*报道原文：
The year 2017 will be known as the one in which the first decentralised crypto-asset went ballistic.
Around the world people were gobsmacked, and then strangely motivated to pour their money into a little understood, new digital asset. The fever that gripped financial traders was manic, the volatility within the market awesome, and stomach-curdling stories of "if I'd invested $100 back in 2011 …" made everyone feel a bit weird.
As the year draws to a close and those in mainstream finance numbly watch bitcoin defy traditional economics and turn anonymous internet purveyors into billionaires, it's worth looking at the next step for this bewildering invention, which is experiencing the kind of financial manipulation and commoditisation it was designed to circumvent.
One man uniquely placed to outline the future uses of a decentralised protocol is Andreas M. Antonopoulos, a self-described "global nomad" whose eloquence on cryptography and bitcoin's revolutionary potential has generated an almost evangelical following.
A strict scholar and writer, Antonopoulos' highly regarded views earned him an outpouring of gratitude from the bitcoin community earlier this month. After responding to internet suggestions he had a lucrative stash of bitcoin, Antonopoulos explained his academic work was mostly conducted for free, and like most people he'd had to sell bitcoin earlier in his career to cover his general living expenses. To his great surprise,over 100 bitcoins were transferred to his wallet– worth about $1.5 million at the time – a timely reminder there is much more to the cryptocurrency community than just pump-and-dump cowboys.
Amid the frenzied rabble of spruiking crypto-salesmen and gloating banker types, Antonopoulos' voice remains clear, articulate and focused firmly on how the application of this technology is good for the world.
"I've turned down around 30 interviews this week because it seems all anyone wants to talk about is the price and whether the Winklevoss twins are billionaires," Antonopoulos tells me from New York over Google Hangouts.
"Whether Wall Street is making money is neither new nor interesting. And while sometimes I just get completely overwhelmed by the trolls and the money-grabbers and the scammers and the pyramid schemes, I go back to thinking about the technology itself, how bitcoin can help us reallocate resources and how we can govern on a planetary scale."
What is bitcoin?
Bitcoin is a decentralised crypto-asset; a software-based system that allows peer-to-peer value transacting. It sprang from a desire to operate outside the existing financial system controlled by central banks and institutions. Powered instead by mass collaboration, all transactions are verified by computers racing to solve complex mathematical problems. They are rewarded with bitcoin.
The release of the bitcoin protocol, in the summer of 2009, coincided with the severity of the global financial crisis – the most violent asset-price crunch in almost 10 years – and gained popularity alongside the extraordinary monetary policy that ensued.
"People watched as central banks pumped money into the system; the middle class underwent massive pain following the collapse of the institutions during that time. They saw the complete bailouts and the absolution of responsibility," says Antonopoulos.
"It left an indelible mark on a generation that has forever lost trust, not just in the institutions that benefited, but the institutions that governed during that time. They saw the governments sell them out to the banks."
But as bitcoin headlines now scream about millionaires and money, of forks and electricity costs and facilitating crime on the dark web, this story is the tipping point of a deep, structural change: it's about humankind's shift towards the algorithm and discovering new ways to distribute the resources we have in a more efficient, effective and fairer way.
In a wide-ranging interview withAFR Weekend, Antonopoulos initially describes the lofty, philosophical changes that have driven bitcoin's development, before elaborating on the sticking points, like transaction times, Ponzi schemes, bubbles and energy use, that have seen an explosion of analysis and speculation.
"Our civilisation itself is really just an ongoing attempt to scale governance models to manage greater and greater numbers of people," he says.
"Presently, we use hierarchies that aggregate information up a bureaucratic structure, where decisions are made at the top and actions taken to the bottom. And for two centuries, this model has worked well to massively scale up human organisation."
Outdated governance model
But as problems such as climate change andwidening inequalityrequire co-ordinated global attention, Antonopoulos says this governance model has reached a point where it no longer scales to benefit the greatest number of people.
As super-state federations swell in size, like the United States and the European Union, he argues that decision-making has become so far removed from everyday people that a deep revolt is under way, with internet-based protocols as the tools.
Evidence of anti-authoritarianism and deeply rooted libertarianism has manifested in the populist swings to the conservative right in both Europe and the US.
"The internet was the first decentralising influence that broke down hierarchical structures and replaced them with a flat communications network," he says.
"We are moving from institutions that operate through a system of checks and balances with hierarchical oversight towards this emerging phenomenon, where the interaction of all parties, scaling to include larger numbers of participants, will deliver better results with less of the side effects of corruption and concentration of power.
"Well, that's the theory anyway. We're about to see if that works out."
But looking at the hysteria, mania and complete insanity that blew up bitcoin in 2017, it's easy to argue it, too, is beginning to disappoint.
Is bitcoin broken?
At the time of writing, you could sell one bitcoin on an Australian exchange for about $26,500. On a global exchange, you could sell one for about $US19,000, the world's reserve currency.
On average across exchanges, the price has appreciated by 1861.6 per cent this year alone; 4221.7 per cent over two years. And yes, if you invested $100 in January 2011, and had managed to keep from losing or spending any, you'd have the equivalent of $5.9 million today.
A great deal of activity took place in the latter half of this year, when a snowballing mania gripped mainstream investors who began clamouring to get their hands on cryptocurrency. The market capitalisation of all cryptocurrencies has ballooned out to $US600 billion ($782 billion) and the price chart looks like a breakneck vertical line.
This year, the concept of Initial Coin Offeringstruly explodedand billions of US dollars, euros and yen poured into speculative tokens. This practice of issuing tokens, the transference of which would power yet-to-be-developed networks, was a honey pot for scammers, developers and hackers who collectively made off with, to quote a cybersecurity source, "a f---ing shit tonne" of bitcoin.
