在 crypto 中有一个流行的 meme，称为“5 美元扳手攻击”，来自 xkcd 网络漫画，指出偷取某人的加密货币的方法不是使用复杂的黑客方法，而是“用这个 5 美元扳手敲打他，直到他泄露密码。”

The other problem is that, while crypto generally creates decentralized and irreversible transactions, it also creates a permanent public record of those transactions. The government can just look at that record! It can’t reverse the transactions, but it can do its best to make life unpleasant for the recipients.
另一个问题是，加密货币通常创建了去中心化和不可逆的交易，但也创建了永久的公共交易记录。政府可以查看该记录！它不能逆转交易，但可以尽力使收款人的生活变得不愉快。

You can send Bitcoin to anyone without anyone’s permission. But at some point you’ll want to do something with Bitcoin. You’ll want to spend it; if you have a lot of it, you’ll want to spend it on real estate or yachts or jewelry or art.³⁹ A financial system cannot be entirely self-contained; you have to be able to turn your money into actual stuff.
你可以在不需要任何人许可的情况下将比特币发送给任何人。但是，到了某个时候，你将想要用比特币做些什么。你将想要花费它；如果你拥有很多比特币，你将想要用它来购买房产、游艇、珠宝或艺术品。金融系统不能完全自给自足；你必须能够将钱转换成实际的物品。

And that’s where they get you. The normal way to turn your Bitcoin into dollars is through a centralized crypto exchange, such as the apps for buying and selling crypto that you saw advertised during the Super Bowl. They’re the main “fiat off-ramp,” the place that lets you sell your Bitcoin (which are hard to spend) for dollars (which are easy to spend). Centralized crypto exchanges are extremely censorable, since they tend to be run by wealthy CEOs who would prefer to remain wealthy and not in prison, and so they’ll do things like ask you for your driver’s license before letting you open an account. If you’re on the government’s “do not open an account” list, they won’t open an account for you.
那就是他们控制你的地方。将比特币兑换成美元的正常方式是通过中心化的加密交易所，例如你在超级碗期间看到的购买和出售加密货币的应用程序。它们是主要的“法币离岸”，让你可以将难以花费的比特币兑换成易于花费的美元。中心化的加密交易所非常容易受到审查，因为它们往往由富有的富豪经营，他们宁愿保持富有也不愿坐牢，因此他们会要求你提供驾驶执照才能开设账户。如果你在政府的“不允许开设账户”名单上，他们就不会为你开设账户。

Also, if your Bitcoin are on a bad list, they won’t turn them into dollars for you. If you come by 100,000 Bitcoin in the wrong way—by hacking someone’s Bitcoin account, or by doing a ransomware attack, or by getting them from an address that the government has blacklisted for some good or bad reason—and transfer them into an exchange, the exchange will ask you where they came from. Also the government, and the exchange, can trace the provenance of your Bitcoin and see if any of them were involved in known bad transactions (hacks, ransomware, etc.). And if they were, the exchange can block you from taking your money out and can call the police.
此外，如果你的比特币在黑名单上，它们就不会将其兑换成美元。如果你通过不正当的手段获得 10 万比特币——例如黑客某人的比特币账户、实施勒索软件攻击或从政府列入黑名单的地址获取——然后将其转移到交易所，交易所将询问它们来自哪里。政府和交易所也可以追溯你的比特币的来源，检查它们是否参与了已知的恶意交易（黑客、勒索软件等）。如果它们参与了，交易所可以阻止你提取资金，并报警。

Earlier this year a couple were arrested and accused of trying to launder 119,754 Bitcoin stolen from the Bitfinex exchange in a 2016 hack. (She was a YouTube rapper and a Forbes contributor—colorful character!) That’s billions of dollars of Bitcoin at today’s prices. But these people were not living particularly large, because it turns out billions of dollars of stolen Bitcoin can be extremely difficult to spend and extremely easy to track. Most of the allegedly stolen Bitcoin never left the account where they first landed after the hack. Some were sent to crypto exchanges and converted into dollars, but the exchanges kept meticulous records of who was opening the accounts and withdrawing the money and quickly froze withdrawals. Some were exchanged for gold at a precious-metals dealer, but they had to show a driver’s license and give a real home address for that transaction, so the FBI saw who got the gold. Some of the money was spent on a Walmart gift card, and if you’re buying a Walmart gift card with your billions of dollars of stolen censorship-resistant currency, then your money laundering is not going well.
今年早些时候，一对夫妇被捕并被控试图洗钱 119,754 比特币，这些比特币是 2016 年比特芬克斯交易所被黑客攻击时盗走的。那笔钱在今天的价格相当于数十亿美元。但是，这些人并没有过着特别奢侈的生活，因为盗走的比特币数十亿美元非常难以花费，也非常容易追踪。大部分据称被盗的比特币从未离开最初落入的账户。一些被发送到加密货币交易所，并兑换成美元，但是交易所保留了谁开设账户和提取钱款的 meticulous 记录，并快速冻结了提款。一些被兑换成黄金在贵金属交易商那里，但是他们需要出示驾驶执照并提供真实的家庭地址，以便进行该交易，因此FBI看到了谁获得了黄金。一些钱被花费在沃尔玛礼品卡上，如果你用数十亿美元的盗窃货币购买沃尔玛礼品卡，那么你的洗钱就不太成功。

We’ve talked about how Satoshi’s essential technological innovation was that he found a way to make numbers on computers scarce. And a weirdly important generalization of Bitcoin is that it is a way to create electronic scarcity.
我们已经讨论过萨托西的基本技术创新是，他找到了一种方法，使计算机上的数字变得稀缺。比特币的一个奇怪的重要推广是，它是一种创建电子稀缺的方式。

Is that good? For digital cash it is, sure. Dollars are electronic ledger entries that are scarce because a complicated system of banking regulation makes them scarce; banks can make new dollars just by changing a number in a database, but there’s a lot of ceremony involved in making sure they do that in the right way. If you want a decentralized permissionless system of money without trust or regulation, you need some way to limit how much money there is, and Bitcoin solved that problem.
这样好吗？对于数字货币来说，当然是好的。美元只是电子账簿条目，因为复杂的银行监管系统使其稀缺；银行可以通过简单地在数据库中更改一个数字来创造新美元，但确保他们以正确方式做到这一点需要很多仪式。如果你想要一个去中心化的、无需许可的货币系统，不需要信任或监管，那么你需要某种方式来限制货币的数量，而比特币解决了这个问题。

The broader idea of scarce digital assets is weirder, though. The normal condition of human existence is that good stuff is scarce, and companies make money selling it to us because we can’t get infinite amounts of it for free. This isn’t always true of everything, but it’s generally true of the things that you notice paying for. (In general you can breathe as much air as you want for free, though science fiction occasionally has fun imagining dystopian worlds where air is scarce, expensive, and controlled by corporations. Crypto people sometimes have fun imagining those worlds, too, but thinking they’re utopias.)
然而，稀缺数字资产的概念更奇怪。人类存在的正常状态是，好的东西都是稀缺的，公司通过卖给我们这些东西来赚钱，因为我们不能免费获得无限数量的这些东西。这并不总是对所有事情都成立，但它通常适用于我们注意到的付费项目。（一般来说，你可以免费呼吸尽可能多的空气，虽然科幻小说偶尔会想象出一个空气稀缺、昂贵、由公司控制的反乌托邦世界。加密货币人士有时也会想象出这样的世界，但认为它们是乌托邦。）

It’s hard to mine coal
开采煤炭很难

or make a chair
或制造一把椅子

or train a tax accountant.
或培训一名税务会计。

There isn’t an unlimited supply of those things, so they cost money. Every so often a scarce thing becomes abundant—a vast oil field is discovered, a robot is invented that can make 100 chairs per hour—and prices drop, and the people who were previously in the business go broke.
这些东西的供应不是无限的，所以它们需要花钱。有时候稀缺的东西变得丰富——发现一个巨大的油田，发明了一台每小时可以生产 100 把椅子的机器器——价格就会下跌，之前从事这个行业的人就会破产。

So there’s a natural intuition that scarcity creates value and abundance destroys it. This is, of course, wrong. You’d rather have more stuff than less. As a consumer, abundance is good. But you can’t get rich selling stuff that’s infinitely available for free. And you want to get rich.
所以人们自然会认为稀缺创造价值，丰富摧毁价值。这当然是错误的。你宁愿拥有更多的东西，而不是更少的。作为消费者，丰富是好的。但是你不能靠出售免费的东西变得富有。你想变得富有。

The modern world has developed ways to get rich by selling stuff that, in theory, is infinitely available because it’s electronic. Microsoft Word is not really scarce: The amount of physical resources (electricity, computing power, disk space) involved in making one more copy of that computer program and putting it on my computer is tiny in the scheme of things, and when I pay for a copy of Word, I’m paying Microsoft Corp. for the effort involved in coming up with Word in the first place, not for the marginal copy. And Microsoft is, in part, in the business of making those copies scarce—of making it not trivial to copy its programs, with copy-protection schemes and subscription plans—so that it can charge for them.
现代世界已经找到了一些方法，可以靠出售理论上可以无限供应的电子产品变得富有。Microsoft Word 并不是真正稀缺的：制作一份 Word 副本并将其安装到我的电脑上所需的物理资源（电力、计算能力、磁盘空间）在整个计划中微不足道，当我购买 Word 副本时，我是向微软公司支付开发 Word 的努力，而不是支付边际副本。微软公司部分地从事使这些副本变得稀缺的业务——使用复制保护方案和订阅计划，使其可以收费。

Or, if you regularly read Bloomberg online, thank you for paying to get past our paywall. Some of your money is going toward paying for our servers to deliver one more impression of an article to your browser. Not very much of it, though. Most of it is going to me, haha, thanks!
或者，如果你经常在线阅读彭博新闻，谢谢你支付了我们的付费墙。你的钱有一部分用于支付我们的服务器向你的浏览器提供一篇文章的费用。虽然不多，大部分钱都去了我这里，哈哈，谢谢！

One possible future is that the world will be increasingly like that, at least for some people.⁴⁰ Technological progress will make the basic necessities increasingly abundant and also less fun, the physical world will become more homogenous and boring, and everyone will spend more of their time online. Their friendships and romances and family life will occur on computers; their lives will get meaning from stuff that happens on computers.
未来的一种可能是，世界将变得越来越像这样，至少对于一些人来说。技术进步将使基本需求变得越来越丰富，也越来越无趣，物理世界将变得越来越同质化和乏味，每个人将花更多时间在线上。他们的友谊、恋爱和家庭生活将发生在计算机上；他们的生活将从计算机上发生的事情中获得意义。

One possibility here is that this will just be nice and egalitarian: Everyone can find their own communities and live in the limitless abundance of the internet. The other possibility is that in an internet world the essential goods will be positional. Being in the cool internet chat room will be desirable the way living in a fancy house in a good neighborhood is desirable now. Having a cool online avatar will be desirable in the way that wearing a nice watch is desirable now. And if crypto is a way to make those things scarce, to make the desirable avatars a limited edition available only to trendsetting early adopters and rich people, then you can make money selling them.
这里的一种可能性是，这将只是非常 nice 和平等的：每个人都可以找到自己的社区，并生活在互联网的无限丰富中。另一种可能性是，在互联网世界中，基本商品将是位置性的。在 cool 的互联网聊天室中拥有位置将是非常 desirable 的，就像现在拥有豪宅在好 neighborhood 一样。拥有 cool 的在线头像将是非常 desirable 的，就像现在戴着昂贵的手表一样。如果加密货币是一种使这些东西变得稀少的方式，使 desirable 的头像只对时尚的早期采用者和富人开放，那么你就可以赚钱卖它们。

This all seems bad to me,
这一切对我来说似乎都是坏的，

I guess we have to talk about NFTs again.
我们不得不再次讨论 NFT。

Remember, an NFT is just a token with a number. If you buy a Bitcoin, your Bitcoin is identical to anyone else’s Bitcoin.⁴¹ If you buy an NFT, it has a number. There will be some series of NFTs—some ERC-721 token series with a name, let’s call them Tedious Tamarins—and each NFT in that series will have a number, and Tedious Tamarin No. 63 will be distinguished from Tedious Tamarin No. 64 by having a different number.
记住，NFT 只是一个带有编号的令牌。如果你买了比特币，你的比特币与任何其他人的比特币相同。 ⁴¹ 如果你买了 NFT，它就有一个编号。有一些 NFT 系列——一些名为“讨厌的狒狒”的 ERC-721 令牌系列——每个 NFT 在该系列中都有一个编号，而讨厌的狒狒第 63 号将因其不同的编号而与讨厌的狒狒第 64 号区分开来。

I’m being as trivial as possible, but of course everything on the internet is distinguished from everything else on the internet by having a different series of numbers. That’s all internet culture is, numbers encoding pictures and sounds and text and arguments. There’s no reason in principle why the number 63 should not encode a tamarin who looks bored but really cool, while the number 64 encodes a tamarin who looks bored and kinda schlubby. And so you might pay more for No. 63 because he looks cooler.
我尽量变得琐碎，但当然互联网上的所有东西都是通过不同的数字系列来区分的。这就是互联网文化的全部，数字编码图片、声音、文本和争论。从原则上讲，没有理由 why 数字 63 不能编码一个看起来很酷的狒狒，而数字 64 编码一个看起来很无精打采的狒狒。因此，你可能会因为他看起来更酷而为第 63 号支付更多。

What this means technically is interesting. The paradigmatic NFT is some piece of digital art: Tedious Tamarins is a series of 1,000 digital drawings of slightly different monkeys with bored expressions, and different tamarins will be worth more depending on how cool they look. (Commonly an NFT series will have a handful of possible attributes—a tamarin might be smoking a cigarette, or wearing a funny hat, or yawning, or closing its eyes, and tamarins will be worth more depending on how many attributes they have and how rare those attributes are. You could imagine the value of different NFTs within a series being based on purely aesthetic considerations, but, mostly not.)
从技术角度看，这非常有趣。典型的 NFT 是某种数字艺术品：Tedious Tamarins 是一系列 1000 幅微妙不同的猴子数字绘画，带着无聊的表情，不同的猴子价值取决于它们看起来有多酷。（通常 NFT 系列会有一些可能的属性——猴子可能在吸烟、戴着有趣的帽子、打哈欠或闭上眼睛，猴子的价值取决于它们拥有的属性数量和这些属性的稀有程度。你可以想象系列中不同 NFT 的价值基于纯粹的美学考虑，但大多数情况下不是这样。）

But what does it mean to say that the NFT is a piece of digital art? The art does not live on the blockchain. As the well-known software engineer and hacker who goes by the name Moxie Marlinspike wrote in a blog post:
但是什么意思，说 NFT 是一件数字艺术品？艺术作品并不存储在区块链上。正如著名软件工程师和黑客 Moxie Marlinspike 在博客文章中所写的那样：

Instead of storing the data on-chain, NFTs instead contain a URL that points to the data. What surprised me about the standards was that there’s no hash commitment for the data located at the URL. Looking at many of the NFTs on popular marketplaces being sold for tens, hundreds, or millions of dollars, that URL often just points to some VPS running Apache somewhere. Anyone with access to that machine, anyone who buys that domain name in the future, or anyone who compromises that machine can change the image, title, description, etc for the NFT to whatever they’d like at any time (regardless of whether or not they “own” the token). There’s nothing in the NFT spec that tells you what the image “should” be, or even allows you to confirm whether something is the “correct” image.
NFT 不是将数据存储在链上，而是包含一个指向数据的 URL。我对标准的惊讶之处在于，位于 URL 的数据没有哈希承诺。在热门市场上，以数十、数百或数百万美元出售的许多 NFT，URL 通常只是指向某个运行 Apache 的 VPS 机器。任何拥有该机器访问权限、将来购买该域名或破坏该机器的人都可以随时更改 NFT 的图像、标题、描述等内容（无论他们是否“拥有”该令牌）。NFT 规范中没有告诉你图像“应该”是什么样的，也不允许你确认某个图像是否是“正确”的图像。

If you buy an NFT, what you own is a notation on the blockchain that says you own a pointer to some web server. On that web server there’s probably a picture of a monkey, but that’s none of the blockchain’s business.
如果你购买了 NFT，你拥有的只是区块链上的一条记录，表明你拥有某个网页服务器上的指针。那台服务器上可能有一只猴子的图片，但这与区块链无关。

Meanwhile the intellectual-property rights to that picture of a monkey are certainly none of the blockchain’s business. It’s not uncommon for the person or company selling the NFT series to 1) own the IP rights to the pictures of the monkeys and 2) promise to transfer those rights, or some of them, to individual holders of the NFTs. But if that happens, it happens off the blockchain; those promises are or aren’t enforceable through the normal legal system. And it’s not all that uncommon for the person selling the NFT series not to own the IP rights. Early in the NFT boom, it was common for people to make NFTs “of” the Mona Lisa or the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s just a token with a number; why can’t that number refer to “the Brooklyn Bridge”?
同时，那只猴子的知识产权当然也与区块链无关。出售 NFT 系列的人或公司不常拥有猴子图片的知识产权，并承诺将这些权利或部分权利转让给 NFT 持有者。但是，如果发生这种情况，那么它发生在区块链之外；这些承诺通过正常的法律系统或不可强制执行。此外，出售 NFT 系列的人也不常拥有知识产权。NFT 热潮初期，人们常常制作 Mona Lisa 或布鲁克林大桥的 NFT。它只是一个带有编号的 token；为什么这个编号不能指向“布鲁克林大桥”？

In some ways this technical silliness makes NFTs more culturally interesting. If you buy an NFT, all you’re getting is a very thin signifier, some fragile pointer to some piece of digital art. And yet people do pay a lot of money for NFTs with the right sort of monkey picture. These NFTs may not represent ownership in any particularly binding sense, but they represent a feeling of ownership. And they also represent a form of community.
在某些方面，这种技术上的荒谬性使 NFT 更具文化趣味性。如果你购买了 NFT，你所获得的只是一个非常薄弱的符号，一些脆弱的指向某个数字艺术品的指针。然而，人们仍然愿意为拥有正确类型猴子图片的 NFT 支付很多钱。这些 NFT 可能不代表任何真正的所有权，但它们代表了一种所有权感。它们也代表了一种社区形式。

The most famous NFT collection is of course the Bored Ape Yacht Club, a series of 10,000 JPEG images of monkeys on Ethereum, some of which sell for millions of dollars. There’s no physical yacht club, but there are (IRL) parties for Bored Ape owners. Various celebrities, art dealers, and venture capitalists own apes, and owning an ape is a way to join an exclusive club. And that club has its norms, and those norms include “It is cool to use a picture of your ape as your Twitter profile picture” and “It is not cool to use a picture of an ape you don’t own as your Twitter profile picture.” The technological and legal connections between blockchain and JPEG and ownership are a bit thin, but the connections are enforced culturally.
当然，最著名的 NFT 集合是无聊猿游艇俱乐部，一系列 10,000 张以太坊上的猴子 JPEG 图像，其中一些卖出了数百万美元。没有真正的游艇俱乐部，但有为无聊猿所有者的 IRL 派对。各种名人、艺术经销商和风险投资家都拥有猿，而拥有猿是加入一个独家俱乐部的方式。这个俱乐部有其规范，这些规范包括“使用您自己的猿作为 Twitter 头像是酷的”和“使用您不拥有的猿作为 Twitter 头像是不酷的”。区块链、JPEG 和所有权之间的技术和法律连接有点薄弱，但这些连接是文化上强制执行的。

I plan to go to my grave not knowing what “the metaverse” is, so I’m certainly not going to explain it to you. But one thing it is is that you can buy some real estate on the internet. Like, there will be a picture of a house on the internet, and you can have an avatar on the internet that lives in the house, and the avatar can walk from your internet house to the internet store, where it can buy some internet groceries. It will be like a computer game, but more all-consuming and much more boring.
我计划在我去世前不知道什么是“元宇宙”，所以我当然不会向你解释它。但有一件事是，你可以在互联网上购买一些房产。像，互联网上会有一张房子的图片，你可以在互联网上拥有一个头像，头像可以从你的互联网房子走到互联网商店，在那里可以购买一些互联网杂货。这将像一场电脑游戏，但更加耗费时间和更加无聊。

How much should your house in the metaverse cost? Two plausible answers might be “It should cost as much as a house, it’s a house,” or “It should be basically free, it’s just a file on a computer, there’s essentially infinite space in the metaverse, and nobody has to actually nail together the house.” The second answer strikes me as correct, but that’s no fun for the people selling houses on the internet.
你在元宇宙中的房子应该多少钱？两个合理的答案可能是“它应该像一所房子那样贵，因为它是一所房子”，或“它应该基本免费，因为它只是电脑上的一个文件，在元宇宙中有无限的空间，并且没有人需要实际建造这所房子”。第二个答案似乎正确，但这对互联网上的房产销售者来说不是很有趣。

So, scarcity. The internet houses are NFTs. The goal is to make some of them scarce and prestigious. Having an internet house next door to Elon Musk’s internet house is desirable, let’s assume, and only a couple of internet houses can be next door to Elon Musk’s internet house. Why? They’re all on computers; you could put a million internet houses next door to Elon’s internet house, but you don’t. You make the positional goods scarce.
所以，稀缺性。互联网上的房子是 NFT。目标是使其中的一些变得稀缺和崇高。拥有一个位于埃隆·马斯克互联网房子旁边的互联网房子是可取的，让我们假设，只有少数互联网房子可以位于埃隆·马斯克的互联网房子旁边。为什么？它们都在计算机上；你可以把一百万互联网房子放在埃隆的互联网房子旁边，但你不这样做。你使位置商品变得稀缺。

This is dumb, but, I mean, look at Facebook (Meta, now). What are the odds that, 50 years from now, the center of the world economy will be digital goods? What are the odds that we will all spend most of our time and money seeking status and romance and connection and entertainment on the internet? If most goods end up being digital, if most people make their money by producing digital goods, then monitoring and metering the distribution of those goods will be an important economic function. Digital scarcity.
这很傻，但看看 Facebook（现在是 Meta）。50 年后，世界经济中心将是数字商品的可能性有多大？我们将花费大部分时间和金钱在互联网上寻找地位、浪漫、连接和娱乐的可能性有多大？如果大多数商品最终都是数字的，如果大多数人通过生产数字商品赚钱，那么监控和计量这些商品的分配将是一个重要的经济功能。数字稀缺性。

