a******n
发帖数: 206 | 1 先声明：我没有站边, either pump or dump btc. 只是读到了自己觉得不错的文章，
分享过来，想听听大牛怎么说。
链接在此：https://blog.chain.com/a-letter-to-jamie-dimon-de89d417cb80?from=
singlemessage&isappinstalled=0
原文很长。总结如下。
Cryptocurrencies (which I prefer to call crypto assets) are a new asset
class that enable decentralized applications
Decentralized applications enable services we already have today, like
payments, storage, or computing, but without a central operator of those
services
This software model is useful to people who need censorship resistance which
tend to be people that are either off the grid or who want to be off the
grid
Most everyone else is better off using normal applications because they are
10x better on every other dimension, at least for now
Society’s embrace or rejection of new technology is hard to predict (think
about encrypted messaging)
In the long-run, the value of a crypto asset will rise and fall in
proportion to the use of the decentralized application it enables
In the short-run, there will be extreme volatility as FOMO competes with FUD
, confusion competes with understanding, and greed competes with fear (on
both the buyer side and the issuer side)
Most people buying into crypto assets have checked their judgement at the
door
Many sellers of new crypto assets aren’t actually building decentralized
applications but are instead shoe-horning an ICO into their service because
of the market mania; that doesn’t mean decentralized applications are bad,
it just means people are capitalizing on the confusion and are probably
themselves confused
Don’t bet against crypto assets in the long-run: as we approach the 10 year
anniversary of the Bitcoin paper it is clear that they aren’t going
anywhere and that decentralized applications may very well find an important
place alongside all the other forms of organization we have come to take
for granted.
--------------------------
以下为全文：
A Letter to Jamie Dimon
And anyone else still struggling to understand cryptocurrencies
Dear Jamie,
My name is Adam Ludwin and I run a company called Chain. I have been working
in and around the cryptocurrency market for several years.
Last week you said a few things about Bitcoin:
Bloomberg. https://twitter.com/joelight/status/918899226771427328
It’s easy to believe cryptocurrencies have no inherent value. Or that
governments will crush them.
It’s also becoming fashionable to believe the opposite: that they will
disrupt banks, governments, and Silicon Valley giants once and for all.
Neither extreme is true.
The reality is nuanced and important. Which is why I’ve decided to write
you this briefing note. I hope it helps you appreciate cryptocurrencies more
deeply.
Let me start by stating that I believe:
The market for cryptocurrencies is overheated and irrationally exuberant
There are a lot of poseurs creating them, and some scammers, too
There are a lot of conflicts of interest, self-serving hype, and obfuscation
Very few people in the media understand what’s going on
Very few people in finance understand what’s going on
Very few people in technology understand what’s going on
Very few people in academia or government understand what’s going on
Very few people buying cryptocurrencies understand what’s going on
It’s very possible I don’t understand what’s going on
Also:
Banks and governments aren’t going away
Traditional software isn’t going away
In short: there’s a lot of noise. But there is also signal. To find it, we
need to start by defining cryptocurrency.
Without a working definition we are lost. Most people arguing about
cryptocurrencies are talking past each other because they don’t stop to ask
the other side what they think cryptocurrencies are for.
Here’s my definition: cryptocurrencies are a new asset class that enable
decentralized applications.
If this is true, your point of view on cryptocurrencies has very little to
do with what you think about them in comparison to traditional currencies or
securities, and everything to do with your opinion of decentralized
applications and their value relative to current software models.
Don’t have an opinion on decentralized applications? Then you can’t
possibly have one on cryptocurrencies yet, so read on.
And since this isn’t about cryptocurrencies vs. fiat currencies let’s stop
using the word currency. It’s a head fake. It has way too much baggage and
I notice that when you talk about Bitcoin in public you keep comparing it
to the Dollar, Euro, and Yen. That comparison won’t help you understand
what’s going on. In fact, it’s getting in the way. So for the rest of this
note, I will refer to cryptocurrencies as crypto assets.
