【朝花夕拾】-【经济学人】- 加密币市场疯狂众生相

Crypto-currencies - The madness of crowds

  加密币市场疯狂众生相

  节选自【经济学人】April, 2019

  翻译练习：青澄青果

（注：本文仅用于英语翻译学习之用）

【朝花夕拾】-【经济学人】- 加密币市场疯狂众生相

Six months earlier a single Bitcoin cost just under $20,000. These days it is just $4,025. While the price was soaring, big financial institutions flirted with opening crypto-currency trading desks. The Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), one of the world's leading derivatives exchanges, launched a Bitcoin futures contract. Hundreds of copycat cryptocurrencies also soared, some far outperforming Bitcoin itself. Ripple rose by 36,000% during 2017. The bust has been correspondingly brutal. Those who bought near the top were left with one of the world's worst-performing assets. CBOE said it would soon stop offering Bitcoin future. Bitmain, a cryptocurrency miner, appears to have pulled a planned IPO. (Miners maintain a cryptocurrency's blockchain-a distributed transaction database-using huge numbers of specialised computers, and are paid in newly minted coins.)

六个月前一枚比特币是2万美元，现在已经降到4025美元。当时价格狂飙的时候，大型金融机构为了招徕客户还专门设置了加密币专柜。领先全球衍生品交易的芝加哥期权交易所还推出了比特币期货合约。成百上千的山寨版加密币价格攀升甚至超过了比特币的幅度。例如瑞博单在2017年就攀升了百分之36000. 不过攀升之后跌得很惨。最后这些劣质资产砸在那些接近高位买进的客户手里。芝加哥交易所也停止了比特币期货交易。比特大陆，一家加密币的挖矿公司也推迟了上市计划。这里解释一下，这些矿工利用专用计算机维护加密币区块链。区块链则是一种分布式加密币交易的数据库，矿工能够获得最新版的加密币作为报酬。

【朝花夕拾】-【经济学人】- 加密币市场疯狂众生相

The speed with which the bubble inflated and then popped invites comparisons with past financial manias, such as the Dutch tulip craze. Cryptocurrency enthusiasts like to claim a more flattering comparison-with the 1990s dotcom bubble. They point out that, despite the froth, viable businesses emerged from that episode. But the cryptocurrency fiasco has exposed three deep and related problems: the extent of genuine activity is hugely exaggerated; the technology does not scale well; and fraud may be endemic.

泡沫膨胀和破裂的速度如此之快，让人不由得联想起了历史上荷兰郁金香狂潮。加密币拥趸更喜欢比较上世纪90年代的互联网泡沫，显得还体面点。他们承认虽有泡沫存在但是加密币业务有其商业价值。加密币的结局揭示了三个深层次的问题：1、交易虚夸；2、技术规模没有跟上业务的扩张；3、欺诈行为泛滥。

【朝花夕拾】-【经济学人】- 加密币市场疯狂众生相

Consider the overstatement of activity, first. Ten years after their invention, using cryptocurrencies to pay for goods and services remains a niche pastime. Bitcoin is the original cryptocurrency and still the most popular. In January it is declared that Bitcoin transactions in 2018 added up to $3.3trn. But such figures include an awful lot of double-counting, mostly related to the way Bitcoin handles changes. Strip that out, Bitcoin accounted for around $812bn of genuine transfers of value. Of that, only a fraction was used to buy things. Around $2.4bn went to merchant-service providers, which handle payments for businesses- a piffling sum compared with the $15trn of transaction in 2017 on Alipay and Wechat Pay. Even for speculators, business is less brisk than it seems. "Wash trading", in which traders buy and sell to each other(or themselves) to create the illusion of volume, is widespread. Bitwise Asset Management, a cryptocurrency-fund manager, analysed 81 cryptocurrency exchanges for a presentation to the Securities and Exchange Commission, an American financial regulator. The firm estimate that 95% of trading volume could be artificial. The Justice Department is investigating claims of price manipulation.