I’m sorry to be This Type of Guy, but it’s hard not to think of the movie The Matrix. You know the premise: Everyone is a sack of meat in a bath of nutrients with their brains plugged into a remarkably realistic simulation of late-’90s America. Why a remarkably realistic simulation of late-’90s America? Why does Neo, the main character, have to go work at a boring desk job if he’s just a brain in a vat being fed a soothing simulation by the machines? Agent Smith explains:
我很抱歉是这种人，但很难不想到电影《矩阵》。你知道这个前提：每个人都是一个浸泡在营养液中的肉袋，脑袋插入一个非常逼真的美国 90 年代晚期模拟中。为什么是一个非常逼真的美国 90 年代晚期模拟？为什么 Neo，这个主角，需要去做一个枯燥的办公室工作，如果他只是一个被机器喂养的脑袋？史密斯代理人解释：

So they simulated late capitalism instead. Even in a world where all the goods are digital and available in limitless abundance, you still have to have a (simulated) desk job to pay for them. Digital scarcity.
于是他们模拟了晚期资本主义。即使在一个所有商品都是数字化的、无限丰富的世界中，你仍然需要有一份（模拟的）办公室工作来支付它们。数字稀缺。

III
The Crypto Financial System
III 加密金融系统

Let’s step back a bit and abstract from what we’ve discussed so far. Crypto is:
让我们退一步，抽象出我们迄今为止讨论的内容。加密货币是：

If you read only that description, you might object: “Yes, fine, but what is crypto for? What do these tokens do? Why are they worth money?” Nothing in that description answers those objections. I suppose the last one does, in a sense—“Crypto tokens are for building smart contracts for trading crypto tokens”—but it’s not a very good answer, because it’s entirely self-referential. “Yes, fine, but why are you trading the tokens in the first place?”
如果你只读了那个描述，你可能会反对：“好的，但是加密货币是干什么的？这些代币有什么用？它们为什么值钱？”那个描述没有回答这些反对。我认为最后一个问题在某种意义上回答了——“加密代币是用来建立智能合约以交易加密代币的”——但是这不是一个很好的答案，因为它完全是自我参照的。“好的，但是你为什么要交易这些代币呢？”

But for now I want to set this objection to the side. If you’re a certain sort of financial person—a financial engineer, an arbitrageur, a market-structure enthusiast, a builder of high-frequency trading systems—this abstract set of facts is incredibly, incredibly beautiful. You wake up one day, and there’s just a whole other financial system. It’s full of smart people building interesting things, and it’s full of idiots making terrible mistakes. People have built brilliant new ways to make financial bets that you can use, and they’ve built insane new ways to make financial bets that you can exploit. How can you not want to join in? It’s so interesting, so intellectually appealing, such a blank canvas for all of your aesthetic views about how markets should work. Also, so many idiots are getting rich; why shouldn’t you?
但是现在我想暂时搁置这个反对。如果你是一种特定的金融人士——金融工程师、套利者、市场结构爱好者、高频交易系统的建设者——这个抽象的事实集合是非常、非常美丽的。你一觉醒来，发现有一个完全不同的金融系统。它充满了聪明人建立有趣的东西，也充满了傻瓜犯下的可怕错误。人们建立了聪明的新方式来进行金融投注，你可以使用它们，也建立了疯狂的新方式来进行金融投注，你可以利用它们。为什么你不想加入？这太有趣了，太有智慧的吸引力了，对于市场如何运作的所有美学观点是一个空白的画布。此外，还有很多傻瓜变得富有；为什么你不应该？

There are other appealing properties when you compare this system to traditional finance. The crypto system is, philosophically, one of permissionless innovation. The workings of the major blockchains are public and open-source; if you want to build a derivatives exchange or margin-lending protocol or whatever in Ethereum, you just do it. You don’t need to set up a meeting with Vitalik Buterin to get his approval. You don’t need to negotiate access and fees with the Ethereum Corp.; there is no Ethereum Corp. Anyone can try anything and see if it works.
与传统金融系统相比，这个系统还有其他吸引人的特性。从哲学角度讲，crypto 系统是一种无需许可的创新。主要区块链的运作是公开的、开源的；如果你想在 Ethereum 建立衍生品交易所或边际贷款协议，或者其他什么，你就可以这样做。你不需要与 Vitalik Buterin 会面以获得他的批准。你不需要与 Ethereum 公司谈判访问和费用；因为没有 Ethereum 公司。任何人都可以尝试任何事情，看看是否有效。

If you’re a smart young person coming from traditional finance, this feels liberating. If you’re used to spending months negotiating credit agreements with prime brokers and setting up direct access to trade on a stock exchange, the idea that you can just do stuff in crypto, with no preliminaries, is amazing. Obviously it’s a bit alarming as well: Some of those long, slow processes in traditional finance are there to prevent money laundering or fraud or ill-considered risk-taking. But, empirically, a lot of them aren’t really preventing any of those things, or aren’t doing so in an optimal way. A lot of them are just How It’s Always Been Done. Nothing in crypto is How It’s Always Been Done; it’s all too new.
如果你是一名来自传统金融的聪明年轻人，这感觉非常解放。如果你习惯于与主要经纪商谈判信用协议，并设置直接访问股票交易所的权限，那么在 crypto 中可以不经任何前提就做事的想法是惊人的。当然，这也有点吓人：传统金融中的一些漫长、缓慢的过程是为了防止洗钱、欺诈或不当风险承担。但是，从经验上讲，这些过程中有很多并没有真正防止这些事情，或者并没有以最佳方式防止这些事情。很多只是因为这是传统做法。crypto 中没有什么是传统做法的；一切都是太新的。

And so people invented a financial system for crypto. It runs alongside the traditional financial system, though they touch at many points. In some ways it looks a lot like a copy of the traditional financial system. In other ways it looks totally different. In some ways it’s a streamlined and modernized and innovative evolution of the traditional system. In other ways it’s a chaotic and stupid devolution of the traditional system, a version of traditional finance (“TradFi,” as crypto people call it) that unlearned important historic lessons about fraud and leverage and risk and regulation.
于是，人们发明了一种加密金融系统。它与传统金融系统并行运行，尽管它们在许多点上相互交叉。在某些方面，它看起来很像传统金融系统的副本。在其他方面，它看起来完全不同。在某些方面，它是传统系统的简化、现代化和创新演变。在其他方面，它是传统金融系统（加密人称其为“传统金融”）的一个混乱和愚蠢的退化版本，该版本未吸取关于欺诈、杠杆、风险和监管的重要历史教训。

Maybe the first thing to say about the crypto financial system is that the traditional financial system is deeply intermediated, and the crypto system is not. If you have money, your bank tracks your money for you; if you have stock, your broker tracks your stock for you; etc.
也许关于加密金融系统的第一件事是，传统金融系统是深度中介的，而加密系统不是。如果你有钱，你的银行会跟踪你的钱；如果你有股票，你的券商会跟踪你的股票；等等。

One dumb, simple thing that this means: If you have money in the bank, your bank has to give it to you. If you forget the PIN code for your ATM card or if you forget the password for your online banking, you’ll have a hard time taking out money, and that will be inconvenient for you. But the bank owes you the money; they can’t just be like, “Aha, got you, the money is ours now.” There’s some process by which you can go into the bank and prove that you are who you say you are, and they’re like, “Fine, we’ll reset your password, it’s Test1234, don’t forget this time.”
这意味着一个简单的事情：如果你在银行有钱，你的银行必须把钱给你。如果你忘记了 ATM 卡的 PIN 码或在线银行的密码，你将很难取出钱，这将对你造成不便。但银行欠你的钱；他们不能像这样说：“哈哈，我们现在拥有钱了。”有一个过程，你可以去银行证明你是谁，然后他们就会说：“好的，我们将密码重置为 Test1234，不要再忘记了。”

Crypto doesn’t necessarily work like that. Owning Bitcoin means 1) having a public Bitcoin address with some Bitcoin in it and 2) possessing the private key to that address. If you have the public address/private key pair, then you own the Bitcoin; you can transfer them to someone else on the blockchain. If you don’t have that pair, then you can’t. If you lose your private key or lose track of your public address, there’s no one to recover your password for you or give you back your Bitcoin. They’re just gone.
加密货币不一定是那样工作的。拥有比特币意味着两件事：1) 拥有一个带有比特币的公共比特币地址，2) 拥有该地址的私钥。如果你拥有公共地址/私钥对，那么你拥有比特币；你可以将其转移到区块链上的其他人。如果你没有那对，则不能。如果你丢失私钥或遗忘公共地址，没有人可以恢复你的密码或退还你的比特币。它们就消失了。

There are ways to, you know, not lose your keys. Mainly people use “software wallets,” which generate and keep track of their addresses and private keys and allow them to sign transactions and send and receive crypto online. The wallets may be desktop or phone apps, or extensions on a browser. Most modern wallets require you to keep track not of private keys, but rather a “seed phrase” of, typically, 12 random-looking words. Maybe: “army truth speak average” and so on.
不过，有方法可以不丢失密钥。主要是人们使用“软件钱包”，它可以生成和跟踪地址和私钥，并允许在线签署交易和发送、接收加密货币。这些钱包可能是桌面或手机应用程序，也可能是浏览器扩展。大多数现代钱包不需要你跟踪私钥，而是跟踪一个典型的 12 个随机单词的“种子短语”。例如：“army truth speak average”等。

The phrase can be used as a seed to generate lots of public-private key pairs, so the wallet can create lots of different addresses that can all be recovered from a single seed phrase. (People often speak of wallets “holding” crypto, but really what they have are these keys for various addresses; the crypto is only ever on the blockchain.) Then you write the seed phrase down on a piece of paper, which is easier to write than a long random number.
这个短语可以用作种子来生成许多公共-私钥对，因此钱包可以创建许多不同的地址，这些地址都可以从单个种子短语中恢复。（人们经常说钱包“持有”加密货币，但实际上它们拥有的是各种地址的密钥；加密货币只存在于区块链上。）然后，你可以将种子短语写在一张纸上，这比写长随机数更容易。

But this is a developing technology, and there’s a long history of people losing, forgetting, or throwing away their private keys or seed phrases. A guy in Wales named James Howells periodically pops up in the news, because he threw away a hard drive with the private key for 8,000 Bitcoin. He’s pretty sure he knows the garbage dump that has his hard drive, and for years he’s been waging a campaign to dig up the dump and sift through the garbage. If he finds the hard drive and if it still works, then he’ll have Bitcoin worth about $150 million, which he can use to pay all the garbage diggers. In one sense it would be much, much better to have a financial system in which the bank could reset his password and give him back the 8,000 Bitcoin, instead of digging up a garbage dump. In another sense
但是，这是一项正在开发的技术，有很多人失去了、忘记了或扔掉了他们的私钥或种子短语。威尔士的一个人詹姆斯·豪威尔斯经常出现在新闻中，因为他扔掉了一个硬盘，其中包含 8000 比特币的私钥。他非常确定他知道垃圾堆填区的位置，并且多年来一直在努力挖掘垃圾堆填区和筛选垃圾。如果他找到硬盘并且它仍然可以使用，那么他将拥有价值约 1500 万美元的比特币，可以用来支付所有的垃圾清洁工人。在某种意义上，拥有一个银行可以重置密码并将 8000 比特币归还给他的金融系统将会非常非常好，而不是挖掘垃圾堆填区。在另一种意义上，

If you’re a portfolio manager at an institutional investor, and you want to buy Bitcoin, and you go to your compliance and operations people and say, “I want to buy Bitcoin, and I will write our private keys down on a Post-it that I will keep next to my computer,” they will say no. If you propose better security measures, they might still say no: This stuff is too new, too scary. If you say, “MegaBank Custody Services will hold our Bitcoin for us, and we’ll just have a book entry on their ledger saying we have Bitcoin,” then compliance might be a bit more comfortable, but that requires MegaBank to offer that service.
如果你是一家机构投资者的投资组合经理，你想购买比特币，并且你去找你的合规和运营人员说，“我想购买比特币，并且我将我们的私钥写在一张贴纸上，放在我的电脑旁边，”他们将说不。如果你提议更好的安全措施，他们可能仍然会说不：这些东西太新、太可怕。如果你说，“巨型银行托管服务将为我们持有比特币，我们将只在他们的账簿上记下我们拥有比特币的记录，”那么合规人员可能会感到有点舒服，但这需要巨型银行提供这种服务。

But what if you go to compliance and say, “I’m just going to enter into a bet with a hedge fund on the price of Bitcoin. For every dollar that Bitcoin goes up, the hedge fund will pay us $5; for every dollar that it goes down, we’ll pay them $5.” Then you don’t have to own crypto at all. All you have is an over-the-counter derivative with a hedge fund. Compliance knows what that is; that’s an understandable thing. There are no weird custody issues there, because there’s nothing to keep custody of. There are no weird “coins” to worry about, just a contract with a hedge fund to pay you money. You can write contracts on the price of corn,
但是，如果你去找合规部门，说：“我只是要与对冲基金在比特币价格上进行赌注。每当比特币上涨一美元，对冲基金就会支付我们 5 美元；每当比特币下跌一美元，我们就会支付他们 5 美元。”那么你就不需要拥有加密货币了。你拥有的只是与对冲基金的一份场外衍生品。合规部门知道这是什么；这是一个可以理解的事情。在那里没有奇怪的托管问题，因为没有什么需要托管的东西。没有奇怪的“币”需要担忧，只是与对冲基金的一份合同来支付你钱。你可以写出关于玉米价格的合同，

on interest rates, 关于利率，

and on hurricane damage,
和关于飓风损害，

so why not Bitcoin? You do due diligence on the hedge fund, you get comfortable with the credit and collateral terms, and then you sign the contract. And then, economically, you own some Bitcoin—your investment goes up when Bitcoin goes up, and down when Bitcoin goes down—without the worries of really owning Bitcoin. No keys to lose.
那么为什么不可以是比特币呢？你对对冲基金进行尽职调查，熟悉信用和抵押条款，然后签订合同。然后，从经济角度来说，你拥有一些比特币——你的投资随着比特币的上涨而上涨，随着比特币的下跌而下跌——而不需要担忧真正拥有比特币。没有钥匙丢失的风险。

And so, in traditional finance there’s a big business offering those instruments. CME Group Inc. offers Bitcoin futures, which are basically the bet that I outlined above: You pay me $5 for every dollar that Bitcoin goes up, and I pay you $5 for every dollar it goes down. It’s a trusted, centralized, traditional-finance way to bet on the price movements of Bitcoin.
因此，在传统金融中，有一个大的业务提供这些工具。CME 集团公司提供比特币期货，这基本上是上述赌注：你为每一美元的比特币上涨支付我 5 美元，我为每一美元的比特币下跌支付你 5 美元。这是一个值得信赖的、集中化的传统金融方式来赌比特币价格的波动。

Still, not everyone can buy futures, which require a lot of money and are not offered by some retail brokerages. In the US financial system, pretty much the easiest thing to invest in is stocks. So wrapping Bitcoin in a stock would increase its appeal. The easiest way to do this would be a cash Bitcoin exchange-traded fund, a pot of money that trades like stock on a stock exchange and invests the money in Bitcoin. People keep trying to do this, but the US Securities and Exchange Commission remains skeptical and hasn’t approved cash Bitcoin ETFs, though they exist in some other countries. The US has, however, approved Bitcoin futures ETFs, which invest in Bitcoin through futures contracts. Two layers of abstraction: a Bitcoin, wrapped in a futures contract, wrapped in a stock, and delivered to your brokerage account.
然而，并不是每个人都能买期货，因为期货需要很多钱，并且一些零售经纪公司不提供期货。在美国金融系统中，投资最容易的事情就是股票。因此，将比特币包装成股票将增加其吸引力。实现这一点的最简单方法是现金比特币交易所交易基金，一种在股票交易所上交易的资金池，投资于比特币。人们一直尝试这样做，但是美国证券交易委员会仍然持怀疑态度，并且没有批准现金比特币 ETF，尽管其他一些国家已经批准了。美国已经批准了比特币期货 ETF，它们通过期货合约投资于比特币。两层抽象：一个比特币，包装在期货合约中，包装在股票中，并交付到您的经纪账户中。

OK, I said one way to own a Bitcoin is to write your private key on a Post-it note. But where did you get that Bitcoin?⁴³ The main way people in most of the world get into crypto is that they exchange dollars (or euros, pounds, yuan, etc.—what crypto people call “fiat”) for crypto. And how they do that is a tricky question.
好的，我说过拥有一比特币的一种方式是将私钥写在便利贴上。但是，你是如何获得那个比特币的？ ⁴³ 大多数世界人民进入加密货币的主要方式是将美元（或欧元、英镑、人民币等——加密货币人士所谓的“法币”）兑换成加密货币。那么，他们是如何做到的呢，这是一个棘手的问题。

One simple way is for you to find someone with crypto and say, “Hey, can I buy some of your crypto?” They say sure, and you arrange a deal. In researching this article, I set up an Ethereum wallet and texted a friend to ask if he had any Ether that I could buy. He replied sure, and I said, “Send me $20 worth” and gave him my public address. He sent me $20 of Ether, and then he texted me to say, “Done, Venmo me $20.” I did, and our transaction was complete.⁴⁴ He sent me the Ether before I sent him the dollars, so he took some credit risk, and in fact I was away from my phone when he sent it, so he ended up taking my credit risk for several hours. When I did get his text, I briefly considered that it would be very funny if, as part of my research for this article, I stole $20 of Ether from him, but that seemed mean.
找到一个拥有加密货币的人，然后说：“嘿，可以买一些你的加密货币吗？”他们答应了，然后你们安排交易。在研究这篇文章时，我设置了一个以太坊钱包，并发短信给朋友，问他是否有以太坊 ether 可以卖给我。他答应了，然后我说：“给我发送 20 美元的以太坊 ether”，并给了他我的公钥地址。他发送了 20 美元的以太坊 ether，然后发短信说：“完成，Venmo 给我 20 美元。”我照做了，我们的交易就完成了。他在我发送美元之前就发送了以太坊 ether，所以他承担了一些信用风险；实际上，当他发送以太坊 ether 时，我不在手机旁边，所以他最终承担了我的信用风险几个小时。当我收到他的短信时，我一度考虑，如果作为这篇文章的研究，我偷走 20 美元的以太坊 ether，那将非常有趣，但那样似乎太过分了。

I’m not going to lie: This was fun to do and fun to write about—it felt sillier and more exciting than my automatic monthly Vanguard investments—but it’s not a good way to run a financial system.⁴⁵ In general, if you get a text asking you to send crypto to a string of letters and numbers, you should throw your phone into the ocean.
老实说，这件事做起来很有趣，写起来也很有趣——感觉比我的自动每月温哥华投资更傻更刺激——但这不是运行金融系统的好方式。如果你收到一条短信，要求你将加密货币发送到一串字母和数字，那你应该把手机扔进大海。

Instead, the main way that normal people buy crypto is through crypto exchanges, specifically centralized crypto exchanges. Crypto exchanges are companies—Coinbase, Gemini, Binance, FTX, Kraken, and Bitfinex are some big ones—that accept regular money for crypto. You wire an exchange $100, and it gives you $100 worth of Bitcoin, perhaps minus a fee.
相反，普通人购买加密货币的主要方式是通过加密货币交易所，特别是中心化加密货币交易所。加密货币交易所是接受普通货币换取加密货币的公司——Coinbase、Gemini、Binance、FTX、Kraken 和 Bitfinex 是一些大的交易所。你将 100 美元汇给交易所，它就会给你 100 美元的比特币，可能扣除一些费用。

In the olden days, the stereotype was that a lot of crypto exchanges were run by criminals or incompetent teenagers, or incompetent teenage criminals. The standard crypto-exchange transaction was 1) you exchanged your dollars for Bitcoin to buy heroin, and then 2) the exchange got hacked and lost your Bitcoin before you could even buy the heroin.
旧日的传统是，很多加密货币交易所都是由罪犯或不称职的青少年，或者不称职的青少年罪犯所经营的。标准的加密货币交易是：1）你将美元换成比特币购买海洛因，然后 2）交易所被黑客攻击，失去了你的比特币，甚至还没来得及购买海洛因。

Modern crypto exchanges are less like that. For one thing, they’re more careful and technically adept, so they’re less likely to lose your Bitcoin. For another thing, though, they’re big companies, regulators are aware of them, and they try to be good corporate citizens. In their role as on-ramps and off-ramps between traditional currencies and crypto, they do the same sorts of anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer checks that traditional banks and brokerages do. If you show up at Coinbase—a US public company!—with a sack of dollar bills that you got from dealing heroin and try to convert them into Bitcoin, Coinbase will turn you away and probably report you to the police. The centralized exchanges are very much part of the regulated financial system these days. The days of crypto being a zone of utter lawlessness are mostly gone.
现代加密货币交易所不同于那样。首先，它们更加小心和技术娴熟，因此不太可能失去你的比特币。此外，它们还是大型公司，监管机构了解它们，并努力成为良好的企业公民。在它们作为传统货币和加密货币之间的入口和出口的角色中，它们执行与传统银行和经纪公司相同的反洗钱和了解客户检查。如果你带着一袋从贩毒活动中获得的美元现金来到 Coinbase——一家美国上市公司！——并试图将其兑换成比特币，Coinbase 将拒绝你，并可能向警方报告。这些中心化交易所现在已经是监管金融系统的一部分了。加密货币不再是完全无政府状态的领域。