So, to repeat: crypto assets are a new asset class that enable decentralized
applications.
And like every other asset class, they exist as a mechanism to allocate
resources to a specific form of organization. Despite the myopic focus on
trading crypto assets recently, they don’t exist solely to be traded. That
is, in principle at least, they don’t exist for their own sake.
To understand what I mean, think about other asset classes and what form of
organization they serve:
Corporate equities serve companies
Government bonds serve nations, states, municipalities
Mortgages serve property owners
And now:
Crypto assets serve decentralized applications
Decentralized applications are a new form of organization and a new form of
software. They’re a new model for creating, financing, and operating
software services in a way that is decentralized top-to-bottom. That doesn’
t make them better or worse than existing software models or the corporate
entities that create them. As we’ll see later, there are major trade-offs.
What we can say is simply that they are radically different from software as
we know it today and radically different from the forms of organization we
are used to.
How different? Imagine the following: you grew up in a rainforest and I
brought you a cactus and told you it was a tree. How would you react? You’d
probably laugh and say it’s not a tree because there’s no point in a tree
being a stumpy water tank covered in armor — after all, water
is abundant here in the rainforest! This, roughly, is the reaction of many
people working in Silicon Valley to decentralized applications.
But I digress. I owe you an important explanation:
What is a decentralized application?
A decentralized application is a way to create a service that no single
entity operates.
We’ll come to the question of whether that’s useful in a moment. But first
, you need to understand how they work.
Let’s go back to the birth of this idea.
It’s November 2008. The nadir of the financial crisis.
An anonymous person publishes a paper explaining how to make electronic
payments without a trusted central party like Chase or PayPal or the Federal
Reserve. It’s the first decentralized application of this kind ever
proposed.
It’s a decentralized application for payments.
The paper is titled Bitcoin.
How does it work? How is it possible to send an electronic payment without a
designated party who will track and update everyone’s balances? If I hand
you a dollar that’s one thing. But data is not a bearer instrument. Data
needs intermediation and validation to be trusted.
The paper proposes a solution: form a peer-to-peer network. Make it public.
Announce your transaction to everyone. In your announcement, point to the
specific funds on the network you want to spend. Cryptographically sign your
announcement with the same software key that is linked to those funds so we
know they’re yours.
It almost works. We need one more thing: a way to make sure that if you
broadcast two competing announcements (that is, if you try to spend the same
funds twice) that only one of your attempts counts.
Bad solution: designate a party to timestamp the transactions and only
include the transaction that came first. We’re back to square one. We have
a trusted intermediary.
Breakthrough solution: let entities compete to be the “timestamper!” We
can’t avoid the need for one, but we can avoid designating one in advance
or using the same one for every batch of transactions.
“Let entities compete.” Sounds like a market economy. What’s missing? A
reward for winning. An incentive. An asset.
Let’s call that asset Bitcoin. Let’s call the entities competing for the
right to timestamp the latest batch of announced transactions “miners.”
Let’s make sure anyone can join this contest at any time by making the code
and network open.
Now we need an actual contest. The paper proposes one. On your mark, get set
really hard to find. So hard that the only way to find it is to use tons of
processing power and burn through electricity. It’s a computing version of
what Veruca Salt made her dad and his poor factory workers do in Willy Wonka
. A brute force search for a golden ticket (or in this case, a golden number
).
Bitcoin Mining
Why the elaborate and expensive competition to do something as simple as
timestamp transactions for the network? So that we can be sure the
competitors have incurred a real financial cost. That way, if they win the
race to find the random number and become the designated timestamper for a
given batch of transactions, they won’t use that power for evil (like
censoring transactions). Instead, they will meticulously scan each pending
transaction, eliminate any attempts by users to spend the same funds twice,
ensure all rules are followed, and broadcast the validated batch to the rest
of the network.
