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这期的标题是 - If blockchains ran the world
Disrupting the trust business
The trust business is little noticed but huge. Startups deploying blockchain technology threaten to disrupt it, and much else besides
如果区块链掌控世界
信托业务正在遭受颠覆。
信托业务很少受到关注，但规模巨大。使用区块链技术的创业公司威胁要颠覆它，除此之外还有很多其他的东西。
“WE LIKE lists because we don’t want to die.” What Umberto Eco, an Italian writer, said about human beings applies even more to the institutions they create. Without lists that keep track of people and things, most big organisations would collapse.
“我们喜欢列表，因为我们不想死”。这是意大利作家Umberto Eco说的。人性依赖于他们创造出的各种组织。没有列表来保持记录，绝大多数的大型组织都会崩溃
Lists range from simple checklists to complex databases, but they all have one major drawback: we must trust their keepers. Administrators hold the power. They can doctor corporate accounts, delete titles from land registries or add names to party rolls. To stop the keepers from going rogue, and catch them if they do, society has come to rely on all sorts of tools, from audits to supervisory boards. Together, list-keepers and those who watch them form one of the world’s biggest and least noticed industries, the trust business.
列表可以是简单的清单，也可以是复杂的数据库。但他们都一个致命的短板，那就是我们必须相信他们的拥有者。管理员掌控的权力。他们既可以篡改公司的账目，也可以删除土地注册的授权书，或是在排队名单上假名字。为了制止并惩戒这种欺诈，整个社会都依赖与各种工具的使用，比如审计师或是监督委员会。清单管理者和那些监视他们的人组成了这个世界最大却最不引人注意的产业 - 信托业
Now imagine a parallel universe in which lists have declared independence: they maintain themselves. This, broadly, is the promise of the “blockchain”, the system which underlies bitcoin, a digital currency, and similar “distributed-ledger” technologies. If blockchains take over, as fans are sure they will, what are the implications of the trust business migrating into the ether?
现在想像一下，在一个平行宇宙，列表都是各自宣告独立的，并实施自我维护。这就是和“分布式账本”非常类似的，数字货币比特币的底层技术-区块链，所承诺的。如果区块链如粉丝笃定的那样掌控了世界，信托业务该何去何从呢？
It would not be the first time a novel form of list-making changed the world. More than 500 years ago a new accounting technique, later known as double-entry book-keeping, emerged in northern Italy. It was a big step in the development of the modern company and economy. Werner Sombart, a German sociologist who died in 1941, argued that double-entry book-keeping marked the birth of capitalism. It allowed people other than the owner of a business to keep track of its finances.
听起来像小说一样，但列表记录改变世界已经不是第一次了。500多年前，新的会计手段 - 后来被称之为复式记账法在意大利北部诞生，现代公司和经济因此而产生了质的飞跃。1941年去世的德国社会学家Werner Sombart曾争辩说，复式记账法标志了资本主义的诞生。它赋予了企业主以外的人了解企业财务状况的能力
If double-entry book-keeping freed accounting from the merchant’s head, the blockchain frees it from the confines of an organisation. That is probably not what Satoshi Nakamoto, the still-elusive creator of bitcoin, had in mind when he set out on his endeavour. His aim was to create a “purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash”, as he put it in a “white paper” published in 2008. To do so, he created a new type of database, the blockchain. It provides proof of who owns what at any given moment. It contains the payment history of each bitcoin in circulation; heavy-duty encryption makes it theoretically impossible to alter it once a transaction is registered; copies are spread around the computers, or “nodes”, that form the bitcoin network, so that anybody can check whether something is wrong. A “consensus mechanism”, a complex cryptographic process which replaces the list-keeper, turns the blockchain into an independent entity.
如果说复式记账法把记账从业主手中解放出来的话，那区块链则把他从组织的边界解放出来。这也许并不是比特币的神秘创造者中本聪的初衷。从2008年发布的白皮书来看，他最开始要创造的是一个完全点对点（p2p) 版本的电子现金。为了达到这个目的，他创造了一种新的数据库 - 区块链。他可以给出任意时间谁拥有什么的证据。它包含了每个比特币在流通中的交易历史。高强度的加密确保了任何一个交易一旦完成，从理论上来说便不可更改。副本（拷贝）在比特币网络中所有的电脑，或者说节点中传播，每个人都可以检查哪儿出了什么状况。一种“共识机制”，一个基于密码学复杂流程将会取代记账员，使得区块链成为一种完全独立的存在
Clever minds quickly saw that such a set-up can be used for things other than money. Different sorts of self-sufficient lists now abound. Prominent among them is Ethereum. Like bitcoin, it boasts its own crypto-currency, called “ether”, but it also allows users to add “smart contracts”, code that encapsulates the terms of a business agreement and is executed automatically.