This is a series of trade-offs. Roughly speaking, the crypto exchanges of the olden days let you trade dollars for Bitcoin without asking any questions, but they might steal your Bitcoin: When the exchanges were unregulated and crime-positive, the odds of them doing crime to you (or having crime done to them) were pretty high. The modern crypto exchanges ask a lot of questions and make it difficult for you to move tons of money in secret, but they probably won’t steal your Bitcoin.
这是一系列的权衡。粗略地说，过去的加密货币交易所允许你在不问任何问题的情况下将美元兑换成比特币，但它们可能会偷走你的比特币：当交易所不受监管和犯罪化时，你或他们受到犯罪的可能性非常高。现代加密货币交易所会问很多问题，并使你难以秘密转移大量资金，但它们可能不会偷走你的比特币。

So you’ve opened an account at an exchange and sent the exchange $100 to buy $100 worth of Bitcoin. What does the exchange give you for your $100? One possibility: It gives you 0.005215 Bitcoin. It sends you some instructions on how to set up a Bitcoin wallet, it asks you for a public Bitcoin address, it converts $100 to Bitcoin at the current market price, and it sends you that number of Bitcoin at your public address. And then you access those Bitcoin using your private key for that address.
于是，你在交易所开设了账户，并将 100 美元发送给交易所，以购买价值 100 美元的比特币。交易所会给你什么样的回报？一种可能是：它给你 0.005215 比特币。它会发送一些设置比特币钱包的指令，询问你的公共比特币地址，以当前市场价格将 100 美元兑换成比特币，并将该数量的比特币发送到你的公共地址。然后，你可以使用私钥访问这些比特币。

This is suboptimal for the exchange. For one thing, dollar and Bitcoin transactions have different time frames and finality. If you fund your account with a bank transfer or a credit card, and then you buy $100 of Bitcoin, and then you call your bank and say, “I’ve been defrauded, I don’t recognize that charge,” there’s a decent chance the bank will take the $100 from the exchange and give it back to you.⁴⁶ Meanwhile, the Bitcoin transfer to your wallet is fast and irreversible.
对于交易所来说，这不是最优的选择。其中一个原因是美元和比特币交易的时间框架和不可逆性不同。如果你使用银行转账或信用卡为账户充值，然后购买 100 美元的比特币，然后你致电银行说，“我被欺骗了，我不认识这笔费用”，银行有可能会从交易所那里拿回 100 美元，然后退还给你。与此同时，比特币转账到你的钱包是快速的不可逆的。

For another thing, you know the exchange will get some customers who don’t write down their wallet’s seed phrase (or lose it or forget it) and then can’t access the Bitcoin. And they’ll call the exchange’s customer service number and say, “I lost the password to my Bitcoin account, can you reset it?” And the exchange will say, “No, it doesn’t work that way, also we don’t have a customer service number.” And the customers won’t like it. “I paid you $100 for Bitcoin, and I don’t have the Bitcoin,” they’ll say, and blame the exchange and complain to regulators and law enforcement and the press.⁴⁷
另外，你知道交易所会遇到一些客户，他们没有记下钱包的种子短语（或遗失或忘记），然后无法访问比特币。他们会打电话给交易所的客服热线，说：“我失去了比特币账户的密码，可以重置吗？”交易所会说：“不行，不是这样工作的，我们也没有客服热线。”客户不会喜欢这样。“我花了 100 美元买比特币，但我没有比特币，”他们会说，并责怪交易所，投诉监管机构、执法机关和媒体。

Now, these problems are annoying but solvable, and modern crypto exchanges do some amount of this, acquiring crypto for “self-custodying” customers. But there’s a simpler possibility that is also quite popular. The exchange could hang on to your Bitcoin for you. Instead of sending you 0.005215 Bitcoin on the Bitcoin blockchain, it could go out and buy 0.005215 Bitcoin and put them into its own Bitcoin wallet. Being a professional Bitcoin exchange, it could put in the effort to keep these Bitcoin safe and not lose the keys.
现在，这些问题虽然很讨厌，但可以解决，现代加密货币交易所已经为“自托管”客户做了一些这方面的工作。但还有一个更简单的可能性，也非常流行。交易所可以替你保管比特币。 Instead of sending you 0.005215 Bitcoin on the Bitcoin blockchain, it could go out and buy 0.005215 Bitcoin and put them into its own Bitcoin wallet. 作为专业的比特币交易所，它可以努力保护这些比特币，不丢失密钥。

And then instead of sending you 0.005215 Bitcoin, the exchange just keeps a database of its customers and their account balances. And your entry in the database includes your name, your driver’s license number, your account number, your email address, your phone number, your password,⁴⁸ your mother’s maiden name, and your account balance, and the exchange writes 0.005215 in the balance field.
然后，交易所不再发送 0.005215 比特币，而是保持一个客户数据库，记录客户的账户余额。你的数据库条目包括你的名字、驾驶执照号码、账户号码、电子邮件地址、电话号码、密码、 ⁴⁸ 母亲的娘家姓和账户余额，交易所在余额字段中写入 0.005215。

And then when you log in to your account, it displays “0.005215 Bitcoin” as your account balance, and you think you own 0.005215 Bitcoin. And you’re not exactly wrong. But really what you own is a claim on the exchange for 0.005215 Bitcoin. You don’t own them directly, and you don’t control the private key. You just have an entry on the ledger of the exchange.
然后，当你登录账户时，它显示“0.005215 比特币”作为账户余额，你认为自己拥有 0.005215 比特币。其实你并不完全错。但真正拥有的只是交易所对 0.005215 比特币的债权。你并不直接拥有它们，也不控制私钥。你只是交易所账簿上的一个条目。

If you have a bank account, the bank owes you money, and you trust it to keep a record of that; if you have a crypto exchange account, it’s the same, but the exchange owes you Bitcoin. One thing this means is that if you lose your password, you can call the exchange, and it can reset it for you. The customer service can be a bit better.
如果你有银行账户，银行欠你钱，并且你信任它记录这笔钱；如果你有加密货币交易所账户，情况相同，只是交易所欠你比特币。这意味着，如果你忘记密码，可以致电交易所，它可以为你重置密码。客户服务可能会更好。

There are some obvious downsides. One big one: It’s like a bank! If you got into Bitcoin because you don’t trust banks and you want to be in control of your own money, it’s somewhat weird, philosophically, to just go and trust a crypto exchange to keep your money for you.
有一些明显的缺点。一个大的缺点：它就像银行！如果你因为不信任银行而选择比特币，并想控制自己的钱财，那么哲学上来说，把钱交给加密货币交易所保管就有点奇怪。

These days the big crypto exchanges seem to be mostly law-abiding, and you can get rich enough running a legitimate crypto exchange that it seems silly to steal the money instead. But another downside is hackers. A crypto exchange has a giant pot of money, and it has to move that money around a lot to deal with customer transactions. It’s an appealing target for hackers looking to steal private keys. Again, modern crypto exchanges spend a lot of money on information security, but that wasn’t always the case, and there’s a long history of Bitcoin exchanges being hacked. Or “hacked.” When all the Bitcoin in an exchange’s wallet get stolen, it can be hard to tell, sometimes, whether they were stolen by outside hackers or by the exchange’s CEO.
现在，大型加密货币交易所似乎都遵守法律，并且运营合法的加密货币交易所可以赚足够的钱，以至于偷钱似乎很愚蠢。但是另一个缺点是黑客。加密货币交易所拥有巨额资金，并且需要频繁地移动这些资金以处理客户交易。这使得黑客有机会窃取私钥。现代加密货币交易所投入了大量资金用于信息安全，但这并不是一直如此，加密货币交易所曾经被黑客攻击过很多次。或者说是“被黑客攻击”。当交易所的钱包中的所有比特币被盗时，有时很难确定是外部黑客还是交易所的CEO窃取的。

Also, while I suppose an exchange is less likely to lose its private keys than the average customer is, it can happen. In 2018 the CEO of Quadriga Fintech Solutions Corp. died in somewhat mysterious circumstances while on vacation in India. At the time, the company’s QuadrigaCX was Canada’s largest crypto exchange, and it was apparently run entirely off of its CEO’s laptop. When he died, he took all of Quadriga’s private keys with him, meaning its customers’ Bitcoin were lost forever. Or that’s what it would’ve meant, except that before he died he also stole all the customers’ Bitcoin, so the wallets whose keys disappeared with him were empty anyway. When crypto exchanges are bad, they tend to be bad in all ways at once.
另外，我认为交易所丢失私钥的可能性比普通客户小，但这仍然可能发生。在 2018 年，Quadriga Fintech Solutions Corp.的CEO在印度度假时突然死亡。当时，该公司的 QuadrigaCX 是加拿大的最大加密货币交易所，据说完全依靠其CEO的笔记本电脑运营。当他去世时，他带走了 Quadriga 所有的私钥，意味着客户的比特币永远丢失。或者说，这原本意味着客户的比特币永远丢失，但他在去世前已经偷走了所有客户的比特币，所以他带走的私钥对应的钱包实际上是空的。当加密货币交易所很糟糕时，它们往往在所有方面都很糟糕。

Centralized crypto exchanges are on-ramps to crypto for people with dollars and other traditional currencies, but they’re also exchanges. If you have some Bitcoin in your Coinbase account, and you’d rather have Ether, you can sell your Bitcoin for Ether. If you want to actively trade among cryptocurrencies, to make bets on which will go up more, you can do that on an exchange.
集中式加密货币交易所是美元和其他传统货币持有者进入加密货币市场的入口，但它们也是交易所。如果您在 Coinbase 账户中拥有比特币，并想拥有以太坊，可以将比特币卖给以太坊。如果您想在加密货币之间进行活跃交易，押注哪种货币将上涨更多，可以在交易所进行。

In traditional finance there tends to be a division between “exchanges” and “brokerages.” If you want to buy stock, you open an account at a brokerage such as Charles Schwab, Fidelity, or Robinhood, and you send your broker an order to buy stock. The stock exchange is a place for big brokerages and institutions to trade stock; retail customers need an account with a broker to access the exchange.⁴⁹ There are many layers of intermediation.
在传统金融中，通常存在“交易所”和“经纪公司”之间的区别。如果您想购买股票，需要在经纪公司如 Charles Schwab、Fidelity 或 Robinhood 开设账户，然后将购买股票的订单发送给经纪人。股票交易所是大型经纪公司和机构交易股票的地方；零售客户需要通过经纪人账户来访问交易所。 ⁴⁹ 这中间有许多中间环节。

In crypto that’s not generally true: Big crypto exchanges such as Coinbase or FTX let anyone open an account and trade crypto directly on the exchange, and you wouldn’t normally connect to the exchange through a broker.⁵⁰ Every step that goes into making a trade happen—getting your money into your account, taking your buy order, matching your order with someone’s sell order, settling the trade, putting the crypto in your account, keeping track of your account—is done by the exchange.
在加密货币中，这种情况通常不成立：大型加密货币交易所，如 Coinbase 或 FTX，允许任何人开设账户并直接在交易所交易加密货币，您通常不会通过经纪人连接到交易所。 ⁵⁰ 交易所负责所有交易步骤——将资金存入账户、接受购买订单、与卖方订单匹配、结算交易、将加密货币存入账户、跟踪账户。

Let me spend a bit more time on one of those functions: providing leverage. If Bitcoin isn’t exciting enough for you, you can find an exchange that will let you borrow money to buy more of it. You put in $100, the exchange lends you $900, you get $1,000 worth of Bitcoin. If Bitcoin goes up 10%, you double your money; if Bitcoin goes down 10%, you lose everything. Bitcoin goes up and down by 10% a lot, so this is an exciting way to gamble.
再多花点时间谈谈其中的一个功能：提供杠杆作用。如果比特币对你来说不够刺激，你可以找到一个允许你借钱购买更多比特币的交易所。你投入 100 美元，交易所借给你 900 美元，你获得 1000 美元的比特币。如果比特币涨了 10%，你就赚了一倍的钱；如果比特币跌了 10%，你就会失去一切。比特币涨跌 10%的情况很多，因此这是一个激动人心的赌博方式。

Traditional finance also provides leverage, but it’s a complex and intermediated system involving brokers and clearinghouses. Crypto exchanges are more integrated, so in many cases a crypto exchange is basically in the business of managing market risk. Say instead of Bitcoin going down 10%, it falls 15%; you’re not only down your original $100, but now you owe $50. Crypto exchanges have to decide when to make you post collateral—put up more money—to ensure that you’re good for your losses and when to liquidate your position so you don’t lose more than you can pay back.
传统金融也提供杠杆作用，但这是一个复杂的中介系统，涉及经纪人和结算所。加密货币交易所更加集成，因此在许多情况下，加密货币交易所基本上是管理市场风险的业务。如果比特币不降 10%，而是降了 15%；你不仅损失了原始的 100 美元，现在你还欠了 50 美元。加密货币交易所需要决定何时让你提供担保金——追加更多的钱——以确保你能够支付损失，并何时清算你的头寸，以免你损失超过你能够支付的金额。

A crypto exchange may have customers with big leveraged bets on Bitcoin rising (they’re “long,” in the language of finance) and customers with big leveraged bets against Bitcoin (they’re “short”). If Bitcoin moves too far in one direction too quickly, then the long (or short) customers will be out of money, which means there won’t be money to pay back the short (or long) customers on the other side. The exchange has to think about how volatile its assets are, set leverage limits so blowups are unlikely, and monitor leverage levels to ensure no one is in imminent danger of blowing up. If someone is likely to blow up, the exchange has to seize their collateral and sell it, ideally in an intelligent way that doesn’t destabilize the market too much. And in periods of high volatility the exchange might shut down trading rather than deal with all this. That’s a lot of centralized decision-making.
加密货币交易所可能拥有押注比特币涨幅的客户（在金融领域中称为“多头”）和押注比特币跌幅的客户（称为“空头”）。如果比特币价格快速波动，多头（或空头）客户将失去资金，这意味着无法偿还另一方的多头（或空头）客户。交易所需要考虑其资产的波动性，设定杠杆限制以避免爆仓，并监控杠杆水平以确保没有人即将爆仓。如果有人即将爆仓，交易所需要没收他们的抵押品并出售，理想情况下是以一种不太 destabilize 市场的方式。在高波动期，交易所可能会关闭交易以避免所有这些问题。这需要很多集中化的决策。

Bitcoin is good at keeping track of who has Bitcoin. This is technologically interesting and also useful insofar as Bitcoin are a store of wealth. And if Bitcoin were the dominant currency in the world—if it were “digital cash,” and you could use it to buy stuff and the prices of things were set in Bitcoin—then it would be even more useful. But it isn’t. You use dollars or pounds or yen or euros to buy stuff, and the price of Bitcoin in dollars (etc.) is very volatile.
比特币擅长跟踪谁拥有比特币。这在技术上很有趣，也很有用，因为比特币是一种财富储备。如果比特币是世界主要货币——如果它是“数字现金”，你可以用它购买东西，东西的价格以比特币为单位——那么它将更加有用。但是，它不是。你使用美元、英镑、日元或欧元购买东西，比特币的美元价格（等）非常波动。

One thing that would be cool is if crypto could keep track of who has dollars. Then you could get the benefits of crypto (decentralization, smart contracts, skirting the law) along with the benefits of dollars (your bank account isn’t incredibly volatile, you can buy a sandwich). A stablecoin is a crypto token that’s supposed to always be worth $1.⁵¹ If you have a stablecoin, then you have $1 on the blockchain. You hope.
如果加密货币能追踪谁拥有美元，那就太好了。这样你就可以同时拥有加密货币的优势（去中心化、智能合约、规避法律）和美元的优势（你的银行账户不太波动，你可以买一个三明治）。稳定币是一种加密令牌，总是价值 1 美元。如果你拥有稳定币，那么你在区块链上就拥有 1 美元。你希望。

The simplest sort of stablecoin is what’s sometimes called a “fully backed” stablecoin; popular examples include USDC and Tether. The idea here is:
最简单的稳定币是有时被称为“完全支持”的稳定币；流行的例子包括 USDC 和 Tether。这里的想法是：

Your stablecoin lives on some blockchain⁵³ and can be traded and used like any other token on that blockchain. If you have 10,000 dollar stablecoins on the Ethereum blockchain and you want to buy some Ether, you can buy $10,000 worth of Ether with your stablecoins without putting more dollars in. And if you have $10,000 worth of Ether, you can sell it for 10,000 dollar stablecoins. Having 10,000 dollar stablecoins is like having $10,000, but the stablecoins live on the blockchain—in your crypto wallet—rather than in a bank account.
您的稳定币存在某个区块链 ⁵³ 上，可以像其他代币一样在该区块链上交易和使用。如果您在以太坊区块链上拥有 10,000 美元稳定币，并想购买一些以太币，可以使用稳定币购买 10,000 美元的以太币，而不需要再添加美元。同样，如果您拥有 10,000 美元的以太币，可以将其出售换取 10,000 美元稳定币。拥有 10,000 美元稳定币就像拥有 10,000 美元，但稳定币存在于区块链上——在您的加密钱包中，而不是在银行账户中。

This is useful if, for instance, you don’t have a bank account. Or if you don’t live in the US, and it’s hard for you to set up a dollar-denominated bank account. Or if you plan to use the $10,000 to buy more crypto later, and you don’t want to move it back and forth between the regular and crypto financial systems. Or if you want to send the $10,000 to a smart contract, which can deal directly with your crypto wallet but which has a hard time talking to a bank. Banks are suspicious of crypto, and crypto is suspicious of banks, so it’s always a bit painful to connect the crypto system to a bank. “This smart contract will send me dollars if the Jets win this weekend”: no, bad, doesn’t work. “This smart contract will send me stablecoins if the Jets win”: yes, fine. Stablecoins are “wrapped” dollars, dollars that live on the blockchain.
这非常有用，例如，如果您没有银行账户。或者，如果您不在美国，并且很难设立美元 denominated 银行账户。或者，如果您计划使用 10,000 美元来购买更多的加密货币，以后不想在传统金融系统和加密金融系统之间来回转移资金。或者，如果您想将 10,000 美元发送到智能合约，该合约可以直接与您的加密钱包进行交互，但很难与银行进行交互。银行对加密货币存有疑虑，加密货币对银行也存有疑虑，因此总是有点痛苦地连接加密系统到银行。“这个智能合约将在 Jets 本周末获胜时发送美元给我”：不行，不工作。“这个智能合约将在 Jets 本周末获胜时发送稳定币给我”：可以，没问题。稳定币是“包装”的美元，存在于区块链上的美元。

More generally, this is useful if you think the crypto financial system is better than the traditional one. If sending tokens over a crypto blockchain is faster and cheaper than sending dollars by interbank transfer, then stablecoins are a better way to send dollars. If the blockchain lets you develop interesting derivatives contracts and trading applications in a quick and permissionless way and the traditional financial system doesn’t, you’ll want to use stablecoins instead of regular old dollars.
一般来说，如果你认为加密金融系统比传统系统更好，那么这将非常有用。如果在加密区块链上发送 token 比通过银行间转账发送美元更快、更便宜，那么稳定币就是发送美元的更好方式。如果区块链允许你快速、无需许可地开发有趣的衍生品合约和交易应用，而传统金融系统不具备这种能力，那么你将想要使用稳定币而不是普通的美元。

One important point about the collateralized-stablecoin model is that it requires you to trust the issuer. The dollar-ness of the stablecoin happens, as it were, entirely off the blockchain. As a crypto matter, what you have is a receipt for $1 from some institution that you trust. If that institution incinerates all the dollars, that receipt shouldn’t be worth a dollar.
有担保稳定币模型的一个重要点是，它需要你信任发行者。稳定币的美元属性实际上完全发生在区块链之外。在加密领域，你拥有的只是某一机构的 1 美元收据。如果该机构烧毁了所有美元，那么这个收据不应该值 1 美元。

One of the longest-running and funniest controversies in crypto is about where Tether, the biggest stablecoin, keeps its money. Tether is replete with colorful characters (the Mighty Ducks guy, etc.), and they go around boasting about how transparent they are without actually saying where the money is. They also go around promising to publish an audit but never do it. They probably have the money, more or less, but they seem to be going out of their way to seem untrustworthy. Still, people trust them.
加密领域中最长久、最有趣的争议之一是关于 Tether（最大的稳定币）存放资金的地方。Tether 拥有很多有趣的人物（《强大的鸭子》男孩等），他们总是夸耀自己的透明度，但实际上却不说出资金的去向。他们还总是承诺发布审计报告，但从不兑现。他们可能拥有资金，但他们似乎故意表现得不可靠。然而，人们仍然信任他们。

The collateralized-stablecoin model is a way to wrap noncrypto assets and put them on the blockchain. You could imagine all sorts of assets getting wrapped.
把非加密资产包装起来，并将其放置在区块链上。你可以想象各种资产被包装起来。

For instance, what if you wanted to trade stocks, but in crypto? You might want to do this for reasons similar to why you might want to have dollars, but in crypto. You like the crypto system, the smart contracts, the permissionless innovation, the decentralized exchanges, frankly the lack of regulation. But you also like stocks, which represent ownership in productive enterprises and are also a very popular tool for speculation. The crypto system doesn’t talk all that well to the stocks system. Your broker is suspicious of crypto, and crypto is suspicious of your broker (less and less so, but still). Putting the stocks on the blockchain lets you trade the things you want (stocks) the way you want (in crypto).
例如，如果你想在加密货币中交易股票？你可能想这样做，因为你可能想拥有加密货币中的美元。你喜欢加密货币系统、智能合约、无许可创新、去中心化交易所，坦率地说，也喜欢缺乏监管。但你也喜欢股票，它们代表生产性企业的所有权，也是投机的非常流行的工具。加密货币系统与股票系统不太兼容。你的券商怀疑加密货币，加密货币也怀疑你的券商（虽然越来越少，但仍然如此）。将股票放置在区块链上，让你以加密货币的方式交易你想要的东西（股票）。

Conceptually, one way to do this is that some fairly trustworthy institution buys a bunch of Tesla Inc. stock and holds it in its vault. And then it issues “wrapped Tesla” tokens on some blockchain: Each wTSLA token corresponds to one share of Tesla that the institution has in its vault, and you can trade them on the blockchain exactly as you would Ether.
从概念上讲，这可以通过某些相当可靠的机构购买大量 Tesla Inc. 的股票，并将其存放在金库中。然后，它在某个区块链上发行“包装 Tesla”令牌：每个 wTSLA 令牌对应机构金库中的一个 Tesla 股份，你可以像交易以太币一样在区块链上交易它们。

