This interview came to me on November 21, and I finished writing it that very day. After that, Nandu.com spent a month putting together this special feature. Overall, they did a pretty good job; the altcoin list at the very bottom is a bit of an unnecessary embellishment.
According to the reporter’s request, I waited a few days before reposting it. But in fact, back then I had never agreed to any copyright arrangement with them, nor had I received any fee or the like, so one might say the copyright to this piece still remains in my own hands~
1、How did Bitcoin enter your world? Do you think you fully understand Bitcoin?
I entered the world of Bitcoin during the surge-and-crash period this April. Although I had heard of it before, it was only at that point that I began to take it seriously. My specialty is philosophy of technology, and I found that Bitcoin fit neatly with my thinking on the Scientific Revolution, the history of technology, philosophy of technology, and so on. It is a vivid example of how a technological revolution drives historical transformation, so I began buying Bitcoin and studying the related issues. As for understanding it fully, of course I can’t claim that. But if I’m allowed a bit of self-congratulation, my interdisciplinary background as a scholar in philosophy means my perspective is relatively broad, so I can at least say I understand it in a rather “comprehensive” way. I have a certain grasp of many aspects of Bitcoin—its technology, ideas, economics, and so on—but I can’t say I am a specialist in any one field.
2、Some people suspect Bitcoin is a “scam.” How do you prove that it isn’t a scam?
No need to prove it. I can say: yes, it is a scam. That doesn’t matter. But what needs to be noted is that if Bitcoin is a scam, then fiat currency (the dollar and the like) is an even bigger scam—the defining feature is that you must find someone else foolish enough to believe that this shabby piece of paper, which is good neither for wiping your hands nor for writing on, is worth that much, and only then can you spend the banknotes in your pocket. If no one believes in it anymore, the paper money will just rot in your own hands and be worth nothing.
As for currencies before Bitcoin, government was the guarantor of confidence. Some people think that because paper money is issued by the government, it is not a scam. But in fact this is precisely a necessary element of a Ponzi scheme: a center of belief. Once that center collapses, confidence collapses all at once, and the whole scheme can no longer continue. But what exactly does government guarantee? Setting aside the fact that governments can always collapse, even if the government were to remain authoritative forever, at most it can only guarantee that money can be printed and issued continuously (or, put differently, we can only guarantee that the government will always find a way to devalue the currency). It can guarantee that 10 yuan will always be worth 10 yuan, but as for what those 10 yuan can actually buy, the government guarantees nothing.
Bitcoin removes this center. Since it is not a pyramid structure at all and has no center whatsoever, there is no fulcrum that can cause the whole chain of the scam to break apart. Of course, you can say that early profiting miners have to lure newcomers in so they can cash out, and therefore they are the center of the scam. But Bitcoin’s total quantity is limited; once they cash out, they are no longer the center.
Bitcoin’s reliability is guaranteed by mathematics and the network. Although that is not absolutely reliable, it is still much firmer than government. And Bitcoin’s value, like fiat currency’s, is not guaranteed by the government, but determined by market confidence.
You can understand Bitcoin as a scam, but the key is that this scam is very hard to end. You can think that everyone who accepts Bitcoin is foolish, but as long as there are always fools in the world who are attracted by the idea of Bitcoin, then Bitcoin can circulate forever in that fool’s world as if it were genuine gold and silver. That fool’s world is at least more stable than any regime, and harder to break than al-Qaeda.
3、Did early Bitcoin enthusiasts share some common trait? Liberals? Anarchists? Rational thinkers who also love technology? Or crazy geeks?
Early Bitcoin enthusiasts were much like early internet users—they were diverse too. The early internet emerged from the military, but geeks, scholars, businesspeople, hackers, and many other cultures all took part in its rise. Bitcoin is similar: there are anarchists and hackers, but also scholars and technology enthusiasts with more moderate positions, as well as some profit-seeking businesspeople. In different stages of its development, the group that serves as the main driving force may change, but from the very beginning it has been diverse and open.
4、The essence of money is trust. But when it comes to Bitcoin, what is it that people ultimately trust?
