2022.05.20 加密货币如何消失在空气中

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How Crypto Disappeared Into Thin Air
When a currency’s value is based on belief alone, it’s liable to evaporate.

By James Surowiecki
A bitcoin in a cloud
The Atlantic; Getty
MAY 20, 2022
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About the author: James Surowiecki is the author of The Wisdom of Crowds and blogs at Medium.

Carnage in the cryptocurrency market is nothing new. Over the past decade, even as the value of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ether has risen sharply, crashes have been a regular feature of the market. (There’s a reason HODL—“Hold on for dear life”—is a mantra among crypto believers.) But even by crypto standards, the destruction of value over the past six months—and in particular, over the past few weeks—has been staggering.

Since November, something like $1.5 trillion in cryptocurrency value has been erased. Bitcoin and Ethereum, the market’s bellwethers, are both down about 60 percent from their peaks. And most strikingly, the so-called stablecoin Terra and its sister token, Luna, which together were valued at about $60 billion six weeks ago, imploded in a matter of days and are now essentially worthless.


This huge sell-off of course raises a natural question: What happened? You can certainly point to potential culprits. Inflation and interest rates are rising—though cryptocurrencies were supposed to be hedges against inflation, and indifferent to what’s happening in the “fiat” financial world. Stocks are being sold off—though one of crypto’s big selling points was that it was supposed to be uncorrelated with other assets. But really, there’s a much simpler explanation: People’s faith in crypto wavered. And faith, not fundamentals, is what most of crypto’s value depends on.

Crypto, after all, is different from assets like farmland, or stocks, or even real estate. When investors are trying to figure out how much to pay for those kinds of assets, they’re interested, at least in theory, in their intrinsic value. If you’re going to buy farmland, you want to know how much money you’ll get from the crops you can grow on that land. If you’re going to buy an apartment building, you want to know how much rent you’ll be able to get from your tenants over the next 30 years (or whatever your time horizon is). And if you’re buying stock in a company, you want to know how much cash it’ll generate in the future, together with the value of whatever assets it currently owns.


Now, calculations of intrinsic value are always estimates, and are also always inaccurate, because there’s no way to perfectly predict the future. But the crucial idea is that assets have value that’s independent of what other people will pay for them. If you owned all of Apple right now, you’d get at least $100 billion in profit—that’s real cash that would go into your bank account—in the first year. And assuming you let Tim Cook just do his thing, you could count on getting that, and probably more, every year for the foreseeable future. So that provides a baseline for how much Apple is worth.

Crypto valuations, though, are generally founded on a different principle: Intrinsic value doesn’t matter. The value of an asset is not dependent on its use value in the real world, or its ability to generate cash in the future. Instead, the value of an asset depends on what people think it’s worth. This is a kind of postmodern vision: There is no “real” value, only narratives of value we collectively construct and choose to believe in, or not. As the crypto and NFT (non-fungible token) investor Nick Tomaino put it last fall, “If the collective group of people on the internet believes something has value, it has value. We are in a world where belief equals value.”

There are, of course, other markets in which value depends on belief, including, most obviously, gold, fine art, and collectibles. But gold has a millennia-long history of people choosing to accept it as money; and fine art is wrapped up with ideas of rarity and the aura of an original work. What’s striking about the crypto market is that it has used this same logic to conjure more than $1 trillion of value out of thin air (or, more accurately, out of code) in less than a decade.

The purest examples of this phenomenon are memecoins, the most famous of which is Dogecoin. Dogecoin was created back in 2013, literally as a joke. It has no real-world use value; no one needs Dogecoin to buy or sell anything. It’s not even scarce because, unlike bitcoin, which has a finite supply of coins that will ever be available and becomes harder to produce as time goes by, Dogecoins are really easy to “mine.” Yet, at its peak in April 2021, Dogecoin was “worth” a supposed $50 billion, and even today, after its value has dropped almost 90 percent, it’s still worth about $11 billion. Why? The answer might be as dumb as the fact that Elon Musk mentioned Dogecoin in a tweet, calling it “the people’s crypto,” and got everyone excited about it.

Or take Terra and Luna. They’re little more than three years old, and until 2021, they were worth less than $1 billion combined. Then, in the space of a year or so, they were suddenly valued at $60 billion. From August 2021 to March of this year alone, their combined value more than tripled. At that point, Terra and Luna seemed like the next big things in crypto. Do Kwon, Terra’s founder, started getting talked about as a visionary. Luna holders were calling themselves Lunatics. Terra paid nearly $40 million to put its name all over the Washington Nationals’ stadium.