And in fact this exists. FTX, a leading centralized crypto exchange, offers “tokenized stocks” on the Solana blockchain, though not to US customers; Binance, another leading exchange, offered tokenized stocks for a while but then stopped. If you’re going to try this, you’ll want to run it by your local securities regulator. It’s legally sensitive to find new ways to sell people new, not-quite stocks.
事实上，这已经存在。领先的中心化加密货币交易所 FTX 在 Solana 区块链上提供“证券化股票”，虽然不面向美国客户；另一个领先的交易所 Binance 曾经提供证券化股票，但后来停止了。如果你想尝试这样做，你将需要与当地证券监管机构商讨。这是一种法律敏感的方式，用于向人们出售新的、不完全是股票的东西。

But if it works it’s interesting. For a crypto exchange, it’s a way to keep your retail gamblers gambling on your platform: Someone who wants to bet on Bitcoin and Ether and Tesla stock can do all of it on one crypto exchange.
但是如果它有效，那就很有趣了。对于一个加密货币交易所来说，这是一种让零售赌徒继续在你的平台上赌博的方式：有人想赌比特币、以太坊和Tesla股票，可以在一个加密货币交易所上完成所有这些操作。

More broadly, though, it’s a way for the crypto financial system to ingest the traditional financial system. Have a financial asset? Put it in a box and issue tokens about it. Now it’s a crypto asset. If the crypto financial system is good—if the computer programs, payment rails, and institutional structures of crypto have competitive advantages against the programs, rails, and structures of traditional finance—then some people will prefer to trade their stocks or bonds or other financial assets in the crypto system.
更广泛地说，这也是加密金融系统吸收传统金融系统的一种方式。拥有金融资产？把它装进盒子，发行关于它的代币。现在它就是一个加密资产。如果加密金融系统很好——如果加密的计算程序、支付轨道和机构结构具有传统金融的竞争优势——那么一些人将更喜欢在加密系统中交易他们的股票、债券或其他金融资产。

The fully backed stablecoin model has problems. One is that you might not trust the issuer of a backed stablecoin. Another is that you might not want to trust any issuer. An issuer of a fully backed stablecoin is, by necessity, using the US dollar financial system. It’s keeping the backing dollars in a bank or in other traditional-finance dollar instruments. It might be subject to the regulatory pressures of that system.
完全支持的稳定币模型有问题。一个问题是你可能不信任支持稳定币的发行者。另一个问题是你可能不想信任任何发行者。支持稳定币的发行者必然使用美元金融系统。它将支持美元存放在银行或其他传统金融美元工具中。它可能会受到该系统的监管压力。

What you want is something that’s worth a dollar but exists purely on the blockchain. Can that be done?
你想要的是一种价值一美元但纯粹存在于区块链上的东西。能做到吗？

Sure! And with a fairly simple and traditional bit of financial engineering.
好的！然后使用一种非常简单传统的金融工程方法。

It starts with leverage, or just borrowing money. Leverage is a way to amplify the risks and returns of betting on crypto: Instead of putting in $100 and buying $100 worth of Bitcoin and making $10 if Bitcoin goes up 10%, I put in $100 and borrow $100 and buy $200 worth of Bitcoin and make $20 if Bitcoin goes up 10%. Or I lose $20 if Bitcoin goes down 10%. Or I lose everything if Bitcoin goes down 50%.
这一切从杠杆开始，也就是借钱。杠杆是一种放大加密货币风险和回报的方式：例如，我不再投入 100 美元，购买 100 美元的比特币，并在比特币上涨 10%时赚取 10 美元，而是投入 100 美元，借入 100 美元，购买 200 美元的比特币，并在比特币上涨 10%时赚取 20 美元。或者我在比特币下跌 10%时亏损 20 美元。或者我在比特币下跌 50%时亏损一切。

For me, that’s a high-risk, high-reward proposition. But what if I borrowed the money from you? What does that proposition look like for you? Well, if Bitcoin goes up 10%, you get back $100: I sell my Bitcoin for $220, give you back $100 and keep the rest. And likewise:
对我来说，这是一个高风险、高回报的提议。但是，如果我从你那里借钱，这对你来说是什么样的提议？好，如果比特币上涨 10%，你将获得 100 美元：我卖出比特币，获得 220 美元，退还你 100 美元，并保留剩余部分。同样：

At every point that I’ve named so far, you get back $100. You put in $100, and you get back $100, no matter what. For me this trade is very risky. (If Bitcoin fell 49.5%, I lost 99%.) For you this trade is very safe. Very stable. What you have is a stablecoin. You put in $100 and get back $100.
在我迄今所提到的每个点上，你都将拿回 100 美元。你投入 100 美元，无论如何你都将拿回 100 美元。对我来说，这笔交易风险很高。（如果比特币下跌 49.5%，我将损失 99%。）对你来说，这笔交易非常安全。非常稳定。你拥有的就是稳定币。你投入 100 美元，拿回 100 美元。

This basic idea is called an “algorithmic stablecoin.” You put in $100 and get back a thing that’s worth $100, with that value guaranteed by a larger amount of a volatile cryptocurrency. I’ve described this as just a direct loan from you to me (a contract), but ordinarily this would be done as a smart contract, a computer program on a blockchain.
这个基本想法被称为“算法稳定币”。你投入 100 美元，拿回一个价值 100 美元的东西，这个价值由更大数量的 volatile cryptocurrency 所保证。我将其描述为你与我之间的一份直接借贷合同，但通常这将作为智能合约，在区块链上运行的计算机程序。

Vitalik describes a rudimentary form of this in the original Ethereum white paper, calling it a “hedging contract.” Here’s a slightly different example that involves no dollars at all: Say you and I each put 1,000 Ether into a smart contract, and that when we do it, 1,000 Ether is worth $1 million. On some preset maturity date, the contract will send you $1 million worth of Ether, and I will get whatever Ether is left. If Ether doubled in value in that time, that means you’ll get 500 Ether worth $1 million, and I’ll get 1,500 Ether worth $3 million. On the other hand, if Ether’s dollar value fell 50%, you get all the Ether in the pool so you get your $1 million back, and I get nothing. You get back $1 million no matter what. The smart contract, though, never held any dollars at all. There’s no bank account, no Treasury bills, no trusted central intermediary, but you have a claim with a steady value in US dollars. We have in a way manufactured dollars purely out of crypto.
Vitalik 在原始以太坊白皮书中描述了这种形式的初级版本，称其为“对冲合约”。这里有一个略有不同的例子，不涉及美元：假设你和我各自将 1,000 个以太币投入智能合约，当时 1,000 个以太币的价值为 100 万美元。在预设的到期日，该合约将向你发送价值 100 万美元的以太币，而我将获得剩余的以太币。如果以太币的价值在那段时间内翻番，那么你将获得价值 100 万美元的 500 个以太币，而我将获得价值 300 万美元的 1,500 个以太币。另一方面，如果以太币的美元价值下跌 50%，你将获得池中的所有以太币，从而获得 100 万美元，而我将一无所获。你无论如何都将获得 100 万美元。然而，该智能合约从不持有任何美元。没有银行账户，没有美国国债，没有可信的中央中介机构，但你拥有一个稳定的美元价值索赔。我们以某种方式纯粹地从加密货币中制造出了美元。

A few points. First, I’m being far too cute here: In my original example, if the price of Bitcoin falls by 51%, my $200 worth of Bitcoin will be worth $98, and I won’t have enough money to pay you back. Your supposed stablecoin is worth 98¢.
有几个要点。首先，我这里太过狡猾了：在我的原始例子中，如果比特币的价格下跌 51%，我的 200 美元的比特币将只值 98 美元，我将无法偿还你。你的所谓稳定币只值 98 美分。

It’s not easy to manufacture stablecoins out of extremely unstable assets. Your algorithmic stablecoin has some risk of becoming unstable. But you can do a little better than the crude version I’ve proposed here. You could have margin calls, for instance, so that if Bitcoin falls by more than 20%, the smart contract sells the remaining Bitcoin to pay you back immediately.⁵⁴ (Actual algorithmic stablecoins—Dai, the stablecoin of MakerDAO, is a big one—work this way.)
制造稳定币从极不稳定的资产中不是一件容易的事。你的算法稳定币有一定的风险变得不稳定。但你可以比我这里提出的原始版本做得更好一点。例如，你可以设置保证金调用，以便如果比特币的价格下跌超过 20%，智能合约就会立即出售剩余的比特币来偿还你。(实际上，算法稳定币——如MakerDAO的稳定币 Dai——就是这样运作的。)

Second, I am omitting interest. In the real world, if I’m borrowing $100 from you to buy Bitcoin, I’m not just paying you back $100; I’m paying you back with interest, $101 or whatever. An algorithmic stablecoin—much like a dollar in a bank account—can potentially generate interest.⁵⁵
其次，我忽略了利息。在现实世界中，如果我从你那里借 100 美元来购买比特币，我不仅要偿还 100 美元，还要偿还利息，101 美元什么的。算法稳定币——类似银行账户中的美元——也可以潜在地产生利息。 ⁵⁵

Third, note that there are two sides to this trade. Some people want stablecoins and will put money (or Ether, Bitcoin, etc.) into this sort of smart contract to get stablecoins; others want leverage and will borrow money from this sort of smart contract to take leveraged positions in risky crypto assets. There are different appetites for risk, so there’s a trade to be done.
第三，注意这笔交易有两个方面。一些人想要稳定币，将钱（或以太币、比特币等）投入这种智能合约以获取稳定币；其他人想要杠杆，将从这种智能合约借钱，以便在风险加密资产中采取杠杆头寸。由于风险承担能力不同，因此可以进行交易。

Fourth: Do you know what a bank is? Not in crypto, just in the world. Here’s what a bank is. Some people want to borrow money to make investments. The main investments are 1) starting or expanding a business and 2) buying real estate. They borrow money from a bank; they get leverage. If their business does well or their house’s price goes up, they pay back the money to the bank, with interest. The bank has the senior claim on their business or house—if there isn’t enough money for everyone, the bank gets paid first. Sometimes the bank loses money, but mostly it gets paid back on most of its loans.
第四，你知道银行是什么吗？不在加密领域，而是在世界上。这就是银行的定义。一些人想借钱进行投资。主要投资是 1）创业或扩大业务和 2）购买房产。他们从银行借钱，获得杠杆。如果业务做得好或房价上涨，他们将钱还给银行，连同利息。银行对业务或房产拥有优先索赔权——如果没有足够的钱偿还所有人，银行将首先获得偿还。有时银行会亏损，但大多数情况下银行会收回大多数贷款。

The bank, then, is just a pool of these loans, just a lot of senior claims on a lot of businesses and houses. These loans are called the bank’s “assets.” Then the bank itself goes and borrows money. A bank with $10 billion of assets—$10 billion of mortgages and business loans—might have $1 billion of its shareholders’ money (“equity” or, for a bank, “capital”) and borrow the other $9 billion. It borrows the $9 billion from its customers in the form of deposits. A bank deposit is, formally, a loan to the bank; if you deposit $100, the bank owes you that $100. And it uses that $100 to fund loans to businesses and homebuyers.
那么，银行只是这些贷款的池，许多业务和房产的优先索赔权。这些贷款被称为银行的“资产”。然后，银行自己也会借钱。拥有 100 亿美元资产——100 亿美元抵押贷款和业务贷款的银行——可能拥有 10 亿美元股东的钱（“股本”或银行的“资本”），并借入其他 90 亿美元。它从客户那里借入 90 亿美元，以存款的形式。银行存款正式是一种借款给银行；如果你存入 100 美元，银行就欠你 100 美元。然后，它使用这 100 美元为业务和房产买家提供贷款。

Wait, though. I said (way, way) earlier that a dollar is just an entry in the bank’s database. When you have a dollar, what you have is an entry on the books of the bank—that deposit is the dollar. The deposit is the dollar, and yet it’s also the debt of the bank. Your entry on the bank’s database shows both that the bank owes you a dollar and is the dollar that you own. Isn’t that incoherent? How can the bank owe you the dollar, if you have it already, right there in your account?
等一下，我早些时候说过，一美元只是银行数据库中的一个条目。当你拥有了一美元时，你拥有的就是银行账簿上的一个条目——该存款就是一美元。该存款既是一美元，也是银行的债务。银行数据库上的条目同时显示银行欠你一美元和你拥有的那一美元。这不是自相矛盾吗？银行怎么能欠你一美元，如果你已经拥有了它，正好在你的账户中？

The modern banking system is a machine that takes in risky assets at one end, takes senior claims on them (lending money against those assets, with the right to be paid back first), repeats that move a few times (taking and issuing senior claims on the senior claims⁵⁶), and spits out dollars at the other end. A dollar is distilled from risky assets.
现代银行系统是一个机器，它从一端吸收风险资产，对它们发出高级债权（对这些资产发放贷款，拥有优先偿还权），然后重复这个动作几次（对高级债权发出高级债权 ⁵⁶ ），最后吐出美元。美元是从风险资产中提炼出来的。

The stablecoin thing is nothing new. It’s just banking, but banking in a particularly clear way,⁵⁷ purified in smart contracts on the blockchain.
稳定币的事情一点也不新鲜。这只是银行业，但是在智能合约和区块链上进行的银行业， ⁵⁷ 得到了净化。

To summarize the previous section: If you have a large quantity of risky tokens, you can with a little financial engineering issue a smaller quantity of claims on those tokens and call them stablecoins. But recall also one of the simplest lessons of Bitcoin, which is that you can make up an arbitrary token that trades electronically, and people might pay you money for it. (Worth a shot, no?)
总结前一节：如果你拥有大量风险 token，你可以通过一点金融工程发行较少数量的该 token 索赔，并称其为稳定币。但回忆比特币最简单的教训之一，即你可以创造一个任意的 token，它可以电子交易，人们可能会为此付钱。（值得一试，不是吗？）

These two insights—you can make up a token and it will be worth money and you can use claims on risky tokens to make a stablecoin—can be combined in a natural way to create a disaster. Here’s the disaster:
这两个见解——你可以创造一个 token，它将值钱，你可以使用风险 token 索赔来创造稳定币——可以自然地结合起来，制造一场灾难。这里就是灾难：

The flaw in this logic is in Step 4: There’s absolutely no reason for Sharecoin to be worth anything at all—I just made it up!—and so no reason for a Dollarcoin to be worth a dollar. But of course everything in crypto was made up, by somebody, in the recent past, so this objection is not as compelling as you might think. People might believe in this story or just in the general vibe of Sharecoin and Dollarcoin. They might buy Dollarcoin and treat it as worth a dollar, and buy Sharecoin and treat it as a valuable component of a thriving ecosystem.
这种逻辑的缺陷在于第四步：股份币完全没有任何价值——我刚刚创造了它！——因此美元币也没有任何理由值 1 美元。但是，当然，所有加密货币都是最近由某人创造的，所以这个反对意见并不像你想象的那样有说服力。人们可能相信这个故事或只是股份币和美元币的总体氛围。他们可能购买美元币，并将其视为值 1 美元，并购买股份币，将其视为一个繁荣生态系统中的有价值组件。

At some point the process reverses. People start to want dollars rather than Dollarcoins, so some of them sell Dollarcoins for dollars on the open market. This pushes the price of Dollarcoin slightly below $1, perhaps to 99¢. Other people get nervous, so they go to the smart contract —which is supposed to keep the price of a Dollarcoin at $1—and trade Dollarcoins in for $1 worth of Sharecoins. Then they sell those Sharecoins, which pushes down the price of Sharecoin, which makes more people nervous. They trade even more Dollarcoins for Sharecoins and sell those. This pushes the price of Sharecoin lower, which creates more nervousness, which leads to more redemptions at lower Sharecoin prices and even more Sharecoin supply flooding the market. This is a well-known phenomenon in traditional finance (it happens when companies issue debt and commit to paying it back with stock), and it has the technical name “death spiral.” It’s as bad as it sounds.
某个时候，过程逆转。人们开始更想要美元而不是美元币，因此一些人在公开市场上将美元币卖给美元。这使得美元币的价格略低于 1 美元，可能降至 99 美分。其他人感到紧张，因此他们去智能合约——该合约旨在保持美元币的价格为 1 美元——并将美元币兑换为价值 1 美元的股份币。然后，他们卖出这些股份币，这使得股份币的价格下跌，进而使更多人感到紧张。他们继续将更多的美元币兑换为股份币并卖出。这使得股份币的价格进一步下跌，引发更多的紧张，导致更多的股份币在较低的价格下被赎回，并且更多的股份币供应涌入市场。这是在传统金融中一个众所周知的现象（当公司发行债务并承诺以股票偿还时就会发生），它有一个技术名称“死亡螺旋”。它的确像听起来那么糟糕。

A couple of algorithmic stablecoins have death-spiraled, the most famous one being TerraUSD. Terra was a blockchain ecosystem with a native currency (like our Sharecoin) called Luna and a stablecoin called TerraUSD. Billions of dollars of TerraUSD were issued, backed by algorithmic conversion into $1 worth of Luna. TerraUSD was popular, because stablecoins are popular and also, to be fair, because you could get 20% interest rates on TerraUSD. The total amount of TerraUSD reached $18.5 billion, the market capitalization of Luna rose above $40 billion, the system all worked, and then it didn’t. A quick death spiral hit in May, and Terra unraveled completely. By the end of the month, TerraUSD was trading below 2¢, zillions of Luna had been issued and were trading at essentially zero, and the whole Terra blockchain had burned to the ground. Terra’s founder, Do Kwon (colorful character!), was tweeting in September that he wasn’t “on the run” from South Korean authorities. Those authorities responded that he was “obviously on the run.”
有些算法稳定币已经死亡螺旋，著名的例子是 TerraUSD。Terra 是一个区块链生态系统，拥有一个本土货币（类似我们的 Sharecoin）叫 Luna 和一个稳定币叫 TerraUSD。数十亿美元的 TerraUSD 被发行，通过算法转换为 1 美元的 Luna 支持。TerraUSD 很流行，因为稳定币很流行，同时，因为你可以在 TerraUSD 上获得 20% 的利息率。TerraUSD 的总金额达到 18.5 亿美元，Luna 的市场资本化超过 40 亿美元，系统一切运作正常，然后它崩溃了。五月份，一场快速的死亡螺旋袭击了 Terra，Terra 完全崩溃。到月底，TerraUSD 的交易价格低于 2 美分，数十亿的 Luna 被发行，交易价格基本为零，全体 Terra 区块链已经烧毁。Terra 的创始人 Do Kwon（一个有趣的人物！）在九月份发推特说，他不在逃离韩国当局。韩国当局回应说，他“明显在逃跑”。

The thing about centralized crypto exchanges is that they’re centralized. Broadly speaking, you have to trust the people running the exchange to run it in a good way: not to steal customer money, not to get hacked, not to take advantage of their knowledge of customer orders to trade ahead, not to blow up by allowing too much leverage, etc. Sometimes that trust is misplaced and the exchange does steal the money. Sometimes the exchange is honest, careful, and well-regulated by the responsible national authorities, but still, you’re in crypto:
中心化加密交易所的问题就在于它们是中心化的。广义地说，你需要信任交易所的运营者，以便他们能以良好的方式运营：不偷客户的钱，不被黑客攻击，不利用客户订单信息进行交易，不允许过高的杠杆率等。有时这种信任被误置，交易所就会偷钱。有时交易所是诚实的、谨慎的，并受到负责的国家当局的良好监管，但你仍然在加密货币中：

Also, you’re in crypto: You want smart contracts. A financial-products exchange can be thought of as a computer program. Most stock exchanges long ago got rid of trading floors with human traders and are now just computer servers matching electronic buy and sell orders. Certainly every crypto exchange works like that. A centralized crypto exchange is fully electronic; it has computers that keep ledgers of customer assets and run the programs matching orders and moving assets between customers.
另外，你在加密货币领域：你想要智能合约。金融产品交易所可以看作是一台计算机程序。大多数股票交易所早已取消了人工交易员的交易厅，现在只是计算机服务器，匹配电子买卖订单。当然，每个加密货币交易所都是这样运作的。一个中心化的加密货币交易所是完全电子化的；它拥有计算机，记录客户资产的账簿，并运行匹配订单和在客户之间转移资产的程序。

The blockchain is already designed to keep a ledger of customer assets, so why keep your assets on an exchange’s ledger? And you can run computer programs on Ethereum or most other modern blockchains: Why not run the exchange programs there?
区块链已经设计好了记录客户资产的账簿，那么为什么还要将资产保存在交易所的账簿上？而且你可以在以太坊或其他现代区块链上运行计算机程序：为什么不在那里运行交易所的程序呢？

A venue for trading tokens that isn’t a company but is instead a set of smart contracts on a blockchain is called a decentralized exchange, or DEX. And the broader idea—of having a financial system, with lending and derivatives and everything else, that runs as smart contracts on a blockchain—is called decentralized finance, or DeFi.
一个不是公司，而是区块链上的智能合约集合的代币交易场所被称为去中心化交易所，或者 DEX。而更广泛的想法——拥有一个在区块链上运行的金融系统，包括借贷、衍生品和其他一切——被称为去中心化金融，或者 DeFi。

A few more points of terminology. Decentralized finance is DeFi, so centralized finance—meaning specifically the bits of crypto that use centralized trusted intermediaries, mainly exchanges and lenders—is
再有几个术语需要注意。去中心化金融是 DeFi，因此中心化金融——特别是指加密货币领域中使用中心化可信中介机构的部分，主要是交易所和贷款机构——