As I said earlier, people trust the government, but only insofar as they trust it not to issue money recklessly—in other words, how worthless the currency becomes depends on the government. But how valuable the currency is depends on the market. That is to say, one does not trust the “upstream” party, but the “downstream” one; one trusts that someone in the market will accept this currency. In this sense, Bitcoin is the same as fiat currency. In the end, both rely on trust in the “market,” and the market should be an environment organized freely from the bottom up, rather than something set up from the top down. There can be markets where there is no government, and where there is government there may not necessarily be a market. If you truly believe the government will protect the market, then the situation is actually worse—for example, recently Venezuela even deployed the army to control the appliance market and prohibit price increases for appliances. But the problem is that price increases were originally caused by the government’s excessive issuance of money. The government makes money worthless, then forcibly controls prices; that is not something to be grateful for.
Any market activity presupposes trust in the market. For example, if I raise pigs to sell for money, the premise is that I believe someone will still buy them after I’ve fattened them up. But what if, all of a sudden, everyone stops eating pork? Suppose everyone suddenly becomes Muslim; then your pork will just rot in your hands. You produce soccer balls to sell, but suddenly everyone stops liking soccer; your soccer balls will also rot in your hands. If everyone suddenly stops liking Bitcoin, then your Bitcoin will likewise rot in your hands. There is nothing strange about that. But because the market is a plural environment organized by many people in a bottom-up way, such a situation is hard to happen.
In the world of Bitcoin, the market no longer needs government support in the background, so all we need is trust in the market—trust in customary habits and spontaneously formed rules.
5、As for Bitcoin becoming a social currency, what is the most urgent problem it needs to solve right now?
First is the spread of ideas and applications: the more people who understand and accept Bitcoin, the more social it becomes. In fact, Bitcoin is already socialized; it’s just that there are different sizes of “society.” Bitcoin already has its own circulation circle, and within these communities Bitcoin has already become a currency. So the question is how to expand these communities and enlarge its ecosystem.
6、What do you think of altcoins? Which altcoin do you recognize more, and do you hold any coins in reserve?
The existence of altcoins is inevitable, because the core of Bitcoin is only an idea, and its carrier is also open-source software. Any open-source software may branch into countless forks; many forks will die out, but some competing branches will still coexist and thrive alongside the main line. In the future, after a brutal process of elimination, some surviving competing coins may live symbiotically with Bitcoin, restraining and promoting one another.
But at present, most altcoins are just simple copies with a few parameter changes and some hype added on top. There are still relatively few coins that truly aim to compete with Bitcoin. Personally, I quite recognize two works by the geek god Sunny King: PPC and XPM. He tries to solve certain problems of Bitcoin and seeks a differentiated path.
I think that, like an ecosystem, what can coexist and prosper are often species occupying different ecological niches, and these species in different positions are very hard to measure by the same standard. In other words, there is no question of which is better between altcoins and Bitcoin. For example, cheetahs run faster than sloths, but that does not prove that cheetahs as a species are superior to sloths. Sloths are more “energy-efficient” than cheetahs, but that is not necessarily better either. After Bitcoin, more and more coins with distinct personalities have emerged, and they are all enriching the future monetary ecosystem.
However, I haven’t really been hoarding altcoins, because I feel that Bitcoin is still in a period of rapid growth. First, more and more people need to come to understand Bitcoin’s idea of decentralized monetary freedom, and only then can we talk about the formation of a new monetary ecosystem. So at this stage, it is very hard for other coins to catch up with Bitcoin. Although they offer more opportunities for speculation because their market caps are smaller, the corresponding risks are also greater. So I am still relatively conservative and mainly hoard Bitcoin.
7、Some people say that although Bitcoin is great, it is doomed to fail. Do you agree?
I haven’t seen the basis of this person’s argument or the logic of their reasoning, so I can’t comment. This view seems rather contradictory. Of course, saying that Bitcoin is great but “may fail” is unquestionably correct. Any great revolution faces the risk of failure; even if, in hindsight, it was an inevitable trend of history, in actual historical circumstances there can still be many twists and turns. That is why I think it is meaningful for people like us not only to invest, but also to work hard at interpreting and promoting ideas related to Bitcoin. We are personally taking part in this great transformation of the times, contributing what strength we can to push forward this great cause.
8、More and more people are investing in Bitcoin, and the exchange rate has now surpassed 600 dollars. Among them are many investors who do not really understand Bitcoin. What impact will this have on Bitcoin’s future development? Do you hope to see this situation?