The wild west nature of the crypto world, and its inherent lack of regulation, did little to dissuade investors. The excessive liquidity pumped into financial markets from central banks struggling to prop up languishing economies, alongside record low interest rates, meant there was plenty of capital sloshing around trying to find yield.
Lured by the insane volatility across exchanges, obscure financial products have blossomed, offering investors exposure to all kinds of crypto-offshoots and spawning smooth-talking crypto-salespeople. Hundreds of companies have "pivoted" their businesses to include "blockchain" in the mandate, and have enjoyed irrational share-price growth as a result.
"This is absolutely a straightforward grassroots bubble, driven by speculation and greed," says Antonopoulos, who points out that this year's run is actually the sixth bubble in bitcoin, and by no means the largest.
"It will pop, though the question is how violently. If you [take] that banking culture and put it on a digital currency full of exuberance, you get the same effect. But really, that's banking, not bitcoin. You should be able to get your hands on bitcoin without having to trade it for any real-world currency or interact with any financial institution. That's the point, of course."
Crypto-craziness 'dangerous'
But the middlemen, the financial products, the crypto-craziness that has sprung up around bitcoin is dangerous, says Antonopoulos, and the exchanges themselves, acting as on-ramps and off-ramps to cryptocurrency, are taking on enormous risks.
"Exchanges are banking, not bitcoin. Centralised institutions in bitcoin are an oxymoron. So when exchanges act not as exchanges but as wallets and people store their money on them, they are not secure," he says.
"When you centralise the keys, you throw out the security model. And the exchanges will get hacked. People will lose money. At the moment, people are giving their keys to exchanges to hold, on the promise they'll give it back. That's a risky thing to do in a market that is unregulated."
The exchanges themselves are beginning to show signs of severe stress, though many suspect this is due not just to transaction volume, but also reflects fraudulent behaviour behind the scenes.
Bitfinex, the world's largest bitcoin exchange, is under a cloud after the links between its managers and an alternative currency called tether came to light in the Paradise Papers. Allegations that Bitfinex has been using tether trading as a way to artificially boost the bitcoin price have been circling for some time. And the exchange has admitted to almost constant distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
Barely an hour after my conversation with Antonopoulos, a South Korean exchange called Youbit was forced to declare bankruptcy following a severe hack. An estimated 4000 bitcoins were stolen, and the exchange has said all customers' assets will be marked down to 75 per cent of their value.
Hundreds of thousands of bitcoins have been stolen this year alone, though they have not had a material effect on price or confidence yet. (Some insist this lack of retracement reinforces the tether/Bitfinex theory.)
"There really are a lot of players motivated by money, and at the moment it's very much easy come, easy go," says Antonopoulos. "Though if you see the tiniest reversal, like a 15 per cent drop, then a lot of that will evaporate in a massive panic." This would be a good thing, he believes, because if "the craziness goes away, bitcoin will have a chance to actually develop".
Energy crisis
One issue that has resonated loudly both inside and outside of cryptocurrency circles is how much energy bitcoin mining uses.
Bitcoin miners race to solve extremely difficult cryptographic problems in return for new currency. This computational burden – known as calculating SHA256 hashes – helps keep the transaction record secure, because computing power cannot be faked.
But that has meant miners racing to generate new bitcoin have built giant farms of servers that consume vast amounts of energy. The more valuable bitcoin becomes, the more miners are willing to spend on equipment and electricity.
But just how much energy miners consume was blown dramatically out of proportion when a widely circulated estimate by Digiconomist suggested that at the end of November this year, bitcoin's estimated annual electricity consumption stood at 29.05TWh.
Digiconomist concluded that meant bitcoin mining was using more electricity than 159 countries, or the equivalent of 0.13 per cent of total global electricity consumption.
At this rate, said the article, bitcoin mining would consume all the world's electricity by February 2020.
The correlation the article's author drew between energy use and the number of transactions – as well as the price – aggrieved Antonopoulos. He is at pains to point out that the diminishing return of bitcoin mining means that no matter how big the system gets, the mining pool doesn't have to get bigger to cope.
"That article really was a load of tosh," he says. "It's like meeting a pregnant woman and saying, 'Ma'am, I'm very concerned because having seen how your belly has grown in the last three months, I extrapolate … that in five years from now you'll be the size of this room."
Geographic independence
Instead, Antonopoulos points to bitcoin's geographic independence, meaning miners can establish farms close to cheap electricity.
The vast majority of bitcoin mining happens in Sichuan province in China, home to a unique problem of overabundance of hydroelectric power with very little distribution capability. Local authorities have built plants with enough capacity to sustain rapid population growth in 50 years, but current demand means almost 85 per cent of power generated from the mass movement of water is wasted.
"When you build alternative sources of wind, solar and hydro energy, you can't turn those plants off or turn them down," Antonopoulos explains. "Given there are no networks in place to redistribute that energy to other parts of the country, it is generally sold very cheaply to neighbouring bitcoin miners, built close by precisely to capitalise on this oversupply of energy."
This relationship allows those renewable plants to fully amortise the cost of their capital expenditure in two years instead of 10 years, Antonopoulos says.
"It's easy to criticise bitcoin for its energy consumption, because it's obvious. There are much more wasteful things that are less obvious. For every time you pull out that little plastic card to conduct a transaction, you're not aware of the 100-square-foot data centre that is churning hundreds of thousands of servers for fraud detection or clearing. You're not aware of the tower offices lit 24 hours a day. And the trading floors, and the bank vaults, and the armoured trucks."