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Read: It is silly season in the land of cryptocurrency

This wasn’t because anything important about Terra as an asset had changed. People didn’t start using its coins in great numbers to buy stuff. Terra’s underlying businesses didn’t dramatically improve. Mostly, what changed is that in March 2021, Terra launched an app called Anchor, which began offering 20 percent interest on deposits, which got people to buy Terra in order to then deposit it and get the 20 percent. That hooked lots of new investors, and in the months that followed people started to buy into the company’s narrative that it had solved one of the most complicated questions in crypto: how to create coins that would be stable enough to use as currency without having a mountain of financial reserves to back their value up. (Terra, more than a few pundits opined, had found the “holy grail” of cryptocurrency.) So even though some warned that the way Terra was set up meant that it was eventually going to face the equivalent of a run on the bank (which is, in fact, how it collapsed), crypto holders collectively decided that Terra and Luna were really valuable, and so they were. Until a few weeks ago, when all of a sudden they weren’t.

It’s that “all of a sudden” that makes investing in crypto such a vertiginous experience. In a world where belief determines value, you can never be sure you’re on firm ground. There are cryptocurrencies—ether, most obviously—that have real use value in the blockchain world. And arguably, bitcoin, apart from its usefulness in buying drugs and other illicit items, has retained value long enough that its status as “digital gold” is not under serious threat. But even these two currencies can see their values oscillate wildly based on little more than investor fickleness.

In that sense, crypto can be said to incarnate Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s description of capitalism’s effect on social relations: “All that is solid melts into air.” It’s no surprise, then, that crypto holders are always exhorting one another to believe in order to buck up their collective confidence, and that they identify themselves as HODLers and give their Twitter photos laser eyes. When crypto’s value is the product of investors’ collective will, then it’s essential to try to keep that will intact.

Read: The crypto backlash is booming

That’s why the most interesting question about this crypto crash is not really why it happened, but whether it will provoke a true crisis of confidence. The market has rebounded many times from crashes in the past, and it will not be shocking to see it do so again. Belief, after all, can return as quickly as it departs. But the most recent crypto boom was driven by investors new to this market: ordinary retail investors, as well as institutional investors, most of whom have no philosophical or ideological commitment to crypto, and no desire to HODL when things are falling apart.


Even for the true believers, the obliteration of Terra and Luna was a powerful reminder that investing in most cryptocurrencies is the financial equivalent of Wile E. Coyote running on air—it works great until people decide to look down. And once they do, it’s a really long way to fall.





加密货币如何消失在空气中
当一种货币的价值仅仅建立在信念之上时，它很可能会蒸发掉。

作者：James Surowiecki
云中的比特币
大西洋报》；盖蒂
2022年5月20日
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关于作者。詹姆斯-苏洛维茨基（James Surowiecki）是《人群的智慧》（The Wisdom of Crowds）一书的作者，在Medium发表博客。

加密货币市场的大屠杀并不新鲜。在过去的十年里，即使像比特币和以太坊这样的加密货币的价值急剧上升，崩溃一直是市场的一个常规特征。(HODL--"抓紧时间"--成为加密货币信徒的口头禅是有原因的。) 但是，即使按照加密货币的标准，在过去六个月里，特别是在过去几周里，价值的破坏是惊人的。

自11月以来，大约有1.5万亿美元的加密货币价值被抹去了。比特币和以太坊是市场的风向标，都比其峰值下降了约60%。最引人注目的是，所谓的稳定币Terra和它的姐妹代币Luna，六周前的估值约为600亿美元，在几天内内爆，现在基本上没有价值。


这种巨大的抛售当然会引发一个自然的问题。发生了什么？你当然可以指出潜在的罪魁祸首。通货膨胀和利率正在上升--尽管加密货币应该是对冲通货膨胀的工具，并且对 "法定 "金融世界发生的事情无动于衷。股票正在被抛售--尽管加密货币的一大卖点是它应该与其他资产不相干。但实际上，有一个更简单的解释。人们对加密货币的信心动摇了。而信仰，而不是基本面，是加密货币的大部分价值所依赖的。

毕竟，加密货币与农田、股票、甚至房地产等资产不同。当投资者试图弄清楚为这些类型的资产支付多少钱时，他们感兴趣的是，至少在理论上，他们的内在价值。如果你要买农田，你想知道你能从那片土地上种植的作物中得到多少钱。如果你要买一栋公寓楼，你想知道在未来30年（或任何你的时间范围）你能从租户那里得到多少租金。而如果你要购买一家公司的股票，你想知道它在未来会产生多少现金，以及它目前拥有的任何资产的价值。


现在，内在价值的计算总是估计，也总是不准确的，因为没有办法完全预测未来。但关键的想法是，资产的价值与其他人将为其支付的费用无关。如果你现在拥有苹果公司的全部股权，你将获得至少1000亿美元的利润--那是真正的现金，将在第一年进入你的银行账户。假设你让蒂姆-库克做他的事，你可以指望得到这些，甚至更多，在可预见的未来每年都是如此。因此，这为苹果的价值提供了一个基线。