And I will sometimes refer to DeFi things as protocols. A protocol is a set of smart contracts—the computer programs that run on the blockchain and do stuff—or at least a set of rules for creating them. A decentralized exchange isn’t an exchange in the traditional sense: It certainly isn’t a building in New York where traders meet in person to shout orders at each other, and it also isn’t a data center in New Jersey where an exchange company keeps its computer servers to match orders with each other. It’s a protocol, a set of smart contracts that let people move cryptocurrencies around. There might be a company involved, and surely someone is making money somewhere. But even if the company goes away, the smart contracts will keep running as long as the blockchain does.
我有时会将 DeFi 事物称为协议。协议是一组智能合约——运行于区块链的计算机程序，执行某些操作——或者至少是一组创建它们的规则。去中心化交易所不同于传统意义上的交易所：它绝不是纽约的一栋大楼，交易员在那里亲自喊单与彼此交易，也不是新泽西的一家数据中心，交易所公司在那里维护计算机服务器以匹配彼此的订单。它是一个协议，一组智能合约，允许人们转移加密货币。可能有一家公司参与其中，当然有人在某处赚钱。但即使公司消失，智能合约仍将继续运行只要区块链存在。

Here’s what an exchange is. People send it orders: “Buy 100 shares at $100,” “Sell 100 shares for $102,” etc. The exchange is, at its heart, a system for matching those orders, finding a buyer for each seller and vice versa. The orders come in at different times. When the exchange gets an order to buy 100 shares at $100, it puts the order on its order book—just an electronic list of orders that haven’t executed yet. When it gets its next order, to sell 100 shares for $102, it looks at its order book to see if there are any orders to buy 100 shares at $102. Nope, not yet; the $100 buyer doesn’t want to pay $102, and the $102 seller doesn’t want to accept $100. It puts the sell order on the order book, too. The $100 buy order and the $102 sell order “rest” on the order book. Then another order comes in, to buy 100 shares at $102. The exchange sees in the order book that, aha, yes, there’s an order to sell 100 shares at $102. So the matching engine matches the $102 buy and the $102 sell order; they pair off with each other and do their trade. And then the orders are removed from the order book—they’ve been filled—and the exchange waits for the next order.
这就是交易所的工作方式。人们向交易所发送订单：“买入 100 股，价格 100 美元”、“卖出 100 股，价格 102 美元”等等。交易所的核心是一个订单匹配系统，旨在为每个卖方找到买方，反之亦然。订单来自不同的时间。当交易所收到一笔买入 100 股，价格 100 美元的订单时，它将该订单添加到订单簿中——一个电子列表，记录尚未执行的订单。当它收到下一笔卖出 100 股，价格 102 美元的订单时，它会查看订单簿，看看是否有任何买入 100 股，价格 102 美元的订单。不，还没有；100 美元的买方不愿支付 102 美元，102 美元的卖方也不愿接受 100 美元。它也将卖出订单添加到订单簿中。100 美元的买入订单和 102 美元的卖出订单“休眠”在订单簿中。然后，另一笔买入 100 股，价格 102 美元的订单到来。交易所在订单簿中发现，aha，有一笔卖出 100 股，价格 102 美元的订单。于是，匹配引擎将 102 美元的买入订单和 102 美元的卖出订单匹配起来；它们成对交易，并从订单簿中删除——它们已经被执行——交易所等待下一笔订单。

In general, a centralized exchange will have lots of orders resting on its order book at any time. All the resting buy orders will have lower prices than all the resting sell orders: If a buy order has a higher price than a resting sell order, those two orders will pair off and execute with each other. (If I want to pay $103 and you’ll accept $102, the exchange has found a mutually beneficial trade.) And this way of running an exchange is usually called a central limit order book, or CLOB.
一般来说，集中式交易所在任何时候都会有许多订单休眠在其订单簿中。所有休眠的买入订单价格都低于所有休眠的卖出订单价格：如果一笔买入订单的价格高于一笔休眠的卖出订单价格，那么这两笔订单将成对执行。（如果我愿意支付 103 美元，而你愿意接受 102 美元，交易所就发现了一笔互惠交易。）这种运行交易所的方式通常被称为集中限价订单簿，简称 CLOB。

You could certainly build a smart contract to do this on the blockchain: The contract would take orders, keep them on a central limit order book, and execute them against each other. And smart contracts like this do exist. But most DEXes don’t work this way.
你当然可以在区块链上建立一个智能合约来实现这一点：该合约将接受订单，将它们存储在中央限价订单簿中，并将它们相互执行。类似的智能合约确实存在。但是，大多数 DEX 并不以这种方式运作。

You may ask: “Where do all these resting orders come from—who’s going around thinking up these specific prices they want to pay for a stock or prices they want to sell for?” Ordinary people might not bother with this. If they think a stock is a good investment, they will often send in market orders, just: “Buy from whoever’s selling at whatever the best price is.”
你可能会问：“这些挂单来自哪里——谁会想到这些特定的价格想买入或卖出股票？”普通人可能不会费心这些。如果他们认为某只股票是一个好的投资，他们通常会发送市场订单，只是：“从任何卖方以最佳价格购买。”

Resting orders come mainly from professional investors called market makers, who help make fast and efficient trading possible. Their job is to sell stock or crypto or whatever to people who want to buy, and buy from people who want to sell, and collect the “spread,” the difference between their bid (or buying) price and their offer (or selling) price. If you send a market order to buy, you buy immediately—but you pay a bit of money (the spread) to the market maker for that service. The market maker, meanwhile, is in the business of providing that service and collecting that spread; it’s not really betting that prices will go up or down.
挂单主要来自称为市场制造商的专业投资者，他们使交易变得快速和高效。他们的工作是向想买的人出售股票或加密货币，向想卖的人购买，并收集“价差”，即他们的买入价格和卖出价格之间的差异。如果你发送一个市场订单来购买，你将立即购买——但你需要支付一些钱（价差）给市场制造商，以获得该服务。市场制造商同时也在提供该服务并收集价差；他们并不真正押注价格会上涨或下跌。

In modern stock and crypto markets, market makers are also largely computer programs, and their programs are pretty simple:⁵⁸
在现代股票和加密货币市场中，市场制造商也主要是计算机程序，而这些程序非常简单： ⁵⁸

Market makers in US stocks are often called high-frequency traders, or sometimes even flash boys, and part of what that means is that they’re constantly changing the prices of their orders as their information changes. And the result is that, when you want to buy a share of stock, you can send in a market order, and you will quickly trade with a market maker at a price that’s pretty much the market price, one that’s updated continuously to reflect supply and demand and all available information.
美国股票市场的做市商通常被称为高频交易者，有时也被称为闪电男孩。这意味着他们不断地根据信息变化调整订单价格。结果是，当你想买一股股票时，可以发送市场订单，并快速地以市场价格与做市商交易，该价格会不断更新以反映供需和所有可用信息。

This doesn’t work on the blockchain. The problem with the blockchain is that it’s a slow computer: Ethereum runs computer programs by sending them to thousands of nodes to confirm transactions, and that takes time. You wouldn’t want to run a self-driving car on the Ethereum Virtual Machine. It turns out you wouldn’t want to run a high-frequency trading platform there either.
这在区块链上行不通。区块链的问题是它是一个慢计算机：以太坊通过将计算程序发送到成千上万个节点以确认交易，这需要时间。你不会想在以太坊虚拟机上运行自动驾驶汽车。事实证明，你也不想在那里运行高频交易平台。

Centralized exchanges—in traditional finance and in crypto—have lots of very fast computers with very fast connections that allow market makers to constantly update their prices in response to trades and new information. Traders build fancy fiber-optic lines to get their orders to the exchange a few milliseconds faster than the competition. Speed matters, and they update their orders many times a second. This is harder when the computers are on the blockchain; it’s also more expensive. Every action in Ethereum requires gas fees, and sending a message to a smart contract saying, “Cancel my buy order at $100.001 and put in a new order at $100.002,” would use Ethereum’s computer power and cost gas.
传统金融和加密货币领域中的集中式交易所拥有许多高速计算机和高速连接，这使得做市商能够不断更新价格以响应交易和新信息。交易员建立了豪华的光纤线路，以便比竞争对手更快地将订单发送到交易所。速度至关重要，他们每秒更新订单多次。当计算机在区块链上时，这变得更加困难，也更加昂贵。在以太坊上，每个操作都需要燃气费，而发送一条消息给智能合约，例如“取消我的 100.001 美元的买单，并将新订单设置为 100.002 美元”，将使用以太坊的计算能力并耗费燃气费。

It turns out this is nearly fatal for CLOB market-making in Ethereum. “Market making is very expensive,” Vitalik Buterin wrote, “as creating an order and removing an order both take gas fees, even if the orders are never ‘finalized.’”
事实证明，这对以太坊上的 CLOB 做市商来说几乎是致命的。“做市商非常昂贵，”维塔利克·布特林写道，“因为创建订单和删除订单都需要燃气费，即使订单从未‘最终确定’。”

So Vitalik proposed a different idea. Here it is:
于是维塔利克提出了一个不同的想法。这就是：

The mechanism would be a smart contract that holds A tokens of type T1, and B tokens of type T2, and maintains the invariant that A * B = k for some constant k (in the version where people can invest, k can change, but only during investment/withdrawal transactions, NOT trades). Anyone can buy or sell by selecting a new point on the xy=k curve, and supplying the missing A tokens and in exchange receiving the extra B tokens (or vice versa). The “marginal price” is simply the implicit derivative of the curve xy=k, or y/x.
这个机制将是一个智能合约，它持有类型为 T1 的 A 令牌和类型为 T2 的 B 令牌，并维护不变量 A * B = k，其中 k 是某个常数（在允许投资的版本中，k 可以改变，但仅在投资/提款交易中，不是交易）。任何人都可以通过选择 xy=k 曲线上的新点，并提供缺失的 A 令牌以换取额外的 B 令牌（或反之）。“边际价格”只是 xy=k 曲线的隐式导数，或者 y/x。

That’s just a comment that he wrote on Reddit; later a whole business model grew out of it. Here’s the simplified version. I decide to be a market maker in some token pair, say Ethereum and USDC (a dollar-denominated stablecoin). Let’s say one Ether currently trades for 1,600 USDC ($1,600). I set up a smart contract—again, that’s a computer program on the blockchain, but in this case it might be easier to think of it as a pot of money, managed by the computer program. I can deposit both Ether and USDC into this pot. Anyone who wants to buy Ether (with USDC) or sell Ether (for USDC) can come to my smart contract and make that trade with it, and the contract will adjust its prices to reflect supply and demand.
这只是他在 Reddit 上写的一条评论，后来发展成了一整个商业模式。这里是简化版本。我决定在某个令牌对上成为做市商，例如 Ethereum 和 USDC（一种美元-denominated 的稳定币）。假设一 Ether 当前交易价格为 1,600 USDC（1,600 美元）。我设置了一个智能合约——再次，这是一个区块链上的计算机程序，但在这种情况下可能更容易将其视为一个由计算机程序管理的钱池。我可以将 Ether 和 USDC 都存入这个池子。任何人都可以来我的智能合约，使用 USDC 买 Ether 或卖 Ether，以 USDC，并且合约将根据供需调整价格。

But it will do it in an absurdly simple manner that doesn’t require much in the way of computation or updating prices. It will just try to keep one number constant.
但它将以一种非常简单的方式实现，不需要太多计算或更新价格。它只是尝试保持一个数字不变。

When I set up the contract, I deposited equal values of Ether and USDC. If one Ether was worth 1,600 USDC, I put in 100 Ether and 160,000 USDC (each set of tokens worth $160,000). The program multiplies those two numbers: 100 times 160,000 is 16 million. And then it will just hold that product constant. That is, the number of Ether multiplied by the number of USDC will always be 16 million.
当我设置合约时，我存入了等值的以太币和 USDC。如果一以太币值 1600 USDC，我存入了 100 以太币和 160,000 USDC（每组代币价值 16 万美元）。程序将这两个数字相乘：100 乘以 160,000 是 1600 万。然后，它将保持该乘积不变。也就是说，以太币的数量乘以 USDC 的数量将始终是 1600 万。

A trader will try to buy, say, 10 Ether. That would leave 90 Ether in the fund. Sixteen million divided by 90 is 177,777.78. The pot has 160,000 USDC now, so it will need 17,777.78 more USDC to keep the product constant. That’s what my smart contract charges. The trader has to pay me 17,777.78 USDC—1,777.778 USDC per Ether—to do this trade. Someone wants to buy Ether from my smart contract, so my smart contract automatically raises its price for Ether. But it doesn’t have to go around constantly updating prices and posting new prices on central limit order books: It just advertises its constant product, and that updates prices on its own.⁵⁹ It’s an automated market maker (AMM).
交易员将尝试购买，例如，10 以太币。那将留下 90 以太币在基金中。1600 万除以 90 是 177,777.78。现在，池中有 160,000 USDC，因此需要 thêm17,777.78 USDC 以保持乘积不变。那就是我的智能合约收取的费用。交易员必须支付我 17,777.78 USDC—每以太币 1,777.778 USDC—以进行这笔交易。有人想从我的智能合约购买以太币，因此我的智能合约自动提高了以太币的价格。但它不需要不断更新价格并在中央限价订单簿上发布新价格：它只是宣传其恒定乘积，而该乘积会自动更新价格。 ⁵⁹ 这是一个自动化市场制造商（AMM）。

That’s cool! I don’t know, it’s cool. This isn’t a thing that really exists in traditional finance. It was developed, almost by accident, as a workaround to a novel problem—that the computers are too expensive—in decentralized finance.⁶⁰
太酷了！我不知道，这太酷了。这不是传统金融中真正存在的一件事。它几乎是作为一种新问题的解决方案——去中心化金融中的计算机太昂贵——偶然开发的。 ⁶⁰

In my description above, I assume that I want to be a market maker in some currency pair, so I set up a smart contract to do it on my own. In reality, the way DEXes normally work is that AMM smart contracts pool liquidity. If you want to be a market maker in stocks, it helps to be a large financial institution. In crypto, anyone who wants to be a market maker in a pair of tokens can contribute that pair to a liquidity pool (and get back “liquidity tokens” representing their stake in that pool); they’re called “liquidity providers.” They collect fees in crypto for providing liquidity in the pool.
在我上面的描述中，我假设我想成为某种货币对的做市商，所以我自己设置了智能合约。但实际上，DEXes 通常的工作方式是，AMM 智能合约汇集流动性。如果你想在股票中成为做市商，拥有大型金融机构有助于。在加密货币中，任何想要在某种 token 对中成为做市商的人都可以将该对贡献给流动性池（并获得代表其在该池中的股份的“流动性 token”）；他们被称为“流动性提供者”。他们通过在池中提供流动性来收取加密货币费用。

There’s a risk, though. In general, if you provide liquidity in an asset (in DeFi or centralized finance, in crypto or otherwise), and the asset price steadily goes down, you’ll find yourself buying more and more of it, and it will be worth less and less. In an AMM liquidity pool, if the price of one token keeps going up against the other token, the pool will have more and more of the token worth less and less. This is a risk that all market makers take; in traditional finance it’s sometimes called “adverse selection.”
虽然存在风险。一般来说，如果你在某种资产（无论是 DeFi 还是中心化金融，或者其他加密货币）中提供流动性，而该资产的价格不断下跌，你就会发现自己不断购买更多的该资产，而它的价值却不断降低。在自动做市商流动性池中，如果一种代币的价格不断上涨对另一种代币，池中就会拥有更多的价值不断降低的代币。这是所有做市商面临的风险；在传统金融中，有时称为“逆向选择”。

In DeFi, though, it delights in the name “impermanent loss.” I don’t know why, but I love it. There’s nothing particularly impermanent about it—unless the price bounces back, of course—but that’s what it’s called.
然而，在 DeFi 中，这种风险却以“不可持续损失”的名称为乐。我不知道为什么，但我喜欢这种名称。当然，除非价格反弹否则这种损失并不是特别不可持续的——但这就是它的名称。

Exchanges—providing liquidity between different tokens—are a key function of DeFi, but there are others. One important function is lending.
DeFi 的一个关键功能是交易所——提供不同 token 之间的流动性，但还有其他功能。另一个重要的功能是借贷。

Most DeFi lending is what you would call, in traditional finance, margin lending. You have a volatile asset (Ether, say), and you want to borrow some money (a dollarlike USDC stablecoin, say), using that volatile asset as collateral. Perhaps you’re borrowing that money to buy more volatile assets, or perhaps you’re borrowing against your Ether to buy a sandwich or a house without selling your Ether.
大多数 DeFi 借贷都是传统金融中所谓的保证金借贷。你拥有一个易变资产（例如 Ether），想借一些钱（例如稳定的 USDC 币），以该易变资产作为抵押。也许你借钱是为了购买更多易变资产，或者借钱是为了用 Ether 买一个三明治或房子，而不需要卖掉 Ether。

If you went to a broker for a margin loan against $100 of stock, the broker might lend you $50. It’s “overcollateralized,” because the stock is worth more than the loan, which makes the broker feel safe. If the stock then fell to $70, the broker might send you a margin call: “Pay down $15 of this loan, or I’ll liquidate your stock.” That way it’s less likely the broker will end up holding the bag for your loss if the stock keeps falling. If you failed to meet the margin call, the broker would sell your stock, clear, say, $65 for it, keep enough money to repay the loan, and give you what’s left.
如果你去找经纪人申请一笔价值 100 美元的股票贷款，经纪人可能会借给你 50 美元。这是“超额抵押”，因为股票的价值高于贷款，这使经纪人感到安全。如果股票的价值后来下跌到 70 美元，经纪人可能会发出保证金调用：“偿还 15 美元的贷款，否则我将卖掉你的股票。”这样，经纪人就不太可能因股票继续下跌而蒙受损失。如果你未能满足保证金调用，经纪人将卖掉你的股票，拿回 65 美元，偿还贷款，并将剩余的钱交给你。

This is pretty straightforward to automate with smart contracts. There are robust DeFi lending systems, such as Compound: Lenders put up tokens and earn interest, borrowers borrow tokens (overcollateralized by other tokens) and pay interest, and automatic liquidation provisions make sure that if the value of the collateral goes down, it’s sold to pay back the loans.
这可以使用智能合约来自动实现。有着健全的 DeFi 借贷系统，例如 Compound：出借人提供 token 并获得利息，借款人借入 token（以其他 token 作为抵押）并支付利息，自动清算条款确保如果抵押的价值下跌，就将其卖掉以偿还贷款。

What’s much harder in DeFi are the main businesses of traditional finance: unsecured lending and lending secured by physical assets (such as houses). DeFi is good at lending crypto secured by crypto. The collateral lives on the blockchain; the loan lives on the blockchain; they’re connected by smart contracts on the blockchain. It’s all pretty neat.
DeFi 中最难的部分是传统金融的主要业务：未担保贷款和以物理资产（如房屋）为担保的贷款。DeFi 擅长于以加密货币为担保的加密货币贷款。抵押品、贷款和智能合约都存在于区块链上，整个过程非常简洁。

But this sort of lending crypto against crypto doesn’t do much. It’s mostly useful for crypto speculation—you lend Ether, get USDC, and use it to buy even more Ether. By contrast, a mortgage lets you buy a house and then pay for it with your future income. An unsecured business loan helps you build a business and then pay off the loan with the business’s future earnings.
但这种加密货币互换贷款方式并没有太大作用。它主要用于加密货币投机——你贷款以太币，获得 USDC，然后用它购买更多的以太币。相比之下，抵押贷款可以让你购买房屋，然后用未来的收入偿还贷款。未担保的商业贷款可以帮助你建立业务，然后用业务的未来收益偿还贷款。

There are deep philosophical reasons that crypto is bad at this. An unsecured loan is essentially about trust. It’s about the lender trusting that she’ll be repaid not out of a pool of collateral but out of the borrower’s future income. She has to trust that the borrower will have future income and that he will pay.
加密货币在这方面存在深刻的哲学原因。未担保贷款的实质是关于信任的。它是关于贷款人相信借款人将来会有收入，并且会偿还贷款，而不是来自抵押品池的偿还。贷款人必须相信借款人将来会有收入，并且他会偿还贷款。

Relatedly, an unsecured loan requires identity. You need to know who’s borrowing the money, what their payment history looks like, what their income is. The default approach in much of crypto is pseudonymity: Anyone can set up any number of crypto wallets or Bitcoin account numbers, and they’re generally not tied to a name. If you borrow money against crypto collateral, all your lender needs to know is that the collateral is on the blockchain. If you borrow money against your future income, your lender needs to know who you are.
类似地，未担保贷款需要身份识别。你需要知道谁借钱，借款人的支付记录是什么样的，借款人的收入是多少。在加密货币领域，大多数情况下采取匿名方式：任何人都可以设置多个加密货币钱包或比特币账户号，而这些账户号通常不与真实姓名挂钩。如果你以加密货币作为抵押借钱，贷款人只需要知道抵押物在区块链上。如果你以未来收入作为抵押借钱，贷款人需要知道你是谁。

That said, there’s nothing in principle to prevent unsecured lending in DeFi, and there are projects such as Goldfinch that do it. You get together a smart contract, where people deposit money in exchange for tokens, and a DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization that controls the money. The tokens give them a share in the DAO’s profits and the right to vote on who gets the money. People propose potential borrowers, token holders consider them and vote, and if the holders vote yes then they make a loan. As with any DAO, the token holders can get together in a chat room and consider “off-chain” information if they want. (They could make the borrower send in a driver’s license and two bank statements.) You can build some incentive mechanism to punish members for proposing borrowers who default and reward them for proposing good borrowers. Decentralized finance is made up of smart contracts, but it’s also made up of people, and if they want to do unsecured lending, they can.
也就是说，原则上没有什么可以阻止 DeFi 中的未担保贷款，实际上也有像 Goldfinch 这样的项目。你可以组建一个智能合约，人们可以将钱存入换取 token，然后是一个去中心化的自治组织，控制着这些钱。token 给他们在 DAO 利润中的股份和投票权，决定谁可以获得贷款。人们可以提议潜在的借款人，token 持有者可以考虑和投票，如果持有者投票通过，那么他们就会发放贷款。与任何 DAO 一样，token 持有者可以在聊天室中讨论“链外”信息，如果他们愿意。（他们可以要求借款人提交驾驶执照和两份银行对账单。）你可以建立一些激励机制，惩罚提议借款人违约的成员，奖励提议好的借款人的成员。去中心化金融由智能合约组成，但它也由人组成，如果他们想做未担保贷款，他们可以。