Because if they do indeed follow the rules, the network is programmed to
reward them…
… with newly minted Bitcoin, plus the transaction fees, denominated in
Bitcoin, paid by the senders. (See why they are called miners and not
timestampers, now?)
In other words, miners follow the rules because it is in their economic self
-interest to do the right thing.
You know, like Adam Smith said:
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker, that
we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self interest.
Crypto assets: the invisible hand… of the internet.
Bitcoin is capitalism, distilled. You should love it!
And since these miners have debts to pay (mostly electricity bills), they
will likely sell their newly earned Bitcoins on the open market in exchange
for whatever real currency they need to satisfy their liabilities. Anything
left is profit. The Bitcoin is now in circulation. People who need it can
buy it. And so can people who just want to speculate on it. (More on the
people who “need it” vs. those who are speculating later.)
Eureka! We have killed two birds with one stone: the financial reward that
substitutes our need for a trusted central party with a marketplace of
competing yet honest timestampers is the same asset that ends up in
circulation for use as a digital bearer instrument in an electronic payments
network that has no central party (it’s circular, I know).
Now that you understand Bitcoin, let’s generalize this to decentralized
applications as a whole.
In general, a decentralized application allows you to do something you can
already do today (like payments) but without a trusted central party.
Here’s another example: a decentralized application called Filecoin enables
users to store files on a peer-to-peer network of computers instead of in
centralized file storage services like Dropbox or Amazon S3. Its crypto
asset, also called Filecoin, incentivizes entities to share excess hard
drive space with the network.
Digital file storage is not new. Neither is electronic payments. What’s new
is that they can be operated without a company. A new form of organization.
One more example.
Warning: this one is a bit confusing because it’s meta.
There’s a decentralized application called Ethereum that is a decentralized
application for launching decentralized applications. I am sure by now you
have heard of “initial coin offerings” (ICOs) and “tokens.” Most of
these are issued on top of Ethereum. Instead of building a decentralized
application from scratch the way Bitcoin was, you can build one on top of
Ethereum much more easily because a) the network already exists and b) it’s
not designed for a specific application but rather as a platform to build
applications that can execute arbitrary code. It is “featureless.”
Ethereum’s protocol incentivizes entities to contribute computing resources
to the network. Doing so earns these entities Ether, the crypto asset of
Ethereum. This makes Ethereum a new kind of computing platform for this new
class of software (decentralized apps). It’s not cloud computing because
Ethereum itself is decentralized (like aether, get it?). That’s why its
founder, Vitalik Buterin, refers to Ethereum as a “world computer.”
To summarize, in just the last few years the world has invented a way to
create software services that have no central operator. These services are
called decentralized applications and they are enabled with crypto assets
that incentivize entities on the internet to contribute resources —&#
8202;processing, storage, computing — necessary for the service
to function.
It’s worth pausing to acknowledge that this is kind of miraculous. With
just the internet, an open protocol, and a new kind of asset, we can
instantiate networks that dynamically assemble the resources necessary to
provide many kinds of services.
And there are a lot of people who think this model is the future of all
software, the thing that will finally challenge the FANG stocks and venture
capital to boot.
But I’m not one of them. Because there’s a problem.
It’s not at all clear yet that decentralized applications are actually
useful to most people relative to traditional software.
Simply put, you cannot argue that for everyone Bitcoin is better than PayPal
or Chase. Or that for everyone Filecoin is better than Dropbox or iCloud.
Or that for everyone Ethereum is better than Amazon EC2 or Azure.
In fact, on almost every dimension, decentralized services are worse than
their centralized counterparts:
They are slower
They are more expensive
They are less scalable
They have worse user experiences
They have volatile and uncertain governance
And no, this isn’t just because they are new. This won’t fundamentally
change with bigger blocks, lightning networks, sharding, forks, self-
amending ledgers, or any other technical solutions.
That’s because there are structural trade-offs that result directly from
the primary design goal of these services, beneath which all other goals
must be subordinated in order for them to be relevant: decentralization.