第一个问题首先是交易业务量的虚夸。虽然加密币已经诞生10年，而实际用于消费仅限于小众消遣。比特币是最早的加密币而且也是现在最为流行的加密币。据称2018年其交易量达到了3.3万亿，但是其中有许多重复计算，主要原因是比特币处理数据方法的变化导致的。抛开这些不真实因素，真正的交易额只有8120亿。而其中只有一小部分用于购物，大约240亿用于支付网上业务服务商。与2017年的支付宝和微信支付高达15万亿的业务相比，真是小巫见大巫。即使投机分子也觉得不怎么样。为制造虚假繁荣的“倒仓”现象泛滥。Bitwise资产管理公司，一家加密币基金管理公司受托向美国金融管理机构证券交易委员会汇报了对于81个加密币交易所的业务分析。据其分析结果，大约95%的交易量是虚构的。目前司法部门已经介入关于价格操控的调查。

【朝花夕拾】-【经济学人】- 加密币市场疯狂众生相

The second problem is that the technology is too clunky to operate at scale. Cryptocurrencies are unlikely ever to achieve mass adoption. Unlike Alipay or WeChat Pay, cryptocurrencies are intended as new financial systems rather than extensions of the current one. But they have serious design flaws. Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator wanted it to be resistant to control by tyrannical governments and banks. Payment records are therefore not held centrally, but broadcast to all users. A new batch of Bitcoin is issued every ten minutes on average. That limits the network to processing about seven transactions per second. In 2017, as the crypto-bubble was inflating, the system became clogged. To ensure that transactions went through, users had to pay miners-at one point, as much as $50 per transaction.

第二个问题是技术滞后跟不上业务扩张的步伐。加密币因之也不会得到广泛应用。不像支付宝或者微信支付，加密币是要建立一个全新的金融系统，而非现有金融系统的延伸。而加密币系统有着致命的设计缺陷。比特币的缔造者希望它能躲过政府和银行的监管，所以支付记录没有集中跟踪系统而是分布式的存储于所有用户中。平均每十分钟就有一批比特币发行，意味着每秒仅限于处理七笔交易。2017年泡沫膨胀的时候，系统出现了卡顿。为了保证交易完成，用户每笔交易都需要支付矿工一个点，也就是50美元，才能完成。

【朝花夕拾】-【经济学人】- 加密币市场疯狂众生相

Moreover, Bitcoin is designed such that only 21m Bitcoins will ever be created, making it inherently deflationary. Mining, essentially a self-adjusting lottery in which participants compete to buy tickets, is energy-hungry. At the height of the boom it was thought to consume as much electricity as Ireland. These days, it merely consumes as much as Romania.

还有，比特币的设计总量只有2100万枚，所以通缩是其必然的问题。挖矿行为就像是一个自我调节的彩票系统，每个参与者都争相购买彩票，所以整个过程十分耗能。最高峰时其交易耗电量相当于爱尔兰举国耗能，当然现在就和罗马尼亚一样了。

【朝花夕拾】-【经济学人】- 加密币市场疯狂众生相

The final problem is fraud. Transactions are irreversible- a boon for con-artists. Ponzi schemes are common, as is incompetence. Cyptocurrency exchanges often collapse or are hacked. In February QuadrigCX, a Canadian exchange, filed for bankruptcy, saying it had lost $165m in deposits when its founder, Gerard Cotton, died, since only he had known the encryption keys protecting QuadrigaCX's deposits. But on March 1st, Ernst & Yung, which was appointed to handle the bankruptcy, said that the deposit addresses seem to have been empty for at least eight months before the date Mr Cotton is said to have died.

最后的问题是欺诈问题泛滥。交易不可逆， 这就给庞氏骗局的设计者制造了机会。庞氏骗局无处不在，加密币交易市场经常被整垮或者被黑。今年2月，一家加拿大的交易所就申请破产，声称由于唯一掌握系统密钥的创始人去世而损失1.65亿美元。不过随着指定清算人的介入，发现其存款早在创始人去世前八个月就已经被清空了。

【朝花夕拾】-【经济学人】- 加密币市场疯狂众生相 【朝花夕拾】-【经济学人】- 加密币市场疯狂众生相