As I mentioned earlier, even among early Bitcoin participants, there were many speculators who did not really understand Bitcoin. Many people may have bought in at $2 and cashed out long before it reached $10; others may have cut their losses and left when it fell from $30 to $2. The participation of speculators, whether good or bad, is unavoidable and is also a necessary stage in Bitcoin’s development. Even after Bitcoin truly succeeds, I dare say that a large majority of people still will not understand Bitcoin—just as most of us do not truly understand the issuance mechanisms and financial principles of the renminbi or the dollar, and most people do not understand the origins and technical principles of the internet. What ultimately determines what people use is the surrounding environment. And Bitcoin, like any platform-type tool, has its technical mechanism, historical origins, ideas, and theories hidden behind its application environment. From beginning to end, only a very small handful of people will trace everything back to its roots and thoroughly understand and study it.
Some say that too many investors rushing in cause the exchange rate to rise too fast and fluctuate too much, which is harmful to Bitcoin’s use as an everyday currency. That is certainly true. But how should this problem be solved? The only way is to let it rise faster. Only when its scale reaches a sufficiently large level can its exchange rate become relatively stable. Even after several rounds of explosive growth, Bitcoin’s total market value is only around $7 billion, less than 50 billion yuan, while the A-share market has a scale of more than 10 trillion yuan. Just one middle-sized broker’s fat-finger error at Everbright could instantly cause a 340 billion yuan fluctuation in the A-share market. Compared with that, what is Bitcoin’s current level of fluctuation worth in absolute terms? At its present market cap, the entry of a small institution or a very wealthy tycoon can trigger a major surge. So at this stage, it is impossible to stop these investors from stirring up the Bitcoin market. Only after participants gradually increase and the market cap becomes larger will the exchange rate possibly stabilize.
For Bitcoin to become a universal currency, its market cap will certainly have to far exceed its current magnitude, and this scale cannot be achieved all at once; it can only rise step by step in wave after wave. But if you insist on saying that this necessary path to becoming a universal currency—rising amid volatility—means Bitcoin is too volatile and therefore can never become a universal currency, then that is putting the cart before the horse. The reality is precisely that because it is meant to become a universal currency, it must rise wave after wave. That can only be called growing pains, I suppose.
I think Bitcoin’s exchange rate, with its dramatic rises and falls caused by investor participation, is good for Bitcoin’s future. On the one hand, this huge volatility draws more people’s attention to Bitcoin—for example, I entered during the big fluctuations in April. On the other hand, pushing the exchange rate upward is, after all, a step toward Bitcoin becoming a universal currency. Of course, besides speculators who care about short-term arbitrage, there will also be more and more people who begin to measure their wealth in Bitcoin and participate in promoting and developing Bitcoin applications.
But personally, if you ask me whether this is a situation I hope to see, I am actually very conflicted. Because I am still a student and have no independent source of income, let alone savings, I only bought dozens of coins with scholarships and some pocket money squeezed out from the cracks. If investors had arrived more slowly and the coin price had risen more slowly, I could have gradually earned more money after I started working and bought more coins. But now my dissertation still isn’t finished, and the exchange rate has already multiplied several times over. It feels rather melancholy.
9、Why are Chinese people so interested in Bitcoin?
This question has to be discussed in stages. You may be referring to the recent surge driven by the Chinese market, which shows that Chinese people are very interested in Bitcoin. But in an even earlier stage, Chinese people were already quite enthusiastic about participating in Bitcoin. The Avalon team and the Koushao Mao team, once unrivaled in the mining hardware industry, were both Chinese, and many related fields also had plenty of active Chinese participants. In fact, Chinese geeks are by no means inferior in vision or thinking by world standards, and they are quite drawn to the free and unruly spirit behind Bitcoin; they also have a more direct appreciation of the benefits of the market economy. On the other hand, Chinese people tend to plan ahead more, prefer saving to advance consumption, and avoid living by borrowing the way Westerners do, spending next month’s grain for this month. In the Chinese mind, the store-of-value function of money is more highly valued, so a value-preserving currency like Bitcoin is easier to accept. Westerners, meanwhile, have long been unable to understand why Chinese people dislike borrowing and prefer saving; when they see Bitcoin affecting the inflationary system centered on forward borrowing, their instinctive reaction is that it won’t work. In addition, because electronic payment tools such as Q coins and Alipay are more popular in China, Chinese people already have a better cultural foundation for accepting Bitcoin.
Of course, in the recent stage, the main factor has been the influx of investors. This may have something to do with the push from mainstream media led by CCTV, and it may also be related to China’s financial environment, where people now have too much money and nowhere to put it. I can’t say for sure.