Remember that “elaborate and expensive competition” I described? Well, it
comes at the cost of throughput. Remember how users need to “
cryptographically sign” their transaction announcements? Well, those
private keys need to be held onto much more securely than a typical password
(passwords can be recovered). Remember how “no single entity operates”
these networks? The flip side is that there is no good way to make decisions
or govern them.
Sure, you can make decentralized applications more efficient and user
friendly by, for example, centralizing users’ cryptographic signing keys (i
.e., control of their coins) with a trusted entity. But then we’re mostly
back to square one and would be better off using a service that is
centralized.
Thus, bitcoin, for example, isn’t best described as “Decentralized PayPal.
” It’s more honest to say it’s an extremely inefficient electronic
payments network, but in exchange we get decentralization.
Bottom line: centralized applications beat the pants off decentralized
applications on virtually every dimension.
EXCEPT FOR ONE DIMENSION.
And not only are decentralized applications better at this one thing, they
are the only way we can achieve it.
What am I referring to?
Censorship resistance.
This is where we come to the elusive signal in the noise.
Censorship resistance means that access to decentralized applications is
open and unfettered. Transactions on these services are unstoppable.
More concretely, nothing can stop me from sending Bitcoin to anyone I please
. Nothing can stop me from executing code on Ethereum. Nothing can stop me
from storing files on Filecoin. As long as I have an internet connection and
pay the network’s transaction fee, denominated in its crypto asset, I am
free to do what I want.
(If Bitcoin is capitalism distilled, it’s also a kind of freedom distilled.
Which is why libertarians can get a bit obsessed.)
And for readers who are crypto enthusiasts and don’t want to take my word
for it, will you at least listen to Adam Back and Charlie Lee?
So while we can’t say “for everyone Bitcoin is better than Visa,” it is
possible that for some cohort of users Bitcoin truly is the only way to make
a payment.
More generally, we can ask:
For whom is this the right trade-off?
Who needs censorship resistance so much that they are willing to trade away
the speed, cost, scalability, and experience benefits of centralized
services?
To be clear, I’m not saying you have to make this trade-off in order to buy
/speculate on crypto assets. I am saying that in order for decentralized
applications themselves to have utility to some cohort, that cohort must be
optimizing for censorship resistance.
So, who are these people?
While there is not a lot of good data, actual users of decentralized
applications seem to fall into two categories:
People who are off the grid: that is, in countries where access to
competently operated traditional services is limited (for any number of
reasons) but where internet is not
People who want to be off the grid: that is, people who don’t want their
transactions censored or known
With that framework in mind we can ask:
For whom is Bitcoin the best/only way to make a payment?
For whom is Filecoin the best/only way to store a file?
For whom is Ethereum the best/only way to compute code?
These are the questions that get at the heart of the value proposition of
the technology.
So far, most decentralized applications have very little use relative to
traditional services. Bitcoin, for example, has fewer mainstream merchants
accepting it as a payment option in the U.S. today than in 2014. And for all
the talk of Bitcoin’s value as a payments system in developing countries
or emerging markets like China, it is traditional software (i.e., apps) like
AliPay and Paytm that are actually driving sweeping change in these places.
At the same time, use of Bitcoin on the dark web and for ransomware is
evident, even if it is hard to get good data.
But aren’t people using Bitcoin as a “store of value?” Sure, which is
just another way of saying people are investing in Bitcoin with a longish
time horizon. But remember I’m not talking about investing in the crypto
asset yet. I’m talking about whether there are people who find a
decentralized application for payments (which is enabled by that asset)
useful. Real estate is only a good store of value in the long run if people
live and work in the buildings. The same is true of decentralized
applications.