We’ve talked about web3 as a source of online reputation, about “soulbound” tokens that could be used to verify a person’s actions, connections, and characteristics. A soul, in this terminology, is something close to a credit report: It’s a list of stuff that a person has done that should make you trust them, a decentralized and blockchained source of reputation information. The right assortment of degrees and endorsements might make you feel good enough about a person—or rather, a “soul,” an address on the blockchain—that you give them an unsecured loan. And then I suppose if they default you can take their soul.
我们曾经讨论过 web3 作为在线声誉的来源，关于“灵魂绑定”令牌，它们可以用来验证一个人的行为、连接和特征。在这个术语中，灵魂类似于信用报告：它是关于一个人的所作所为的列表，这些信息应该使你信任他们，这是一个去中心化和基于区块链的声誉信息来源。如果一个人拥有正确的学位和背书，你可能会感到足够信任他们——或者说，信任这个“灵魂”，即区块链上的一个地址，以至于你愿意给他们一笔无担保贷款。然后，我猜如果他们违约，你可以拿走他们的灵魂。

The basic mechanism of DeFi is that you put some tokens up in a smart contract to generate fees or interest. You put your tokens in an automated market-making contract to get liquidity-provider fees, you put your tokens in a lending protocol to get interest, etc. Generally this is referred to as “locking” your tokens—because they’re being used for lending or whatever, you can’t get them back for some period—and people often talk about DeFi protocols in terms of their TVL, or “total value locked.” Mechanically, the way this generally works is that you send your tokens to the smart contract, and it sends you back other tokens that are, basically, receipts for the tokens you locked up. Instead of having Ether and USDC, you have liquidity-provider tokens saying you’ve put some Ether and USDC into a smart contract.
DeFi 的基本机制是，你将一些令牌存入智能合约以生成费用或利息。你将令牌存入自动化做市商合约以获取流动性提供者费用，将令牌存入借贷协议以获取利息，等等。一般来说，这被称为“锁定”令牌——因为它们被用于借贷或其他目的，所以你不能在一段时间内取回它们——人们经常根据 DeFi 协议的 TVL，即“锁定总值”，来讨论它们。机械上，这一般是通过将令牌发送到智能合约，然后它会将其他令牌发送回来，这些令牌基本上是你锁定令牌的收据。例如，你不再拥有 Ether 和 USDC，而是拥有流动性提供者令牌，表明你已经将 Ether 和 USDC 存入智能合约。

What do you do with those liquidity-provider tokens? Well, in theory, you hold them until you want your locked tokens back, and then you hand them in and get back the underlying tokens. The liquidity-provider tokens are just a receipt. But at some point people realized that those tokens represent something of value; we can do something with them. If you have a token representing a receipt on some Ether that you locked into a smart contract, then that’s almost as good as having some Ether, and someone might give you some money for it. Now you can borrow against those receipt tokens in DeFi, too.
那些流动性提供商代币你怎么处理？理论上，你持有它们直到你想要回你的锁定代币，然后你交出它们并换回基础代币。流动性提供商代币只是一个收据。但是，人们最终意识到这些代币代表着某种价值；我们可以用它们做些什么。如果你拥有一个代表某些以太币锁定在智能合约中的收据代币，那么这几乎和拥有以太币一样好，有人可能会为此付你钱。现在，你也可以在 DeFi 中以这些收据代币为抵押借款。

Everything is like this. In proof-of-stake Ethereum, you can stake Ether to earn staking rewards. A protocol called Lido runs a big staking pool. If you stake your Ether with Lido, it will give you back a token called stETH, basically a receipt for your staked Ether. The Ether that you staked with Lido will earn staking rewards, while the stETH that you get back can be sold or invested in other DeFi protocols to earn more money.
一切都是这样。在权益证明以太坊中，你可以将以太币质押以获取质押奖励。一个名为 Lido 的协议运营着一个大的质押池。如果你将以太币质押给 Lido，它将给你回一个名为 stETH 的代币，基本上是一个代表你质押以太币的收据。质押给 Lido 的以太币将获取质押奖励，而你获取的 stETH 可以出售或投资于其他 DeFi 协议以获取更多的钱。

More broadly, the business of DeFi is about reusing tokens as much as possible. You have some tokens, you lock them up in a smart contract that does a thing and pays you a return, the smart contract gives you some sort of receipt token, and you turn around and lock up those receipt tokens in another smart contract that does another thing and pays you some more. People talk about “yield farming,” the process of bouncing between DeFi protocols to try to earn the maximum yield, reusing tokens, and getting paid in the protocols’ own tokens to make as much money as possible.
更广泛地说，DeFi 的业务就是尽可能地重复使用代币。你拥有某些代币，将它们锁定在一个智能合约中，该合约执行某些操作并支付回报，该合约给你某种收据代币，然后你将这些收据代币锁定在另一个智能合约中，该合约执行另一些操作并支付更多回报。人们谈论“收益耕作”，即在 DeFi 协议之间跳转以尽量获取最高收益，重复使用代币，并在协议自己的代币中获取回报以赚取尽可能多的钱。

This can create a self-reinforcing cycle, by which I kind of mean a Ponzi. It goes like this:
这可以创造一个自我强化的循环，我指的是庞氏骗局。它的工作方式如下：

The greatest of these protocols is probably OlympusDAO, which is run by a pseudonymous founder called Zeus (colorful character!), has a group of loyal investors called OHMies, and at its peak offered yields of 7,000% and was worth $3 billion, according to a CoinDesk article titled “Olympus DAO Might Be the Future of Money (or It Might Be a Ponzi).”⁶¹ Since then it’s lost about 99% of its value, so there’s your answer.
这些协议中最伟大的可能是 OlympusDAO，由一个化名为宙斯（一个有趣的人物！）的创始人运营，有一群忠诚的投资者称为 OHMies，并在巅峰时提供了 7,000%的收益，价值 30 亿美元，根据一篇标题为“Olympus DAO 可能是未来货币（或它可能是一个庞氏骗局）”的 CoinDesk 文章。 ⁶¹ 从那时起，它的价值已经下跌了约 99%，所以答案就在这里。

Olympus became particularly famous for the “(3, 3)” meme, based on the notation of game theory. The idea is that the payoff in a two-player game can be written as “(X, Y),” where X is what I get, and Y is what you get. These outcomes could be dollars, but often they’re written as abstract utility numbers: A payoff of (3, 3) is better for both of us than a payoff of (2, -1), without worrying too much about what those numbers mean. Olympus’s pitch was that if everybody buys OHM and locks it up, then everybody’s payoff will be good—i.e., (3, 3)—while if everybody does bad things like sell their OHM, then everybody’s payoff will be (-3, -3). (Those numbers are abstract and unitless, and actually the payoff was (-99%, -99%).)
Olympus 特别以“(3, 3)” meme 而闻名，这基于博弈论的符号。这个想法是，在两人游戏中，回报可以写成“(X, Y)”，其中 X 是我得到的，Y 是你得到的。这些结果可能是美元，但通常它们被写成抽象的效用数字：(3, 3)的回报对我们双方都比(2, -1)好，不需要太担心这些数字的含义。Olympus 的推销是，如果每个人都购买 OHM 并锁定它，那么每个人的回报都会很好——即(3, 3)——而如果每个人都做坏事，如出售 OHM，那么每个人的回报将是(-3, -3)。（这些数字是抽象的和无单位的，实际上回报是(-99%, -99%)。）

This, of course, exactly describes any Ponzi: As long as people keep investing new money and not withdrawing it, everyone will get richer (on paper), but it will unravel when people start taking their money out. Olympus always struck me as charmingly forthright about what it was up to. It’s the future of money, because as long as everyone keeps buying, it will keep going up! People have tried that one before.
这当然正好描述了任何庞氏骗局：只要人们继续投资新钱而不提取，就会使每个人变得更富（在纸面上），但当人们开始提取钱时，它就会崩溃。Olympus 总是让我感到它对自己的所作所为非常坦率。它是未来的货币，因为只要每个人继续购买，它就会继续上涨！人们之前已经尝试过这种方法。

In traditional finance, people devote their careers to finding arbitrages, circumstances in which they can buy something at a low price and instantly sell the same thing at a high price. This is hard to do, because traditional finance is very competitive, and people aren’t regularly leaving $20 bills on the sidewalk. Even if you think you’ve spotted an arbitrage—the same thing trading at different prices in different places—you have to worry about some legal or operational reason that you can’t actually move between those places. (Maybe there’s a 5% tax to move the stock offshore. Maybe short selling isn’t allowed, etc.)
在传统金融中，人们将职业生涯投入到寻找套利机会中，即在低价买入某物，然后立即以高价卖出同样东西。这很难做到，因为传统金融非常竞争激烈，人们不会经常在人行道上留下 20 美元的钞票。即使你认为你发现了套利机会——同样东西在不同地方以不同的价格交易——你仍然需要担心一些法律或操作原因，无法真正地在这些地方之间移动。（可能有 5%的离岸税，或者禁止卖空等。）

Most of what people call arbitrage in traditional finance is buying one thing at a low price, simultaneously selling a slightly different thing at a higher price, and hoping they turn out to be the same thing. Or buying one thing at a low price, selling the same thing a bit later, and hoping it turns out to be at a higher price.
在传统金融中，人们所谓的套利大多是以低价买入某物，同时以高价卖出略有不同的东西，然后希望它们最终是同样东西。或者以低价买入某物，然后稍后以高价卖出同样东西，然后希望它最终以高价卖出。

Meanwhile, decentralized finance is new enough that pricing anomalies exist, but efficient enough that everything happens visibly on a virtual computer running public code, so you can reliably exploit them. There are magical possibilities.
同时，去中心化金融足够新，以至于价格异常存在，但又足够高效，以至于一切都在公开代码运行的虚拟计算机上公开发生，因此你可以可靠地利用它们。这里有魔幻般的可能性。

Let’s say you’re a smart young person and you discover an arbitrage. Stock XYZ is trading at $10 on Exchange A and $11 on Exchange B. You can buy it on Exchange A for $10 and sell it on Exchange B for $11, making an easy $1 profit.
假设你是一名聪明的年轻人，你发现了一个套利机会。XYZ 股票在交易所 A 以 10 美元交易，在交易所 B 以 11 美元交易。你可以在交易所 A 以 10 美元买入，然后在交易所 B 以 11 美元卖出，轻松赚取 1 美元的利润。

That’s fine, now you have $1. But you want to buy 10 million shares on Exchange A for $100 million and sell 10 million on Exchange B for $110 million. Then you would have $10 million, which is much more worth doing.
这很好，现在你有 1 美元。但你想在 A 交易所以 1 亿美元买入 1000 万股，然后在 B 交易所以 1.1 亿美元卖出 1000 万股。然后你就会拥有 1000 万美元，这样做更值得。

The only problem with this plan is, while you’re a smart young person, you don’t have $100 million. Why would you?
这个计划唯一的问题是，你是一个聪明的年轻人，但你没有 1 亿美元。为什么你会有呢？

In financial theory the solution is simple: You borrow the $100 million at the market rate of interest, buy the stock, sell it, pay back a little interest, and keep your profits. In practice no one is going to lend you $100 million. I mean, if you really have found a perfect arbitrage, maybe you’ll be able to raise $100 million. You can work your connections, cold-call some hedge funds, maybe get some meetings where you present your strategy and say, “See, it’s a perfect arbitrage. I just need $100 million. Are you in?” And they’ll just do the strategy and leave you out. Maybe they’ll pay you a small finder’s fee.
在金融理论中，解决方案很简单：你以市场利率借入 1 亿美元，买入股票，卖出股票，支付一点利息，然后保留利润。在实践中，没有人会借给你 1 亿美元。我是说，如果你真的发现了一个完美的套利机会，也许你能够筹集 1 亿美元。你可以利用人脉关系，冷呼叫一些对冲基金，也许获得一些会议，在那里你展示你的策略，说：“看，这是一个完美的套利。我只需要 1 亿美元。你加入吗？”然后他们就会执行这个策略，并把你排除在外。也许他们会支付你一小笔 finder’s fee。

Or you could start small—do your arbitrage for $1,000, make $100, do it again for $1,100, etc.—until you have a huge bankroll, but that’s not great either. The longer it takes you, the more likely it is that the clever arbitrage you’ve spotted will go away. In particular, the more you do the trade, the more likely someone else is to notice and do it in big size and make the arbitrage go away.
或者你可以从小做起——以 1000 美元进行套利，赚 100 美元，然后以 1100 美元进行套利，等等——直到你拥有一个巨大的银行储备，但这也不太好。越久你花费时间，越有可能你发现的那个聪明的套利机会消失。特别是，你越多地进行交易，越有可能有人注意到并以大规模进行交易，使套利机会消失。

In crypto finance the situation is different. If, say, you spot Ether trading at two different prices on different decentralized exchanges, you can just write a program that does the following:
在加密金融中，情况不同。如果你发现以太坊在不同的去中心化交易所以不同的价格交易，你可以编写一个程序来执行以下操作：

The lender in Step 1 can make the return in Step 4 a condition of the loan; the loan and the payback occur simultaneously, in the same computer program executing in the same block of the blockchain. As far as the lending protocol is concerned, there’s no credit risk: If any of the intermediate steps fail—if it turns out you’re wrong about the arbitrage, and you can’t sell the token for more than you paid for it, etc.—then the whole thing never happens, and the loan isn’t made. The lending protocol isn’t evaluating your creditworthiness, your résumé, or your track record as an investor. It’s just making sure that the code works.
步骤 1 中的贷款人可以将步骤 4 中的偿还作为贷款的条件；贷款和偿还同时发生，在同一个区块链的同一个计算程序中执行。就贷款协议而言，没有信用风险：如果中间步骤失败——如果你错估了套利机会，无法以高于购买价格卖出 token 等——那么整个过程就不会发生，贷款也不会被授予。贷款协议不评估你的信用记录、简历或投资记录，只是确保代码运行正常。

This is clever and neat and feels like a good way to build a financial system. It’s an egalitarian, decentralized, permissionless, computerized way for anyone who spots an arbitrage to be able to exploit and close it. It should make markets more efficient and prices more accurate.
这非常聪明和简洁，感觉像是建立金融系统的好方法。这是一种平等、去中心化、无需许可的计算机化方式，允许任何人发现套利机会并将其利用和关闭。这应该使市场更加高效，价格更加准确。

The problem is, in crypto, “an arbitrage” often means “a mistake in a smart contract.”⁶² Somebody writes some contract that has some bug that occasionally lets a user put in one token and get back two. Then somebody notices and writes a program to use flash loans to put in 1 billion tokens and get back 2 billion tokens and blow up the smart contract entirely. People sometimes leave money lying around in crypto, and crypto has built very efficient ways for other people to take their money. It’s not clear that that is a good way to build a financial system.
问题是，在加密货币中，“套利”通常意味着“智能合约中的错误”。有人编写了一个有 bug 的合约，偶尔允许用户输入一个 token 并获得两个 token。然后有人注意到并编写了一个程序，使用闪电贷款输入 10 亿 token 并获得 20 亿 token，完全破坏智能合约。人们有时会在加密货币中留下钱，而加密货币已经建立了非常高效的方式来让其他人拿走他们的钱。这并不明显是一个建立金融系统的好方法。

It gets stranger. Let’s say you notice that a token is trading at $10 on Decentralized Exchange A and $11 on Decentralized Exchange B. So you send an order to Exchange A to buy 1,000 tokens for $10,000 and a simultaneous order to sell 1,000 tokens for $11,000. What happens to those orders?
情况变得更加奇怪。假设你注意到某个代币在去中心化交易所 A 上交易价格为 10 美元，在去中心化交易所 B 上交易价格为 11 美元。于是，你向交易所 A 发送一笔订单，购买 1,000 个代币，价值 10,000 美元，同时向交易所 B 发送一笔订单，出售 1,000 个代币，价值 11,000 美元。那这些订单会怎么样？

In the US stock market, whole books have been written about that question. People get really mad about it. Your order goes to your broker, who routes it to different exchanges at different times through different pipes. High-frequency electronic traders who see your order execute on one exchange might “race ahead” to another exchange to push up the prices. There are controversies about “co-location,” where the high-frequency traders pay fees to the stock exchanges to keep their computers in the same room as the exchange’s computers, so they can get a tiny speed advantage by connecting to the exchange through a fairly short wire.
在美国股票市场上，这个问题已经有了整本书的讨论。人们对此非常愤怒。你向经纪人发送订单，经纪人将其路由到不同的交易所，通过不同的管道。在一个交易所执行你的订单后，高频电子交易者可能会“抢先”到另一个交易所，推高价格。关于“同址”存在争议，即高频交易者向股票交易所支付费用，以便将他们的计算机与交易所的计算机置于同一个房间中，从而通过短短的电缆连接交易所，获得微小的速度优势。

In crypto the answer is different. It’s easiest to understand if you start with how trades worked on Ethereum, before the switch to proof of stake. When you made a trade, your transaction would be broadcast to the entire network and included in the list of transactions that miners were working on executing but that hadn’t yet made it into a block.
加密货币领域中的答案不同。要理解这一点，最好从以太坊上的交易方式开始，特别是在转换到权益证明之前。当你进行交易时，交易信息会被广播到整个网络，并被列入矿工正在执行但尚未加入区块的交易列表中。

When a block was finalized, miners would include your transaction in the block. But the miners decided which transactions got included in a block and in what order, and they also earned gas fees for executing transactions. Users could specify how much they wanted to pay for gas, and transactions with higher gas fees were usually prioritized.⁶³ This created a trade:
当一个区块被最终确定时，矿工会将你的交易加入区块中。但矿工决定了哪些交易被加入区块中，以及它们的顺序，并且他们还获得了执行交易的 gas 费用。用户可以指定他们愿意为 gas 支付的金额，高 gas 费用的交易通常会被优先处理。这就创造了一笔交易：

This is usually called MEV, which originally stood for “miner-extractable value,” because one winner in this scenario was the miner who got to charge higher gas prices to people who wanted to front-run trades or avoid getting front-run. It’s the subject of a 2019 paper, by Philip Daian et al., titled “Flash Boys 2.0,” a reference to the high-frequency traders in US stock markets who purportedly race ahead of other traders’ orders to extract value from them.
这通常被称为 MEV，最初是指“矿工可提取价值”，因为在这种情况下，矿工是赢家之一，可以向想要抢跑交易或避免被抢跑的人收取更高的 gas 费用。这是 2019 年菲利普·戴安等人发表的一篇论文，题为“闪电男孩 2.0”，是指美国股票市场中那些声称抢跑其他交易者的高频交易者。

Rather than solve this concern about traditional markets, crypto made it explicit: Time priority was subject to an explicit “gas auction,” where whoever paid the most to the transaction orderers got to go first. Sure, yes, in crypto you could get front-run all the time by more sophisticated electronic traders, but in a transparent and decentralized way.
与其解决传统市场的这个问题，不如加密货币使其变得明确：时间优先权是明确的“gas 拍卖”，谁付出最多钱给交易排序者就能优先。当然，在加密货币中，你可能会被更复杂的电子交易者抢先，但这是在一个透明和去中心化的方式中。

As Ethereum moved to proof of stake, MEV was rebranded “maximal extractable value.” There’s still money to be squeezed from traders by the people maintaining the network, but the mechanics have changed. In today’s Ethereum, there’s a division of labor between block builders (who compile and order transactions) and validators (the replacement for miners, who do the proof-of-stake work to make blocks official), and if you’re doing arbitrages you can send your transactions privately to block builders. You can still pay for speed and priority, but you can’t see everyone else’s trades to front-run them.
随着以太坊转移到权益证明，MEV 被重新命名为“可提取的最大价值”。网络维护者仍然可以从交易者那里榨取钱，但机制已经改变。在今天的以太坊中，存在着区块构建者（编译和排序交易）和验证者（矿工的替代者，负责证明权益以使区块生效）之间的劳动分工。如果你进行套利，你可以私下将交易发送给区块构建者。你仍然可以为速度和优先权付费，但你不能看到其他人的交易以抢先他们。

In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto invented Bitcoin. One thing that seems to have motivated him was a distrust of banks and financial intermediaries. This was understandable, because it was 2008. The modern banking system was at a low ebb. Banks had taken risks that few people understood and ended up losing tons of money on supposedly safe investments. High levels of leverage in the banking system—and in the more opaque and less regulated “shadow banking” system—made those systems fragile; a bank that borrowed $30 for every $1 of shareholders’ equity would go bust if the value of its assets fell 4%.
2008 年，中本聪发明了比特币。似乎他的一件事是对银行和金融中介的不信任。这是可以理解的，因为那是 2008 年。现代银行系统处于低谷。银行采取了许多人不理解的风险，并最终损失了大量钱财在所谓的安全投资上。银行系统和更不透明、更少监管的“影子银行”系统中的高杠杆水平使得这些系统脆弱；如果资产价值下跌 4%，一个借款 30 美元对股东权益 1 美元的银行就会破产。

The high leverage and lack of transparency caused contagion. An asset’s price would fall, the highly leveraged banks and funds that held it would get margin calls, and they’d have to sell whatever they had on hand. That would cause more prices to fall, which would lead to more margin calls, which would bankrupt some of the banks and funds, which would lead to more fire sales and more price drops. Meanwhile, the lenders to those banks and funds, who thought their money was safe, would have losses; many were also highly leveraged and might go bust. All of this was opaque enough that even banks and funds that hadn’t taken big risks or lost a lot of money were treated with suspicion by lenders, which could cause them to fail, too. Ultimately the banking system was bailed out by massive infusions of money from central banks.
高杠杆和缺乏透明度引发了传染效应。当某资产的价格下跌时，高杠杆的银行和基金持有者将收到保证金调用，并不得不出售手头的资产。这将导致更多价格下跌，进而引发更多保证金调用，导致一些银行和基金破产，继而引发更多的火-sale 和价格下跌。同时，认为自己的钱是安全的银行和基金的贷款者也将遭受损失；许多也高度杠杆化，可能破产。所有这些都是如此不透明，以至于甚至没有承担大风险或损失很多钱的银行和基金也被贷款者怀疑，可能导致他们也破产。最终，中央银行的大规模注资拯救了银行系统。