一些聪明人迅速发现，这种机制可以用在钱以外的东西上。各种拥有自我生态的链已经出现，其中的佼佼者叫做"以太坊”，跟比特币一样，他发行了自己的加密货币，叫做“以太币”。但他同时允许用户添加智能合约，从而把商业条款封装到代码中自动执行。
When Luca Pacioli, a Franciscan friar, wrote the first textbook on double-entry book-keeping in the late 15th century, he could not have foretold what the accounting technique would bring about. But today plenty of startups suggest ways that blockchains could change the world.
当法国修道士Luca Pacioli在15世纪末第一次提出复式记账法时，他可不会预见到这对于会计行业产生怎样的影响。但是今天，很多创业人士则认为，区块链终将改变世界
Everledger, for example, keeps track of valuable assets. The firm has registered the ID of more than 1m diamonds, making it easier to check whether gems were stolen or mined in war zones.
比如说Everledger, 他们记录有价值的资产。这家公司注册了超过100万颗钻石的ID，使得查询类似钻石是否是偷来的，是否是战区开采来的等问题变得容易很多
Other firms want to help keep track of people. One of the first things done for a baby could be to give the newborn an entry in a blockchain, the crypto-equivalent of a birth certificate. This sounds Orwellian, but it does not have to be. On the contrary, if people’s identity is anchored in one or several blockchains, this would give them more control over it and their personal data. If a potential tenant, for example, wants to prove to a landlord that his income is high enough to pay the rent, he need only disclose that bit of information, instead of allowing access to his entire credit history, as is often the case today.
其他的公司想要记录人类本身。对于一个新生儿来说，第一件事就是在区块链上给他登记，一个等同于出生证明的加密身份。这听上去非常的奥威尔（《1984》的著作者）风格，但并不一定会那样。相反，如果人的ID被锚定在一个或多个区块链上的话，这可以赋予他们更多的掌控以及个人数据。比如一个人想要租房，要对房东证明自己的收入足够支付房租，他只要把那一部分相关的信息展示出来即可，而不需要像现如今那样揭露他全部的信用历史
In a blockchain world, having such a “self-sovereign identity” may well be a fundamental human right. Moxie Marlinspike, an anarchist entrepreneur, and others have already called for the abolition of the “ID-slavery” imposed by current national registration systems. A slew of startups, including Evernym, Jolocom and uPort, are working on services that will allow people to register identities.
在区块链的世界里，拥有“自主身份认证”可能是一项基本人权。Moxie Marlinspike，一个无政府主义的企业家，和其他一些人开始呼吁要求废除国家强加给每个人的ID认证体系。像Evernym，Jolocom 和 uPort这些公司，已经开始着手开发允许人们自主身份认证的服务
Once people are able to manage their identity, other possibilities open up, says Kevin Werbach of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school. People will be able to band together in virtual countries and set their own rules. One such already exists: BITNATION. Anyone can become a citizen by accepting its constitution. To do business in BITNATION, people have to build up reputation, for instance by trading on the platform.
一旦人们可以管理自己的身份，其他的可能性就应运而生，宾夕法尼亚沃顿商学院的Kevin Werbach这样表示。人们可以聚在一起形成一个虚拟国家，拥有他们自己的规则。现在其实已经有一个了：BITNATION （比特国）。每个人都可以选择接受其宪法而成为公民。人们需要建立自己的声誉，从而可以在这个平台上进行交易之类的活动。
Chain reaction
This is also an example of the other big function of such ledgers: they can serve as a source of truth. All kinds of information could be attached to an entry in a blockchain. In the case of a car, say, that could be where it came from, the history of repairs and even where it was driven. Taken together, these data would form the “truth” about a given vehicle.