What should we make of Ethereum evaluated through the “censorship
resistance” lens? After all, it seems to be getting a ton of use by
developers. Since Ethereum is a developer platform for decentralized
applications, does that mean it is developers who have been censored or
blocked somehow? In a way, yes. Developers and start-ups who wish to build
financial products do not have open and unfettered access to the world’s
financial infrastructure. While Ethereum doesn’t provide access to that
infrastructure, it does provide a different infrastructure that can be used
to, for example, create and execute a financial contract.
Since Ethereum is a platform, its value is ultimately a function of the
value of the applications built on top. In other words, we can ask if
Ethereum is useful by simply asking if anything that has been built on
Ethereum is useful. For example, do we need censorship resistant prediction
markets? Censorship resistant meme playing cards? Censorship resistant
versions of YouTube or Twitter?
While it’s early, if none of the 730+ decentralized apps built on Ethereum
so far seem useful, that may be telling. Even in year 1 of the web we had
chat rooms, email, cat photos, and sports scores. What are the equivalent
killer applications on Ethereum today?
So where does this leave us?
Given how different they are from the app models we know and love, will
anyone ever really use decentralized applications? Will they become a
critical part of the economy? It’s hard to predict because it depends in
part on the technology’s evolution but far more on society’s reaction to
it.
For example: until relatively recently, encrypted messaging was only used by
hackers, spies, and paranoids. That didn’t seem to be changing. Until it
did. Post-Snowden and post-Trump, everyone from Silicon Valley to the Acela
corridor seems to be on either Signal or Telegram. WhatsApp is end-to-end
encrypted. The press solicit tips through SecureDrop. Yes, the technology
got a little better and easier to use. But it is mainly changes in society
that are driving adoption.
In other words, we grew up in the rainforest, but sometimes things change
and it helps to know how to adapt to other environments.
And this is the basic argument that the smart money is making on crypto
assets and decentralized applications: that it’s simply too early to say
anything. That it is a profound change. That, should one or more of these
decentralized applications actually become an integral part of the world,
their underlying crypto assets will be extremely valuable. So might as well
start placing bets now and see how it goes. Don’t get to hung up on whether
we see the killer apps yet.
That’s not a bad argument and I tend to agree.
I would summarize the argument as: in the long-run, a crypto asset’s value
is driven by use of the decentralized application it enables. While it’s
early, the high valuations are justified because even if the probability of
mass adoption is small, the impact would be very large, so might as well go
along for the ride and see what happens.
But how do we explain the recent mania?
Bitcoin is up 5x in a year, Ethereum is up 30x. The total market cap of all
cryptocurrencies is ~$175B, up from $12B just a year ago. Why?
As in every mania in history, it is currently rational to be irrational.
To understand what’s going on, let’s look at the buyer and seller
mentality right now, starting with the buyers.
If you invested early in Bitcoin or Ethereum, you are sitting on a windfall.
It feels like you are playing with “house money,” a well-known
psychological effect. You feel smart and willing to risk more than you
otherwise would if it was “your money.” Might as well diversify a bit and
parlay your gains into the next crypto asset, or two, or three.
If you didn’t invest, the fear-of-missing-out continues to build until the
“screw it” moment when you buy in. Maybe you read about Bitcoin, didn’t
understand it, and followed Warren Buffet’s (good) advice not to invest in
things you don’t understand. Some of your friends made money but you still
ignored it. Then you read about Ethereum, which you really didn’t
understand, also passed on buying, and later found out that your friends are
planning to retire because they did. The lesson seems to be anti-Buffet:
only invest in things you don’t understand. This is causing people to check
their judgement at the door when the latest all-time high finally convinces
them to jump into the market.
And that is not good.
Because there will be sellers to fill the demand, especially the demand
coming from people who have decided they will never understand this stuff so
will just place bets on things that sound complex and impressive.
Let’s think about these sellers. And by sellers, I don’t mean people
selling their holdings of existing crypto assets. I mean new issuers. Teams
launching new crypto assets.