Satoshi didn’t like it, and he built a new payment mechanism that escaped the need to trust banks. It was irreversible and decentralized: Everyone was responsible for their own mistakes; no one could be bailed out by central banks printing money. It was transparent: Every transaction was recorded on the blockchain; there were no hidden chains of leverage.
中本聪不喜欢这种情况，因此他建立了一个新的支付机制，不需要信任银行。这是一个不可逆和去中心化的机制：每个人都要为自己的错误负责；没有人可以通过中央银行印钞票来获得救济。这是一个透明的机制：每笔交易都记录在区块链上，没有隐藏的杠杆链。

In a deep sense it wasn’t built on debt at all. To some Bitcoiners, the central sin of the banking system is that every bank deposit is a liability—it’s a debt, payable on demand, from the bank to its depositors—and so every dollar that you keep in the bank necessarily adds to the leverage of the system.⁶⁴ Dollars are debt, and debt got kind of a bad rap after 2008. Meanwhile, Bitcoin are not debt. They’re just Bitcoin. They exist in themselves, on the blockchain, rather than being liabilities of banks.
从深层次上说，它根本不是建立在债务之上的。对一些比特币支持者来说，银行系统的中心罪恶就在于每笔银行存款都是一个债务——它是一个随时可以兑现的债务，由银行向存款人承担——因此你在银行里的每一美元都会增加系统的杠杆作用。美元是债务，而债务在 2008 年之后就获得了不好的名声。与此同时，比特币不是债务。它们只是比特币。它们存在于区块链中，而不是银行的债务。

In early 2009, when Satoshi mined Bitcoin’s genesis block, this message resonated with a lot of people. A new financial system with transparent and irreversible transactions, with no special power for governments or big banks, had an appeal.
在 2009 年初，当中本聪挖掘比特币的创世块时，这个信息就引起了很多人的共鸣。一个新的金融系统，具有透明、不可逆的交易，没有政府或大银行的特殊权力，对很多人来说具有吸引力。

Over time, though, there was another, much more obvious appeal to Bitcoin. Its price kept going up. If you bought a Bitcoin for $100, you could soon sell it for $1,000. This got a lot of people very interested in crypto, not for philosophical or monetary-structure reasons but because getting rich is nice.
不过，随着时间的推移，比特币还有另一个更明显的吸引力。它的价格不断上涨。如果你以 100 美元买了一比特币，很快你就可以以 1000 美元卖出它。这使得很多人对加密货币非常感兴趣，不是因为哲学或货币结构的原因，而是因为赚钱很 nice。

Many of these people came from traditional finance, because they saw that crypto finance was fun, it was wide open, it allowed for permissionless innovation, and everyone was getting rich.
这些人中有很多来自传统金融，因为他们看到加密金融是有趣的、开放的、允许无许可创新，并且每个人都在赚钱。

These people—the people who left TradFi for crypto because the money was better—didn’t necessarily have strong philosophical commitments to all that Satoshi stuff. They weren’t like, “Leverage is bad, banks are evil, monetary soundness is what matters.” Some came from banks. They were there to make money. One way to make money is by finding good trades, finding cheap ways to borrow money, and then borrowing as much as possible to put into those trades.
这些人——那些因为钱更多而离开传统金融（TradFi）投入加密货币的人——并不一定有强烈的哲学承诺，坚持萨托西（Satoshi）的那些原则。他们不像说：“杠杆是坏的，银行是邪恶的，货币健全性是最重要的。”一些人来自银行。他们的目标是赚钱。赚钱的一种方式是找到好的交易，找到便宜的借贷方式，然后尽可能借贷资金投入这些交易中。

And so somehow crypto had itself a 2008! In 2022 the crypto financial system rediscovered what the traditional system had discovered in 2008. It was honestly kind of impressive.
于是，某种程度上，加密货币系统在 2022 年重新发现了传统系统在 2008 年发现的东西。这真的很令人印象深刻。

In May 2022, you’ll recall, the algorithmic stablecoin TerraUSD collapsed. If you had money in Terra/Luna, odds are that you lost roughly all of it. Many of the people who lost money were regular retail savers who’d been suckered by TerraUSD’s promises of stability (and of a safe 20% interest rate) or regular retail cryptocurrency investors who speculated on Luna and lost. But not all of them.
2022 年 5 月，你可能还记得，算法稳定币泰拉 USD 崩溃。如果你在泰拉/Luna 上有钱，很可能你失去了几乎所有的钱。很多失去钱的人是普通零售储蓄者，他们被泰拉 USD 的稳定承诺（以及 20%的安全利率）所欺骗，或者是普通零售加密货币投资者，他们投机 Luna 并失去了。但并不是所有人。

One victim of the Terra collapse was a hedge fund called Three Arrows Capital, run by two former Credit Suisse Group AG currency traders. (Colorful characters, and also former TradFi guys.) “Speaking from an undisclosed location” in July, 3AC’s founders explained to Bloomberg News that what they’d “failed to realize was that Luna was capable of falling to effective zero in a matter of days and that this would catalyze a credit squeeze across the industry that would put significant pressure on all of our illiquid positions.”
泰拉崩溃的受害者之一是由两名前瑞士信贷集团 AG 货币交易员创立的对冲基金 Three Arrows Capital。（他们是有趣的人物，也是传统金融界的老手。）7 月份，从未公开的地点，3AC 的创始人向彭博新闻解释说，他们“未能意识到的是，Luna 能够在短短几天内跌至实际零，这将引发整个行业的信用紧缩，从而对我们所有的非流动性头寸施加巨大压力。”

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve was raising rates, and speculative assets generally were losing value. It turns out that crypto is basically a speculative asset and that it’s not particularly a hedge for stock market volatility. Everything in crypto went down. Bitcoin was worth more than $67,000 at the peak in October 2021; it fell below $20,000 in June 2022. Ether went from $4,800 to less than $1,000. The total market value of all cryptocurrencies fell from about $3 trillion in late 2021 to about $1 trillion in June 2022. Two-thirds of all crypto wealth just vanished.
与此同时，美联储正在加息，投机资产普遍贬值。事实证明，crypto 基本上是一种投机资产，并不是股票市场波动性的避险工具。crypto 中的所有资产都下跌了。比特币的价值曾在 2021 年 10 月达到 67000 多美元，2022 年 6 月跌破 20000 美元。以太坊的价值从 4800 美元跌至不到 1000 美元。所有加密货币的总市值从 2021 年晚期的 3 万亿美元跌至 2022 年 6 月的 1 万亿美元。所有加密货币财富的三分之二就消失了。

That’s just a very traditional story, isn’t it? Leveraged hedge funds piled into crowded trades that seemed, on the basis of a fairly short series of historical data, to be safe. This made the trades unsafe, so the hedge funds lost money. So their lenders sent them margin calls. So they were forced to sell off other, better assets—assets that were more liquid and could be sold to meet the margin calls—which made those better assets bad, too. “In a crisis, correlations go to 1,” traders say. Losses on bad trades force leveraged hedge funds to sell good assets, and so everything goes down at once.
这只是一个非常传统的故事，不是吗？杠杆式对冲基金涌入拥挤的交易，这些交易基于短期历史数据似乎是安全的。这使得交易变得不安全，因此对冲基金亏损。于是，他们的贷款人发送了保证金调用。于是，他们被迫出售其他更好的资产——这些资产更具流动性，可以出售以满足保证金调用——这也使得这些更好的资产变坏了。“在危机中，相关性达到 1”，交易员说。坏交易的亏损迫使杠杆式对冲基金出售好资产，因此一切同时下跌。

3AC was a leveraged hedge fund. When it blew up, the people who loaned it money didn’t get their money back. 3AC went into a complicated cross-border insolvency process that will presumably eventually recover some money for its creditors, but they’ll lose at least some of their money, and it will take a while to get back the rest. Who are these creditors?
3AC 是一家杠杆式对冲基金。当它崩溃时，借钱给它的人没有拿回钱。3AC 进入了一個复杂的跨境破产程序，预计最终将为债权人恢复一些钱，但他们至少会损失一些钱，并且需要一段时间来拿回剩下的钱。这些债权人是谁？

Well! A little of everyone, really. Documents filed in 3AC’s insolvency process reveal that the hedge fund was borrowing from DeFi platforms but also from an assortment of big-name centralized, or CeFi, crypto lenders, borrowing platforms, and exchanges.
哦！实际上是每个人的一点儿。3AC 破产程序中提交的文件显示，对冲基金从 DeFi 平台借钱，同时也从一系列大型中心化加密货币贷款平台、借款平台和交易所借钱。

The DeFi platforms mostly did fine: They had collateral, they had automatic liquidation mechanisms, they liquidated the collateral, and they got their money back. The centralized lenders did less well. It turns out a lot were less strict about demanding collateral than you might have wanted. 3AC was one of the biggest and best-known hedge funds in crypto. Working with 3AC was a stamp of approval for many lending platforms. It was prestigious to say, “Our customers include Three Arrows.” Also, 3AC was viewed as a smart fund, doing clever low-volatility arbitrage trades with good risk management rather than taking wild gambles. So if 3AC came to a lending platform and said, “Hey, we’d like to borrow $500 million unsecured,” the platform might say yes.
DeFi 平台大多运作良好：它们拥有抵押品，有自动清算机制，清算抵押品，并拿回了钱。集中化贷款机构的表现就不那么好了。原来很多机构对抵押品的要求不够严格。3AC 是加密货币领域最大的也是最知名的对冲基金之一。与 3AC 合作对许多贷款平台来说是一种认可。能够说“我们的客户包括三箭”是非常有荣誉感的。此外，3AC 还被视为一个聪明的基金，进行低风险套利交易，管理风险，而不是进行疯狂的赌博。所以，如果 3AC 来到一个贷款平台说，“嗨，我们想借 5000 万美元不需要抵押”，平台可能会同意。

Oh boy, did they. Voyager Digital, a crypto brokerage that let customers buy, sell, borrow, and lend crypto, is a public company listed in Canada. It had $2.3 billion of assets at the end of June, about $650 million of which was unsecured loans of USDC and Bitcoin to 3AC. Oops! It went bankrupt, too.
哦，真的同意了。加密货币经纪公司 Voyager Digital 允许客户买卖、借贷加密货币，是一家加拿大上市公司。截至 6 月底，它拥有 23 亿美元的资产，其中约 6.5 亿美元是未抵押的 USDC 和比特币贷款给 3AC。哎呀！它也破产了。

Celsius Network is the same basic idea but worse. It offered customers willing to lend out their crypto up to 18% interest on deposits, with pretty vague descriptions of how it earned that yield. CEO Alex Mashinsky (colorful character) once explained to Bloomberg Businessweek that it’s ridiculous that banks take deposits, use them to make loans, and then don’t pay 18% interest. “Somebody is lying,” Mashinsky said. “Either the bank is lying or Celsius is lying.” Only one possible answer! Celsius had also loaned 3AC money, though that was the least of its problems, and it was in some of the same trades as 3AC, which blew up when 3AC did. It also went bankrupt.
Celsius Network 的想法基本相同，但更糟糕。它向愿意将加密货币借贷给他人的客户提供高达 18% 的存款利息，但关于如何获得这种收益的描述非常模糊。CEO Alex Mashinsky（一个有趣的人物）曾经对 Bloomberg Businessweek 解释说，银行收取存款，用来发放贷款，然后不支付 18% 的利息，这是荒谬的。“有人在撒谎，”Mashinsky 说，“要么是银行撒谎，要么是 Celsius 撒谎。”只有一个可能的答案！Celsius 还向 3AC 提供了贷款，虽然这只是它的问题之一，它还参与了与 3AC 相同的交易，当 3AC 倒闭时也倒闭了。它最终也破产了。

The leverage of these platforms is pretty astonishing. Celsius was levered about 19 to 1: It had almost $95 of debt (mostly customer deposits) and about $5 of equity for every $100 of assets. Voyager was levered 23 to 1. A fairly small loss could wipe it out entirely, and did. That some banks were levered 30 to 1 going into the 2008 financial crisis became a matter of intense scandal, and post-crisis reforms require much higher capital levels for banks. Also, banks mostly invest in mortgages and stuff! These guys were investing in crypto loans, hugely volatile stuff with nothing in the way of long-term, through-the-cycle history! And they were doing it with 5% capital ratios.
这些平台的杠杆作用非常惊人。Celsius 的杠杆率约为 19 比 1：它拥有近 95 美元的债务（主要是客户存款），每 100 美元的资产中只有约 5 美元的权益。Voyager 的杠杆率为 23 比 1。一个小的亏损就可能将其完全摧毁，并且确实如此。2008 年金融危机前，一些银行的杠杆率高达 30 比 1，这成为一件激烈的丑闻，危机后的改革要求银行拥有更高的资本水平。此外，银行主要投资于抵押贷款等！这些人却投资于加密货币贷款，这些东西非常不稳定，根本没有长期、跨周期的历史！而且他们还使用 5% 的资本比例。

In many ways this looks like 2008. But it’s striking how little effect the loss of $2 trillion of crypto wealth had on anything else. The 2008 crisis in the banking and shadow banking system led to a global recession, a foreclosure crisis, and real political instability. The 2022 crisis in crypto seems to have been pretty walled-off from real-world effects. Two trillion dollars of market capitalization were lost without much of a visible impact outside crypto.
从很多方面看，这很像 2008 年。但是，失去 2 万亿美元的加密财富对其他方面的影响却很小。2008 年银行和影子银行系统的危机引发了全球经济衰退、房产危机和真正的政治不稳定。2022 年加密危机似乎与现实世界的影响隔离了。2 万亿美元的市场资本化损失了，但在加密领域以外几乎没有明显的影响。

Why? Part of the answer is about who lost money and how they thought of the money they lost. A lot of people who put money into crypto were using their gambling money, and when their bets didn’t pay off, they thought, “Ah, well, that was fun, too bad.” Almost everything about the world of crypto screams “high risk” to anyone who knows at all what to look out for. And so, if you do know what to look for, you take your crypto risks with money that you can afford to lose and in ways that account for the risks. You don’t take your life savings, lever them up 10 to 1, and invest everything in Dogecoin.
为什么？部分答案在于谁失去了钱，以及他们如何看待失去的钱。很多投入加密的人都是用赌博的钱，当他们的赌注不成功时，他们就会想，“哎，挺好玩的，太可惜了。”加密世界的几乎所有方面都在向任何了解风险的人喊话：“高风险！”因此，如果你了解风险，你就会用可以承担损失的钱来承担加密风险，并采取风险对冲的方式。你不会拿出毕生的积蓄，10 倍杠杆投资所有的狗狗币。

The great lesson of 2008 is that the real systemic risk is in the safest assets. The problem isn’t banks and investors buying insane risky securities that promise 50% returns and then go to zero. The problem is banks and investors buying AAA rated bonds that promise an extra 0.03% of yield and borrowing 95% of the money they use to buy those bonds—then finding out those securities shouldn’t have been rated AAA. People invest money they can’t afford to lose—and often money they borrowed—in safe assets, and when those assets lose money, the system breaks.
2008 年的伟大教训是，真正的系统性风险来自最安全的资产。问题不是银行和投资者购买疯狂的高风险证券，承诺 50%的回报然后归零。问题是银行和投资者购买 AAA 级债券，承诺额外 0.03%的收益，然后借入 95%的钱来购买这些债券——然后发现这些证券不应该被评为 AAA。人们投资了他们不能承担损失的钱——经常是借来的钱——在安全的资产中，当这些资产损失钱时，系统就会崩溃。

By 2022 the crypto financial system was working on creating safe assets. That’s what Celsius and Voyager and TerraUSD promised, safe and stable ways to earn high returns without a lot of volatility, but in crypto. Some people were taken in by those promises and invested their life savings; some hedge funds bet on those promises and levered up those bets. But mostly, look, the guy who promises 18% yields and says, “Either the bank is lying or Celsius is lying” isn’t going to persuade that many people to entrust him with their life savings.
到 2022 年，crypto 金融系统正在创建安全资产。这也是 Celsius、Voyager 和 TerraUSD 所承诺的，即在 crypto 领域内提供安全、稳定的高回报投资方式，而不伴随太多的波动性。一些人被这些承诺所吸引，投资了毕生积蓄；一些对冲基金也押注这些承诺，并加杠杆这些押注。但大多数情况下，看起来，那些承诺 18%回报的人说“要么银行在撒谎，要么 Celsius 在撒谎”，并不会说服太多人将毕生积蓄托付给他。

Part of the answer, though, is about the traditional financial system. Traditional big financial companies have been dipping their toe into crypto, but for the most part the traditional and crypto financial systems have stayed pretty separate. You don’t hear a lot about banks keeping 20% of their assets in Bitcoin, and in fact banking regulators have been rather stern about letting banks own crypto. So when crypto prices collapsed, banks and other financial institutions weren’t particularly harmed.
然而，答案的一部分是关于传统金融系统的。传统的大型金融公司一直在涉足 crypto，但传统和 crypto 金融系统大致保持独立。你不太听说银行将 20%的资产投资于比特币，实际上银行监管机构也对银行拥有 crypto 持相当严格的态度。因此，当 crypto 价格崩溃时，银行和其他金融机构并没有受到太大的影响。

This matters a lot. If you want to buy a house or open a store, you go to a bank for a loan. When banks are in crisis, as they were in 2008, they will be less likely to lend you money. So you won’t buy a house or open a store. There will be less credit, less economic activity, less growth in the real economy. Governments bailed out banks in 2008, not because they love bankers but because banks matter for the rest of the economy.
这一点非常重要。如果你想买房或开店，你需要去银行贷款。当银行陷入危机，如 2008 年那样，他们将更不愿意贷款给你。因此，你不会买房或开店。将会有更少的信贷、更少的经济活动、更少的实体经济增长。2008 年，政府拯救银行，不是因为他们喜欢银行家，而是因为银行对整个经济的重要性。

The crypto financial system is very fun and cool and has invented a lot of interesting stuff. But it’s mostly not where people go to get money to buy a house or open a store. Bitcoin and Ethereum and DeFi could all vanish tomorrow without a trace, and most businesses that make stuff in the physical world would be just fine.
加密金融系统非常有趣和酷炫，已经发明了许多有趣的东西。但是，它主要不是人们去获取钱来买房或开店的地方。比特币、以太坊和 DeFi 都可能在明天消失得无影无踪，而大多数制造物理世界产品的企业将不会受到影响。

IV
Trust, Money, Community
IV 信任、货币、社区

Let me tell a couple of stories about crypto and society.
让我讲两个关于加密和社会的故事。

One story goes like this. We live in a world of trust. That trust pervades everything we do. We’re spoiled; the institutions we deal with every day are trustworthy. Not all of them, not all the time, not in every way, but quite a lot of them to a high degree. We put money in the bank, and when we go to take it out, it’s there.
一个故事是这样的。我们生活在一个充满信任的世界中。这种信任渗透到我们的一切行为中。我们被宠坏了；我们每天打交道的机构都是可靠的。不都是这样，不是所有时候，不是所有方面，但是大多数机构都是高度可靠的。我们把钱存入银行，当我们取出钱时，它就在那里。

Crypto—Satoshi Nakamoto and his disciples—said:
加密货币——中本聪和他的追随者们——曾经说过：

This had an appeal, and crypto became very valuable, and people looked to put their money to work in crypto—and they trusted people. Over and over again, they trusted Quadriga and Terra and Voyager and Celsius and dozens of other projects that failed or ran off with their money or got hacked. They just fell over themselves to trust people.
这种吸引力很大，加密货币变得非常有价值，人们开始将钱投入加密货币中——他们信任这些人。一次又一次，他们信任 Quadriga、Terra、Voyager 和 Celsius 等数十个项目，这些项目要么失败，要么卷款逃跑，要么被黑客攻击。他们信任这些人，简直到了自欺欺人的程度。

Why did they do this? Well, there’s a common thread in these kinds of things. The people who are easiest to pull in are often the ones who think they’re the most independent-minded and cynical. “Either the bank is lying or Celsius is lying,” Celsius told people, flattering their unjustified belief that they knew the real score.
他们为什么这样做？好吧，这类事情有一条共同的线索。最容易被骗的人通常是那些认为自己最独立、最怀疑的人。“银行是在撒谎还是 Celsius 在撒谎？”Celsius 对人们说，迎合他们不合理的信念，即他们认为自己知道真相。

But there’s something else, too. The people who trusted Celsius weren’t tripped up only by their belief that they were outsmarting the system, though there was that. They also…they thought Celsius was a bank? It looked sort of like a bank. It did things, with crypto, that were banklike. They were familiar with how banks work. They understood that banks are safe, that if you put money in a bank you can get it back. They looked at Celsius and thought, “Well, this is a big thing, it has a nice website, it’s available to Americans. Surely if it was a problem someone would’ve done something about it.”⁶⁵
但是，还有其他原因。信任 Celsius 的人不仅仅是因为他们认为自己在欺骗系统，还有其他原因。他们也……他们认为 Celsius 是一家银行？它看起来像一家银行，使用加密货币进行银行类似的操作。他们熟悉银行的运作方式，知道银行是安全的，如果你把钱存入银行，你可以取回。他们看了 Celsius，想：“嗯，这是一个大项目，有一个漂亮的网站，对美国人开放。肯定如果有问题，someone 就会采取行动。”

There’s something a bit alarming about this. Crypto is in a way about rejecting the institutions of society, about being trustless and censorship-resistant. But it quietly free-rides on people’s deep reservoir of trust in those institutions. People are so used to trusting banks that, when Celsius told them not to trust banks, they said, “Ah, yes, OK,” then trusted Celsius to work like a bank, to be regulated like a bank. They didn’t worry about Celsius’s opacity and leverage. They didn’t do their own due diligence on its loans and audit its DeFi positions and demand irrefutable proof of its soundness. It promised to pay them back, and that was good enough for them.
这有一点令人担忧。加密货币在某种程度上是关于拒绝社会机构的，关于无需信任和抗审查的。但它悄悄地免费搭载了人们对这些机构的深深信任。人们如此习惯于信任银行，以至于当 Celsius 告诉他们不要信任银行时，他们说：“啊，好的”，然后信任 Celsius 像银行一样运作，像银行一样受到监管。他们没有担心 Celsius 的不透明度和杠杆作用。他们没有对其贷款进行自己的尽职调查，也没有审计其 DeFi positions，并要求不可辩驳的证明其健全性。它承诺偿还他们，这对他们来说已经足够了。