连锁反应
再举个这种分布式账本重要功能的一个例子：他们可以追溯事实。所有的信息都可以登记到区块链上，比如一辆车，他的产地，维修记录，甚至开去过哪等等。这些数据组合起来便形成了这辆车的真实信息
Many people are already working on “truth services”. Researchers have proposed creating unique cryptographic identifiers, or “hashes”, of the descriptions of clinical trials and registering them in a blockchain, so they cannot be changed to fit desired results. Georgia, Sweden and Ukraine are testing the technology as a way of digitising parts of their land registries. And Delaware, the American state which has made a big business out of registering companies from all over the world, is gearing up to allow blockchains for corporate record-keeping.
很多人已经在提供“真相服务”。研究者提出创建独特的加密标识符，或是哈希，并把它们注册在区块链上，这样信息就不能无法符合结果而接受篡改。格鲁吉亚，瑞典和乌克兰正在测试一项技术，想要把他们的土地登记数字化。美国的特拉华州，这个注册了全球很多的公司的地方，正在为推广区块链用做公司记录做准备。
Transactions on a blockchain could also serve as input for smart contracts. Slock.it, another startup, is developing physical locks which have a digital existence on Ethereum. When it is sent some ether, this smart rental contract opens the lock. This could enable new ways of sharing things. If somebody wanted to rent a car, say, he could simply transfer money to its smart contract and drive away.
区块链上的交易也可以作为智能条约的输入。Slock.it这家公司，正在开发一种基于以太坊的物理锁。当收到以太币之后，智能合约便会打开锁。这可以催生出新的分享模式。如果有人想要租辆车，他只需要往智能合约上转账，然后就可以开车走人了
Smart contracts promise to change the economy more than any other feature of the blockchain. They could take over most routine business processes. Some companies could be no more than a bundle of smart contracts, forming true virtual firms that live only on a blockchain. Predictably, the first attempt to create such a “decentralised autonomous organisation” ended in disaster. Named “The DAO”, the entity was set up a year ago as a sort of virtual venture-capital fund. It raised more than $160m, but then hackers siphoned off $60m, leading to its demise.
智能合约是区块链的所有特性里最能够改变经济的。很多日常的商业业务流程都可以被其取代。有些公司甚至可以就是一些智能合约的组合，从而变成存在于区块链上的一个真正的虚拟公司。不出意外，第一个尝试建立这种“去中心化的自治组织”以惨败而告终。这个叫做DAO的项目一年前作为一个虚拟风险投资基金而建立，募集了超过1亿6千万美金，但被黑客窃取了6000万，导致项目的终止
Yet simpler versions of such structures, called initial coin offerings (ICOs), have since taken off—and created the first bubble of the blockchain economy. In an automated form of crowdfunding, startups set up a smart contract on Ethereum and publish a “white paper”, or prospectus. Investors can then send ether to the smart contract, which automatically creates “tokens” that can be traded like shares. More than $550m has already been invested in ICOs.
当然这种模式有一个简化版，叫做首次代币发售（ICO）慢慢的火了起来，也搞出了区块链经济的第一个泡沫。在这种全自动化的众筹机制里，创业公司通过以太坊创建一个智能合约，并发布一份白皮书或计划书。投资者把以太币发送到智能合约，自动获得代币，并可以像股票那样交易。目前已经有超过5亿5千万的资金涌入了ICO
Some of these projects are scams. And many honest ones leave outsiders baffled. EcoBit aims to build a market for carbon credits. Aragon wants to use blockchain tools to manage entire organisations, complete with decentralised arbitration courts. SONM is “a decentralised fog supercomputer”: users can either buy computing power with the project’s tokens or earn them by adding their machines to the pool.
有很多这样的项目是骗局。很多诚实的项目也是让外行看不懂。ECOBit致力于建立一个碳信用的市场。阿拉贡想要用去区块链技术来管理整个组织，完成仲裁法庭的去中心化。SONM是一个去中心化的雾状超级计算机，用户可以拿项目代币来购买算力，或是通过把自己的计算机加入算力池来挣得代币
Will the centre hold?
These efforts give a taste of what will be possible, says Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures (USV), a venture-capital firm. He thinks that such decentralised organisations could one day disrupt the tech giants. At their heart, he argues, those tech titans are gigantic centralised databases, keeping track of products and purchase histories (Amazon), users and their friends (Facebook), and web content and past search queries (Google). “Their value derives from the fact that they control the entire database and get to decide who sees which part of it and when,” he says.