The basic model is to pre-sell some percentage of the crypto assets the
proposed network will generate as a way to fund the development of the
decentralized application before it launches. The project founders tend to
hold on to some percentage of these assets. Which means that raising money
for a project this way is a) non-dilutive as it is not equity and b) not
debt, so you never have to pay anyone back. This is basically free money. It
’s never been this good for entrepreneurs, even in the 90s dot-com boom.
Which makes it incredibly tempting to try and shoe-horn every project that
could perhaps justify an “initial coin offering” to go for it, even if
they aren’t actually building a decentralized application. After all, an
ICO lets you exit before you even launch.
And there is a pervasive narrative out there that supports entrepreneurs
looking to create new crypto assets. The idea is that by selling assets to
users before your network launches, you create “evangelists” who will be
early users and promoters you wouldn’t otherwise have if there were no
financial incentive to participate in your community.
The problem with this line of thinking is that it conflates early investors
with early users. The overlap between people who buy your crypto asset and
people who actually want to use the service you are building is likely very,
very small, especially during market manias like this one. It creates a
false sense of “product-market fit.” Yes, people are buying your crypto
asset. But that’s because the “market” are people who want to get rich
and the “product” you are selling is a “way to get rich.”
But “this is fine.”
Everyone’s making money. For now.
It’s currently rational to be irrational.
As long as that blue line keeps going up.
Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.
At the same time, I wouldn’t bet against crypto assets.
He who lives by the crystal ball will eat shattered glass.
Consider the following. The total market cap of crypto assets has been
increasing by an order of magnitude every few years. Where will they be in
2022? It’s certain that many (most?) of the crypto assets launching today
won’t make it. But neither did most of the ones that were launched back in
the 2013/4 boom (when they were referred to as “alt coins”). Though an
important alt coin from 2014 did stick around and drove the most recent boom
to new heights by being the platform to power all the others: Ethereum.
So, Jamie, what’s the bottom line?
Allow me to summarize.
Cryptocurrencies (which I prefer to call crypto assets) are a new asset
class that enable decentralized applications
Decentralized applications enable services we already have today, like
payments, storage, or computing, but without a central operator of those
services
This software model is useful to people who need censorship resistance which
tend to be people that are either off the grid or who want to be off the
grid
Most everyone else is better off using normal applications because they are
10x better on every other dimension, at least for now
Society’s embrace or rejection of new technology is hard to predict (think
about encrypted messaging)
In the long-run, the value of a crypto asset will rise and fall in
proportion to the use of the decentralized application it enables
In the short-run, there will be extreme volatility as FOMO competes with FUD
, confusion competes with understanding, and greed competes with fear (on
both the buyer side and the issuer side)
Most people buying into crypto assets have checked their judgement at the
door
Many sellers of new crypto assets aren’t actually building decentralized
applications but are instead shoe-horning an ICO into their service because
of the market mania; that doesn’t mean decentralized applications are bad,
it just means people are capitalizing on the confusion and are probably
themselves confused
Don’t bet against crypto assets in the long-run: as we approach the 10 year
anniversary of the Bitcoin paper it is clear that they aren’t going
anywhere and that decentralized applications may very well find an important
place alongside all the other forms of organization we have come to take
for granted.
Best,
Adam
p.s. —You may have noticed that I didn’t use the word “blockchain” in
this note. The word now tends to confuse more than enlighten.
p.p.s — There is another, related market I didn’t talk about:
cryptographic ledgers for the enterprise. My perspective on that is here. | f****e
发帖数: 1521 | | u******n
发帖数: 5727 | | s**t
发帖数: 17016 | 4 谁要是害怕暴跌，就根本不应该玩这东西。要想挣这个钱，就要有承受这个风险的能力
，无论是物质上还是心理上
一有风吹草动，就乱串，亏钱的概率大大增加。就算挣钱，也只能挣点刮头皮的钱
【在 u******n 的大作中提到】
: 太长了，俺看大妈们赶快跑吧，快到瀑布边上了。。
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