不过，加密货币的估值通常建立在一个不同的原则上：内在价值并不重要。一项资产的价值并不取决于它在现实世界中的使用价值，或它在未来产生现金的能力。相反，一项资产的价值取决于人们认为它的价值是什么。这是一种后现代的观点。没有 "真正的 "价值，只有我们集体构建并选择相信或不相信的价值叙事。正如加密货币和NFT（non-fungible token）投资者尼克-托马诺（Nick Tomaino）去年秋天所说的那样，"如果互联网上的一群人集体认为某个东西有价值，它就有价值。我们处在一个信念等于价值的世界里"。

当然，还有其他市场的价值取决于信念，其中最明显的是黄金、美术品和收藏品。但黄金有几千年的历史，人们选择接受它作为货币；而美术品则被稀有性和原创作品的光环所包裹。加密货币市场引人注目的是，它利用同样的逻辑，在不到十年的时间里凭空（或者更准确地说，凭代码）创造了超过1万亿美元的价值。

这种现象最纯粹的例子是memecoins，其中最著名的是Dogecoin。Dogecoin创建于2013年，实际上是一个笑话。它没有现实世界的使用价值；没有人需要Dogecoin来购买或出售任何东西。它甚至不稀缺，因为与比特币不同，比特币的供应量是有限的，而且随着时间的推移，比特币变得更难生产，而狗狗币真的很容易 "开采"。然而，在2021年4月的高峰期，Dogecoin "价值 "达到了所谓的500亿美元，而即使在今天，在其价值下降了近90%之后，它仍然价值约110亿美元。为什么呢？答案可能就像埃隆-马斯克在一条推文中提到Dogecoin，称其为 "人民的加密货币"，并让大家为之兴奋一样愚蠢。

或者以Terra和Luna为例。它们成立三年多一点，直到2021年，它们的总价值还不到10亿美元。然后，在一年左右的时间里，它们的估值突然达到600亿美元。仅从2021年8月到今年3月，它们的总价值就增加了两倍多。在那个时候，Terra和Luna似乎是加密货币的下一个大事件。Terra的创始人Do Kwon开始被当作一个有远见的人而被谈论。Luna的持有者自称为Lunatics。Terra支付了近4000万美元，将自己的名字印在华盛顿国民队的球场上。

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导读：在加密货币的土地上，现在是愚蠢的季节

这并不是因为泰拉作为一种资产有什么重要的变化。人们并没有开始大量使用其硬币来购买东西。Terra的基础业务并没有大幅改善。主要的变化是，2021年3月，Terra推出了一个名为Anchor的应用程序，开始提供20%的存款利息，这让人们购买Terra，以便将其存入，获得20%的利息。这吸引了很多新的投资者，在随后的几个月里，人们开始相信该公司的说法，即它已经解决了加密货币中最复杂的问题之一：如何创造足够稳定的硬币来作为货币使用，而不需要有大量的金融储备来支持其价值。(Terra，不止一些学者认为，已经找到了加密货币的 "圣杯"）。因此，尽管有些人警告说，Terra的设置方式意味着它最终将面临相当于银行挤兑的情况（事实上，它就是这样崩溃的），加密货币持有者集体决定，Terra和Luna真的很有价值，所以它们是如此。直到几周前，它们突然就不值钱了。

正是这种 "突然"，使得投资加密货币成为一种令人眩晕的体验。在一个信念决定价值的世界里，你永远无法确定你是否站稳脚跟。有一些加密货币--最明显的是乙醚--在区块链世界中具有真正的使用价值。而且可以说，比特币除了在购买毒品和其他非法物品方面有用之外，它的价值保持了足够长的时间，其作为 "数字黄金 "的地位没有受到严重威胁。但是，即使是这两种货币，其价值也会因为投资者的善变而发生剧烈振荡。

在这个意义上，加密货币可以说是卡尔-马克思和弗里德里希-恩格斯关于资本主义对社会关系影响的描述的化身。"所有坚固的东西都会融化成空气"。因此，加密货币持有者总是互相劝说相信，以增强他们的集体信心，他们把自己称为HODLers，并给他们的Twitter照片加上激光眼，这并不奇怪。当加密货币的价值是投资者集体意志的产物时，那么就必须努力保持这种意志的完整性。

阅读。加密货币的反击正在蓬勃发展

这就是为什么关于这次加密货币崩溃的最有趣的问题不是它真正发生的原因，而是它是否会激起真正的信心危机。市场过去曾多次从崩盘中反弹，看到它再次反弹也不会令人震惊。毕竟，信心可以像它离开一样迅速返回。但最近的加密货币繁荣是由刚进入这个市场的投资者推动的：普通的散户投资者，以及机构投资者，他们中的大多数人对加密货币没有哲学或意识形态的承诺，也不希望在事情分崩离析时HODL。


即使对真正的信徒来说，Terra和Luna的湮灭也是一个强有力的提醒，投资大多数加密货币相当于Wile E. Coyote在空气中奔跑的金融行为--在人们决定向下看之前，它是很好的。而一旦他们这样做，就会有很长的路要走。