10 Years Later,We Still Don't Know What Bitcoin Is For
he first mention of Bitcoin appeared online a decade ago this week, admittedly without much fanfare. A technical paper describing a new “electronic cash system” was sent around an obscure internet mailing list for cryptography nerds.
Its author detailed how the system would mean online payments being sent directly between people, without having to rely on a bank. It was unveiled without much bombast, and seemed like more of an experiment than a revolution.
A few months later, the Bitcoin network went online.
In the decade since, Bitcoin has been met with a combination of fascination, fervent excitement and deep scepticism. It has been called the end of money as we know it, hailed as a new gold for the digital world, and feared as the fuel for a new digital anarchy.
It has been through multiple boom and bust cycles. An early crash in 2011 saw Bitcoin's price fall from $30 to $2. Last year, it peaked at almost $20,000, making all the Bitcoins in the world worth more than $300bn.
The internet currency turned many of those who found out about it early into millionaires. It also created two ideas that some believe rank as the greatest inventions of this century: cryptocurrencies, of which Bitcoin is only one, and blockchain, the record-keeping technology that underpins it.
The appeal of both is that information of any kind could be stored and moved without having to rely on any central party or institution. In the case of money, when we make a card payment, a bank or credit card company typically takes a fee. Globally, these fees add up to billions each year.
But with cryptocurrencies, there is no such greedy payments provider. The system is “decentralised”: transactions are signed off and recorded by those who use the network. The people have the power.
The reality is that 10 years after the idea for Bitcoin and the blockchain came online, it still feels like a solution searching for a problem. Billions of venture capital funding has been put into cryptocurrency and blockchain start-ups, but as of yet, there seems to be little to show for it. Few of us are using cryptocurrencies to make payments.
Ask somebody who works in the industry about this, and they will tell you to be patient. They will tell you that cryptocurrencies and blockchain represent an idea as profound as the internet itself, and one so powerful that it will inevitably take hold eventually. Miss out, and you miss out on the future.
But something can't be the future indefinitely. At some point, a technology has to start being used. Otherwise it is simply a failed promise. And Bitcoin is starting to look like just that. A decade after it was invented, it has gained no traction as a form of payment. Nor have the thousands of other cryptocurrencies that have taken its place. Instead, it has served as a wild form of gambling. As for the blockchain, nobody seems to be using it for anything other than experiments and publicity stunts.
Technologies do take time to catch on. The first email was sent in the early 1970s but it took more than two decades for us to be sending missives to each other several times a day.
But just as often, things fail to catch on not because the world isn't ready for them, but because they are bad ideas.
Internet money may well be one of these ideas. Generally, our payment systems work. We can rely on our banks to hold our money. Few of us are paranoid enough to want to rip up the system. It is easier, generally, to rely on someone else.
The world wide web was also founded on democratic, grassroots, ideals, but has come to be dominated by massive companies. Decentralisation, it seems, is perhaps not as powerful a force as its backers had hoped.
Bitcoin and the blockchain have been presented as the future for a decade now. Time is running out for that prediction to come true.
十年前的本周,网上第一次提到比特币,应该说没怎么大肆宣扬 。一篇描述一种新型“电子现金系统”的技术论文被发送至一个为密码学领域书呆子设立的鲜为人知的互联网邮件列表 。
论文作者详细说明了该系统将如何意味着在线支付的款项在人们之间直接传递,无需依赖银行 。它的面世没有经过太多吹捧,看起来更像是一次实验而非一场革命 。
几个月后,比特币网络上线 。
【我们依然不知道比特币有什么用 比特币做什么用的】此后10年,比特币遭遇的既有痴迷、狂喜,也有深深的疑虑 。它被称为我们所知金钱的终结者,被誉为数字世界的新金币,也有人担心它会对新的数字无序状态起到推波助澜的作用 。
它经历了多个盛衰周期 。早在2011年的一次暴跌让比特币的价格从30美元跌至两美元 。去年,它达到了近两万美元的峰值,让全世界比特币的总值超过3000亿美元 。
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