But there’s something hopeful about it, too. Trust in institutions is so strong and resilient that all of crypto’s bluster can’t stamp it out. “Not your keys, not your coins, put your trust only in verifiable code,” crypto evangelists yelled, and people heard them and said, “Yes, that is nice, but I’m busy, I’m going to trust these nice strangers with my Bitcoin.”
但是这里也有一些值得期待的地方。机构的信任度如此之高、如此坚韧，以至于所有加密货币的吹嘘都无法摧毁它。“不是你的钥匙，不是你的币，只相信可验证的代码”，加密货币布道者喊道，人们听到了，然后说，“是的，这很好，但我忙，我要相信这些好心的陌生人来管理我的比特币。”

Crypto, in its origins, was about abandoning the system of social trust that’s been built up over centuries and replacing it with cryptographic proof. And then it got going and rebuilt systems of trust all over again. What a nice vote of confidence in the idea of trust.
加密货币原本是要抛弃几个世纪以来建立的社会信任体系，代之以密码学证明。然后它开始运作，重新建立了各种信任体系。这对信任概念的信心投票真是太好了。

There’s a related story about money. One way to think of money is that it’s a system of social credit. Society has mechanisms—capitalism, politics, etc.—to allocate resources, with a rough heuristic of: “The more good stuff you do for society, the more good stuff you get for yourself.” Money is a rough way of keeping track of that. If you do good stuff for other people, they give you money, which you can use to buy good stuff for yourself.
有一个关于钱的相关故事。可以将钱看作是一种社会信用体系。社会有机制——资本主义、政治等——来分配资源，遵循大致的规则：“你为社会做的越多，你自己得到的也越多。”钱是一种粗略的跟踪方式。如果你为他人做了好事，他们会给你钱，你可以用这笔钱来为自己买好东西。

Another way to think about money is that it’s some sort of external objective fact. If you have money, it’s your money, and society has nothing to say about whether you can keep it or what you can do with it.
钱可以被看作是一种外在的客观事实。如果你有钱，它就是你的钱，社会没有权力决定你是否可以保留它或如何使用它。

Crypto starts from the second view: Your Bitcoin are yours immutably; they’re controlled only by your private key, and no government or bank can take them away from you. But the history of crypto since Satoshi has undermined this view. If you got your Bitcoin illegitimately, the government can trace them and stop you from spending them. There are still gatekeepers—crypto exchanges and fiat off-ramps and banks—that decide what you can do with your money. Crypto might be immutable and “censorship-resistant,” but its interactions with the real world are not.
加密货币从第二种观点开始：你的比特币是不可更改的，只由你的私钥控制，没有政府或银行可以从你那里夺走它们。但是，自萨托西以来加密货币的历史已经破坏了这种观点。如果你非法获取了比特币，政府可以追踪它们并阻止你花费它们。仍然有守门人——加密货币交易所、法币离岸和银行——决定你可以如何使用你的钱。加密货币可能是不可更改的和“审查抵抗”的，但它与现实世界的交互却不是。

Not just that. Crypto isn’t even immutable, not really. In 2016 an important smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain called the DAO got hacked. (DAO is now a generic term, but this was the DAO, the first of its name.) There was a flaw in the contract that allowed a hacker to drain a lot of money from it, and he did. Ethereum was a new technology, so the hack was a big deal.
不仅如此，加密货币甚至不是不可更改的。2016 年，一个重要的以太坊区块链智能合约 DAO 被黑客攻击。（DAO 现在是一个通用术语，但这是第一个 DAO。）合约中有一个漏洞，允许黑客从中提取大量资金，并且他这样做了。以太坊是一个新技术，所以这次黑客攻击是一个大事件。

This hack was controversial; there was controversy about whether it was even a “hack.” Some people said: “Look, if the code of the smart contract allowed the hacker to do this, then it was allowed. There’s no external standard of validity, just the code, and if it happened in the code, it’s fine. If we reverse this transaction, we will destroy the essence of the blockchain, which is the irreversibility of transactions.”
这次黑客攻击引发了争议，有人争论它是否真的算是一次“黑客攻击”。一些人说：“看，如果智能合约的代码允许黑客这样做，那么它就是允许的。没有外部的有效标准，只有代码，如果它发生在代码中，那么它就是 fine。如果我们逆转这笔交易，我们将破坏区块链的本质，即交易的不可逆性。”

Other people said: “No, that’s nuts. This was a big hack, and lots of people lost money.” It was clear enough—to humans, anyway—that this was not how people intended the smart contract to work, even if it was in fact how it worked. Sometimes the code is wrong.
其他人说：“不，这太疯狂了。这是一次大规模黑客攻击，很多人损失了钱。”人类至少清楚，这不是智能合约原本要工作的方式，即使事实上它确实是这样工作的。有时候代码就是错的。

The Ethereum network decided to roll back the blockchain and reverse the hack. That’s hard to do. You couldn’t just amass a bunch of computer power yourself and hack the Ethereum blockchain and reverse transactions. But if everyone in Ethereum agrees to do it, they can.⁶⁶ Cryptocurrency isn’t money that’s totally immune to censorship, that’s atomic and individual and immutable. It’s money that’s controlled by consensus, much like dollars are. It’s a different form of consensus—proof-of-work mining, proof-of-stake validation, decentralized communities, DAOs, Discord chats—but the thing that gives you the money and makes the money valuable is that consensus.
以太坊网络决定回滚区块链，逆转黑客攻击。这很难做到。你不能只是自己聚集一堆计算机力量，黑客以太坊区块链，逆转交易。但如果以太坊所有人同意这样做，他们就可以做到。这不是完全免受审查、原子化、不可更改的货币，而是由共识控制的货币，就像美元一样。它的共识形式不同——工作量证明挖矿、权益证明验证、去中心化社区、DAO、Discord 聊天——但使货币有价值的正是这种共识。

Here’s another, more speculative story.
又一个更加推测的故事。

The most valuable thing in human life, this story begins, is connection. Being with your friends, making friends, feeling esteemed by your peers: These are the things that give life meaning.
这个故事开始说，人生中最有价值的是连接。和朋友在一起，结交朋友，受到同伴尊重：这些都是赋予生命意义的事情。

“Sure, sure, sure, whatever,” you say, because this feels fuzzy and fake. But look how rich Mark Zuckerberg is! In 1999, if you’d said, “A giant contributor to US gross domestic product is the friends we made along the way,” that wouldn’t have made any sense. Now, Facebook is worth almost half a trillion dollars—though, to be fair, it’s changed its name to Meta Platforms Inc. to mark its pivot away from friendships.
“好吧，好吧，随便吧，”你说，因为这感觉模糊不清和假造。但看看马克·扎克伯格有多富！1999 年，如果你说，“美国国内生产总值的巨大贡献者是我们一路结交的朋友，”那不会有任何意义。现在，Facebook 的价值几乎达到半万亿美元——虽然，公平地说，它已经更名为 Meta Platforms Inc.，标志着它从友谊转向其他领域。

And to mark its pivot to the metaverse. I don’t know what the metaverse is. But I gather that it means something like: Our lives, our social lives, our intellectual lives, our professional lives, our aesthetic lives, the things that we do all day that give our lives meaning, will take place increasingly on interconnected computers. Our reality will be intermediated increasingly by computers and the internet.
而且标志着它转向元宇宙。我不知道元宇宙是什么。但我认为它意味着：我们的生活、社交生活、智慧生活、职业生活、审美生活，我们每天做的事情赋予生命意义，将越来越多地发生在相互连接的计算机上。我们的现实将越来越多地被计算机和互联网所中介。

Human social life moving to the internet has economic value, it turns out, though if you explain the mechanism, it seems remarkably trivial. “If people talk to their friends about vacuums, and you show them an ad about vacuums, they’ll probably buy a vacuum.” “If we intermediate between people’s friendships, we can serve ads.”
人类社交生活转移到互联网上具有经济价值，结果证明，虽然如果你解释机制，似乎非常微不足道。“如果人们与朋友讨论吸尘器，并向他们展示关于吸尘器的广告，他们可能会购买吸尘器。”“如果我们在人们的友谊之间进行中介，我们可以提供广告。”

A key lesson of crypto is: A bunch of people can get together online and make their community have economic value, and then capture that value for themselves. If you explain the mechanism for that, it sounds even worse. “Well, see, there’s this token of membership in the community, and it’s up 400% this week. Also the tokens are JPEGs of monkeys.”
加密货币的一个关键教训是：一群人可以在线聚集，赋予他们的社区经济价值，然后将该价值据为己有。如果你解释这种机制，听起来甚至更糟。“好吧，看看，这社区成员的代币涨了 400%这周。此外，这些代币还是猴子的 JPEG 图片。”

But look, pretty soon, what are we going to sell to each other? Online communities are valuable. There’s money to be made.
但是，看看，不久的将来，我们将卖给彼此什么？在线社区是有价值的。有钱可赚。

There are lots of online communities, though. One is Bored Ape Yacht Club, a self-selected club where you become a member by buying an expensive membership token. The value of that community is, I guess, you feel cool and exclusive? Maybe you befriend a celebrity or a venture capitalist, bonding over your apes.
虽然有很多在线社区。其中一个是无聊猿游艇俱乐部，这是一个自选的俱乐部，你可以通过购买昂贵的会员令牌加入。这个社区的价值，我猜测，是你感到酷和独特？也许你会和名人或风险投资家成为朋友，通过你们的猿建立联系。

Or there’s social networking. Facebook is valuable; make a Neo-Facebook; give people a token; let them keep the value for themselves. “Advertisers can get your data only if they pay you in tokens,” you tell them, or “You can earn tokens for posting, which you can then use to pay other people for posting.” Why not?
或者是社交网络。Facebook 很有价值；创建一个新 Facebook；给人们一个令牌；让他们自己保留价值。“广告商只能在付费令牌的情况下获取你的数据，”你告诉他们，“或者你可以通过发帖获得令牌，然后用这些令牌支付其他人发帖。”为什么不呢？

Or gaming. “If you buy a laser in this game, it’s an NFT, and it’s yours to keep forever. Maybe you can use it in another game.” Why not? These are standard claims about web3 that leave me mostly cold. I don’t want to be in the advertising-data-selling or computer-game-arms-dealing businesses.
或者是游戏。“如果你在游戏中购买了一把激光枪，它是一个 NFT，你可以永远保留它。也许你可以在另一个游戏中使用它。”为什么不呢？这些关于 web3 的标准主张让我感到相当冷漠。我不想参与广告数据销售或电脑游戏军火交易业务。

But other online communities are DeFi? Like, in some crude sense, what decentralized finance is is a big community of people who get together to pretend to trade financial assets—or, rather, who trade financial assets in a sort of virtual world. They’ve built derivatives exchanges and secured lending protocols and new ways to do market-making, but instead of trading stocks or bonds they trade tokens that they made up. And those tokens are valuable, in part because they’re linked to other online communities (you can use DeFi to buy Ether that you then use to buy NFTs to become a Bored Ape owner), but also in part because DeFi is itself an online community, or cluster of communities, and the tokens it trades are points in that community. If you build a cool trading platform or execute a cool trade, you’ll earn tokens, which you can spend on other cool trading platforms or trades. Talented financial traders are willing to work on projects to get those tokens. If you had some of those tokens, you could hire those traders.
但是其他在线社区是 DeFi 吗？从某种粗糙的角度来说，去中心化金融是什么？它是一个大型社区，人们聚集在一起，假装交易金融资产——或者说，在某种虚拟世界中交易金融资产。他们建立了衍生品交易所、担保贷款协议和新的市场做市方式，但不是交易股票或债券，而是交易他们自己创造的代币。这些代币的价值部分来自它们与其他在线社区的链接（你可以使用 DeFi 购买以太坊，然后使用以太坊购买 NFT 成为无聊猿的所有者），部分来自 DeFi 本身是一个在线社区，或者社区集群，而它交易的代币是该社区中的点数。如果你建立了一个酷炫的交易平台或执行了一笔酷炫的交易，你将获得代币，可以用来购买其他酷炫的交易平台或交易。有才华的金融交易员愿意为获得这些代币而工作。如果你拥有这些代币，你可以雇佣这些交易员。

A problem, and an advantage, of crypto is that it financializes everything. “What if reading your favorite book made you an investor in its stock.” Feh, it’s a story that only a venture capitalist could love. On the other hand, it’s a story that venture capitalists love. A minimalist case for crypto is:
加密货币的一个问题和优势是，它将一切金融化。“如果阅读你最喜欢的书使你成为其股票的投资者。”哎，这只是风险投资家们爱听的故事。另一方面，这也是风险投资家们爱听的故事。加密货币的一个最小案例是：

Or it’s a Ponzi. The web3 vision of having the customers of every project also be its investors works well in times of speculative excess, but it’s disastrous in a crash. “All our customers have a stake in our success” is great when token prices go up, but it also means that all your customers become poorer when token prices go down, which makes it hard to attract customers.
或者这是庞氏骗局。web3 的愿景是让每个项目的客户同时也是投资者，这在投机过热时效果很好，但是在崩溃时却是灾难性的。“我们的所有客户都有份我们的成功”在 token 价格上涨时很棒，但这也意味着当 token 价格下跌时所有客户都会变得贫穷，从而使得吸引客户变得困难。

But we’ve only really seen the boom. The problem with making every product also a Ponzi is that you can’t be sure if your customers are there for the product or the Ponzi. When it collapses, you can. If they’re still there–if they still use your product without getting rich off the token–then that means your product is promising. If not, well, you ran a Ponzi.
但我们只真正看到过繁荣期。让每个产品也变成庞氏骗局的问题是，你不能确定客户是为了产品还是为了庞氏骗局。当它崩溃时，你就可以了。如果他们仍然在那里——如果他们仍然使用你的产品，而不仅仅是为了 token 致富——那么这意味着你的产品很有前途。如果不是，那么你就是运行了一个庞氏骗局。

The great speculative frenzy of crypto and web3 over the past few years drew a lot of money and attention and talent into the crypto world. A great deal of that money and attention and talent went strictly to optimizing the speculative frenzy, to tweaking the tokenomics and leveraging the bets so people could make as much money as possible without actually building anything. Some of it probably went into building, though.
过去几年中加密货币和 web3 的巨大投机狂潮吸引了大量的钱财、注意力和人才进入加密货币世界。其中很大一部分钱财、注意力和人才都用于优化投机狂潮，调整 token 经济学和杠杆投注，使人们能够尽可能多地赚钱，而不需要真正地构建什么。然而，一些钱财可能真的用于构建。

Now the speculative frenzy has, if not disappeared, at least cooled. Now if you’re trying to raise money for a web3 project, it should probably do something, besides issuing a token that goes up. If it creates value for people, if the product is something people want, then the tokens will take care of themselves. Crypto people have a lot to prove on that front. One reason the 2022 crisis in crypto didn’t spark a contagion is that crypto has so few connections to things that matter to people. They play games and gamble on the blockchain, but they don’t have mortgages there.
现在投机热潮已经冷却，至少是如此。如果你想为 web3 项目筹集资金，那么它应该做点什么，而不仅仅是发行一个涨价的代币。如果它为人们创造价值，如果产品是人们想要的，那么代币自然会照顾自己。加密货币人士在这方面有很多需要证明的事情。2022 年加密货币危机没有引发连锁反应的一个原因是，加密货币与人们关心的事情联系甚少。他们在区块链上玩游戏和赌博，但他们不在那里拥有房贷。

Perhaps this is all a self-referential sinkhole for smart finance people, but honestly it would be weird if that’s all it ever turned out to be. If so many smart finance people have moved into the crypto financial system, if they find it so much more enjoyable and functional and productive than the traditional financial system, surely they’ll eventually figure out how to make it, you know, useful.
也许这只是一个自我参照的黑洞，对聪明的金融人士来说，但如果这就是它最终的结果，那么确实很奇怪。如果那么多聪明的金融人士已经转移到加密金融系统，并且他们发现它比传统金融系统更加愉快、功能强大和高效，那么他们最终一定会找到办法让它变得有用。

Here’s another way to tell this story. There’s the real world, and people do stuff in the real world. They grow food and build houses.
这是一个讲故事的另一种方式。在现实世界中，人们做着实事。他们种植粮食，建造房屋。

Over many centuries a financial system grew up, as an adjunct to the real world. That financial system enabled people to do more stuff in the real world. They could build railroads or semiconductor factories or electric cars, because they could raise money from strangers to fund their activities. They could buy bigger houses, because they could borrow money from banks. They could also trade out-of-the-money call options on GameStop, because that’s fun and you can make memes about it, but that’s an accidental feature of a financial system that mostly does serious stuff in the real world.
数世纪以来，一個金融系统逐渐发展起来，作为现实世界的附属部分。那個金融系统使人们能够在现实世界中做更多的事情。他们可以建造铁路、半导体工厂或电动汽车，因为他们可以从陌生人那里筹集资金来资助他们的活动。他们也可以购买更大的房子，因为他们可以从银行借钱。他们还可以交易 GameStop 的看跌期权，因为这很有趣，可以制作关于它的迷因，但这只是一个金融系统的附带功能，该系统主要是在现实世界中进行严肃的事情。

By 2008, or 2022, that system looked pretty abstract. When you think about modern finance, you often think about things like those GameStop options, or the system of payment for order flow that enables their trading, or synthetic collateralized debt obligations referencing other CDOs referencing pools of mortgage-backed securities. There’s a house there somewhere, under the CDO-squareds. All the sophisticated modern finance can be traced back, step by step, to the real world. Sure, it’s a lot of steps now. But the important point is that sophisticated modern finance was built up, step by step, from the real world. The real world came first, then finance, then the more complicated epiphenomena of finance.
到 2008 年或 2022 年，那个系统看起来非常抽象。当你想到现代金融时，你经常想到像 GameStop 期权那样的东西，或者支付流程系统使其交易成为可能的，或者合成抵押债务义务引用其他 CDO 的抵押债务证券池。那里有一所房子，隐藏在 CDO-squared 之下。所有复杂的现代金融都可以一步步追溯到现实世界。当然，现在有很多步骤。但是重要的是，复杂的现代金融是从现实世界一步步建立起来的。现实世界先于金融，然后是金融，最后是金融的更复杂的派生物。

Crypto, meanwhile, has built a financial system from first principles, pure and pleasing on its own, unsullied by contact with the real world. (I exaggerate: The basic function of sending money using crypto, Satoshi’s original goal, is fairly practical. But, otherwise.) That’s interesting as an object of aesthetic contemplation, and I’ve enjoyed contemplating it, and I hope you have, too. And it’s attracted a lot of finance people who also enjoy contemplating it, and getting rich. And their task is to build back down, step by step, to connect the elegant financial system of crypto to the real world. You’ve built a derivatives exchange, cool, cool. But can a real company use it to hedge a real risk facing its real factory? You’ve built a decentralized lending platform, awesome. But can a young family use it to buy a house?
与此同时，Crypto 已经建立了一个从头开始、纯洁、自成一体的金融系统，未受现实世界的污染。（我夸张了：使用 Crypto 发送钱款的基本功能，萨托西的原始目标，还是相当实用的。但除此之外。）这很有趣，可以作为审美对象，我也很喜欢思考它，我希望你也一样。它吸引了许多金融人士，他们也喜欢思考它，并赚钱。他们的任务是逐步将 Crypto 的优雅金融系统与现实世界连接起来。你建立了一个衍生品交易所，很酷。但是一家真正的公司能否使用它来对冲面临的真实风险？你建立了一个去中心化的贷款平台，非常棒。但是一家年轻家庭能否使用它来购买一所房子？

And the answer is, you know, maybe, give it time. The crypto system has attracted a lot of smart people who want to solve these problems, in part because they’re intellectually interesting problems and in part because solving them will make these people rich.
答案是，你知道，也许，需要时间。Crypto 系统吸引了许多聪明的人，他们想解决这些问题，部分是因为这些问题在智力上很有趣，部分是因为解决这些问题将使他们富裕。

But another part of the answer might be that the real world—growing food, building houses—is a smaller part of economic life than it used to be, and that manipulating symbolic objects in online databases is a bigger part. Modern life is lived in databases. And crypto is about a new way of keeping databases (on the blockchain).
但答案的另一部分可能是，现实世界——种植粮食、建造房屋——在经济生活中所占的比例比以前小了，而在线数据库中操作符号对象的部分变得更大了。现代生活是在数据库中度过的。而 Crypto 是关于在区块链上保存数据库的新方式。

If you build a financial system that has trouble with houses but is particularly suited to financing video games—one that lets you keep your character on the blockchain, and borrow money from a decentralized platform to buy a cool hat for her, or whatever, I don’t know—then that system might be increasingly valuable as video games become an increasingly important part of life. If you build a financial system whose main appeal is its database, it will be well-suited to a world lived in databases. If the world is increasingly software and advertising and online social networking and, good Lord, the metaverse, then the crypto financial system doesn’t have to build all the way back down to the real world to be valuable. The world can come to crypto.
如果你建立了一个金融系统，它在房屋方面存在困难，但非常适合为视频游戏融资——一个允许你在区块链上保存游戏角色，并从去中心化平台借钱购买一顶酷炫的帽子，或者其他什么，我不知道——那么这个系统可能会随着视频游戏在生活中变得越来越重要而变得越来越有价值。如果你建立了一个金融系统，其主要吸引力在于其数据库，那么它将非常适合一个生活在数据库中的世界。如果世界越来越成为软件、广告、在线社交网络和，天哪，元宇宙，那么加密金融系统不需要从头开始建立到现实世界中来变得有价值。世界可以来到加密领域。

Want more?  想要更多？
Subscribe to Matt Levine’s Money Stuff, a daily newsletter on all things Wall Street and finance.
订阅马特·莱文的《金融事务》，一个关于华尔街和金融的每日新闻简报。