中心化是否依旧坚挺
这些努力让我们看到了一种可能性，一家风投机构“广和投资（USV）”的Albert Wenger这样表示。他认为这种去中心化的组织会在某一天把当前的巨头扳倒。他强调，当前的科技巨头最为核心的就是他们庞大的中央数据库，用以追踪产品和购买历史（比如亚马逊），用户和他们的朋友圈（比如Facebook），浏览或者搜索过的网站（比如Google）。他们的价值源于对于整个数据库的控制，并且能够决定谁在什么时候看到什么。
USV has invested in decentralised alternatives, such as OpenBazaar, an e-commerce marketplace. Instead of visiting a website, users download a program that directly connects them to other people wanting to buy and sell goods and services. Others have started to build blockchain-based social networks that pay users who contribute content. Steemit is a blogging-site that allows authors to earn tokens. Synereo lets users tip individual content-providers.
USV已经投资于一些去中心化的替代产品，比如OpenBazaar， 一个电子商务的市场平台。用户不需要访问什么网站，只需要下载程序，然后就被自动连接到其他想要买卖商品的用户那里。其他人已经开始建立基于区块链的社交网络，奖励那些贡献内容的用户。Steemit是一个允许作者挣得代币的blog网站，Synereo则允许用户打赏单个的内容提供者。
In a world run by blockchains, decentralisation could be pushed even further, to include objects. Once they have their own identity and can be controlled via a blockchain, it is possible to imagine them becoming, in a way, self-determining. A few years back, Mike Hearn, a former bitcoin developer who now works for R3, a blockchain consortium, suggested the idea of self-driving cars which are also financially autonomous. Guided by smart contracts, they would stash away some of the digital money they make by ferrying people around, so as to pay for repairs or to replace themselves when repairs are no longer worthwhile. They would put themselves in long-term parking if not enough rides are to be had—or emigrate to another city. They could issue tokens to raise funds and to allow owners to get part of their profits.
在区块链的世界里，权力下放还可以更进一步，那就是万物互联。一个对象一旦有了身份，并在区块链上可控的话，可以想象，他们有可能演化成为自我决定的模式。几年前，Mike Hearn，前比特币开案发人员，现在经已在R3 - 一个区块链联盟工作。他测试过财务自主的自动驾驶汽车。通过智能合约，这些汽车可以通过运载乘客得到数字货币，也能够自己支付维修费用，或是判断当维修不划算时直接选择替换。如果没有足够的乘客，他们会让自己在长期停车场呆着，或是跑去另一座城市。他们可以通过发布代币来筹集资金，并允许投资者分享部分利润
If even objects control their own destiny, what is left for governments and the nation state to do? Plenty, it turns out. Despite libertarian dreams of complete decentralisation, in many cases somebody still has to make sure that the information baked into a blockchain is actually true. In China, for example, regulators are part of a pilot project run by IBM and Walmart to make the retailer’s supply network more transparent, for instance by tracing the provenance of pork and organic food.
如果连物体都能够控制自己的命运，政府和国家该干嘛呢？其实还有很多。虽说自由主义者梦想着完全的权力下放，但很多时候，依旧需要有人来确保进入区块链的信息是真实的。例如，在中国，监管机构是IBM和沃尔玛运营的试点项目的一部分，目的是让零售商的供应网络更加透明，比如追踪猪肉和有机食品的来源。
In some areas the blockchain may even make life easier for governments. Last year Dubai announced that it wants all government documents secured on a blockchain by 2020, a prerequisite for agencies to become completely paperless. The technology could also be used as a cheap platform to generate what poor countries lack most: more efficient government and trust in contracts. And some hope that the blockchain could make the United Nations work better by helping it keep track of all its programmes, creating transparency and reducing waste.
在一些场景下，区块链可以让政府的工作更轻松。去年迪拜宣布要在2020年以前把所有的政府文件搬上区块链，为实现无纸化办公打好基础。这种技术也可以被当做是一个廉价的平台，用来解决贫穷国家最为缺乏的东西：更高效的政府与合同的信任。一些人希望，区块链可以让联合国更好地开展工作，帮助它追踪所有项目，创造透明度，减少浪费。
Another example, counter-intuitively, is money. Although the blockchain was created to replace them, central bankers have been interested in the technology from the beginning. When banks share a ledger, rather than keeping their information in separate databases, it will be simpler for regulators to observe financial flows. Several central banks are toying with the idea of issuing their own crypto-currency; the Bank of Canada and the People’s Bank of China are running tests. If digital coins were to replace cash, this would open up new possibilities for monetary policy. To increase demand in an economic crisis, for instance, the coins could be programmed to lose some of their value if they are not spent within a certain time.
另一个例子，有些违背直觉，就是钱。虽说区块链被创造出来用来取代钱，中央银行家门在一开始就对这项科技抱有很大的兴趣。当银行共享一个分布式总账，而不是在各自的数据库分别存储信息，监管机构观察资金流向会容易的多。很多中央很行都跃跃欲试，考虑发行自己的加密货币。加拿大和中国银行正在进行测试。如果数字货币取代现金，这将会带来新的货币政策。比如在经济危机时需要增加需求，货币就可以被程序提前预设好，如果一定时间内不花出去，就会贬值掉一部分
Warning: blockchains ahead
The technology today is nowhere near being able to support many of these applications. Such ledgers may not be as immutable as they seem, and blockchains have yet to show that they can scale up sufficiently (the bitcoin system manages seven transactions per second, compared with thousands in a typical credit-card network). But if the history of digital technology is any guide, these barriers will be overcome.
警告：前方有区块链
这项技术在今天距离支持上述应用还有很长的路要走。这种分布式账本可能没有它看起来的那么不可更改。区块链也还没有证明他们可以进行足够的扩容（比特币系统每秒只能处理7笔交易，而信用卡网络则是上千笔）。但如果数字化技术的历史有任何的参考价值的话，这些障碍终将被客服。
A bigger issue is institutional resistance, as many blockchain enthusiasts are discovering the hard way. Corporate departments are not willing to give up control of their lists because it means a loss of power. In many cases it is also not clear how much value blockchains actually add. Some centralised systems seem to be doing just fine. For now, conventional payment services appear more efficient than their decentralised counterparts.
一个更大的问题是制度上的阻力，很多的区块链狂热者都发现了这个问题。公司部门不愿意放弃对列表的控制，因为这意味着权利的丧失。而且很多情况下，区块链到底增加了多少价值并不清楚。一些中心化的系统运行的也很好。就目前而言，传统的支付方式比相对应去中心化方式更加高效
Politics will also be a hurdle. The reason many champions of the technology display an almost religious excitement about blockchains is because they believe these replace messy decision-making with clean cryptographic code. But bitcoin itself shows that even simple technical questions can turn into interminable fights between potential winners and losers. Even after years of discussion, those involved in bitcoin have yet to agree on how to increase the system’s capacity.
政治会是另一个阻碍。很多科技达人对区块链展现出的近乎宗教般的狂热，是因为
他们相信干净的密码学会取代混乱的决策机制。但比特币本身却显现出，即便是一个简单的技术问题都可以变成可能的赢家和输家之间永无止境的争执。经过数年的探讨，在比特币系统扩容方面依旧没有达成最终的共识
This points to the biggest question of all. Should blockchains run the world? Warning voices are starting to be heard. If distributed ledgers indeed disrupt the trust business, then a lot of administrative jobs will be lost, perhaps even more than through artificial intelligence. Some have called blockchains a libertarian conspiracy. Others fret about a dismantling of institutions humans have painstakingly built. “Each time we use a distributed ledger we participate in a shift of power from central authorities to non-hierarchical and peer-to-peer structures,” researchers at the European Parliament wrote recently. Then there is the concern that hard, cold blockchains and contracts too smart for their own good will ossify society—or make it run amok.
最为重要的问题来了。 应该让区块链来掌控世界么？已经开始有一些警惕的声音发出。如果分布式账本真的扰乱了信托业务，许多的行政工作会丢失，也许比人工智能造成的丢失还要多。有些人说区块链是自由主义者的阴谋。其他人则担忧人类辛辛苦苦建立起来的这些组织就这么废掉了。“每一次我们用分布式账本，我们都在参与从中央集权到无阶层点对点结构的权力迁移。” 欧洲议会的研究人员最近这样写到。也有担心坚硬，冰冷的区块链和合约因为过于智能而让社会变得僵化--或是疯狂
As decentralised list-keeping grows stronger, the list of worries about it is sure to grow longer.
随着分布式记账变得更加强大，对其的担忧也必然会随之增长。
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