10、If Chinese people gain too many Bitcoin chips, will that affect Bitcoin’s development?
Of course it will have an impact, but Bitcoin itself is oriented toward decentralization. “Chinese people” are not a single entity, and there are diverse differences among Chinese people as well. Even if they are all buying Bitcoin, their motives and attitudes are different, so it is hard to say that they will form a unified force capable of skewing Bitcoin’s overall development trend.
11、Do you think Bitcoin’s current industry chain is sufficient to support its healthy development? Do you trust online wallets and trading platforms? How do you protect your own Bitcoin?
These questions don’t seem very coherent? First, regarding the industry chain: actually, the industry chain is Bitcoin’s development itself. The real question is whether Bitcoin’s current industry chain—I would rather say ecosystem—is healthy. To say the ecosystem is healthy means balanced and coordinated development, and one must admit that from today’s perspective it is still not especially balanced. For example, some time ago mining surged while the exchange rate lagged; this period sees the exchange rate surge while popularization of knowledge and application promotion lag a bit. But there is no helping that, because we are currently in a period of rapid growth. A child may suddenly have a voice change overnight while their height has not yet grown, or they may already be very tall but not yet mature in mind, and so on. But overall, the various links in Bitcoin’s ecosystem still drive one another and remain in a fairly lively state.
As for online wallets, I think blockchain.info and coinbase are both relatively trustworthy; others are a bit worse. I keep a small amount of coins in blockchain.info’s online wallet, which makes it convenient for me to use them anytime from my phone or other computers, and even if I lose my phone I won’t lose the coins. Trading platforms are merely intermediaries for buying and selling; since I don’t do short-term trading, I won’t keep too many coins on them. But the main trading platforms, especially some long-established ones, are still relatively trustworthy.
Part of my Bitcoin is stored on my computer, another part is sealed away in the form of offline paper wallets, and a small amount is kept in online wallets, with a little loose change left on platforms as well.
12、What kind of trend will Bitcoin show in the coming period?
I’m not sure. Of course I believe that, in the absence of major events, there will still be short-term fluctuations, while the long-term trend will be upward. In the short run, it will be affected by various outside factors, but what determines the overall trend is mainly mining and applications. Mining determines the cost of new coin supply. If mining costs are too low compared with the coin price, then the price trend will turn bearish. That is the main reason why Bitcoin’s exchange rate has been cooling since May this year. And now mining costs are rising exponentially, so they will no longer drag down the exchange rate so obviously. As for the increase in applications, that is the fundamental basis for Bitcoin’s appreciation, because if people are forever only selling Bitcoin into RMB or dollars to count it as cashing out, then the whole trading market is a zero-sum game: if someone makes money, someone else loses money, and the rise in the coin price is hard to sustain (though it can still continue for quite a long time). But if I no longer need to convert back into RMB, and can instead use it directly—earn Bitcoin, spend Bitcoin, forming an ecological closed loop, with RMB only going one way into Bitcoin and no longer needing to be bought back with RMB—then the Bitcoin exchange rate will inevitably form a one-sided upward pattern. If Bitcoin’s range of applications can match RMB’s or even surpass it, then the status of the exchange rate will ultimately be reversed.
13、Do Bitcoin investment and trading, buying and selling, and circulation violate China’s current laws?
Indeed, at present many market activities involving Bitcoin are operating in a legal gray area, and there are even parts that do conflict with current law. Although the regulatory authorities are not taking care of it for now, the risk of “settling accounts after the autumn harvest” always exists. But on the other hand, we also cannot be completely bound by law. When new things like the internet appear, there are often many parts of the law that seem lagging behind the development of the times. If one were to follow the law in a perfectly rigid, by-the-book way, many kinds of innovation would be very hard to carry out. Here is another example: before, China had something called the “crime of speculation and profiteering” (投机倒把罪). This offense, produced under the planned economy system, was not abolished in the Criminal Law until 1997, and even then it remained in many other regulations until it was completely removed only in 2008. As one can imagine, after reform and opening up, many buying-and-selling behaviors under the market economy, strictly speaking, all violated the “crime of speculation and profiteering.” If one were to obey the law completely and mechanically, taking only the literal words as rigid rules, then the new order of the market economy would also have been very hard to develop. Some behaviors in today’s Bitcoin market do indeed carry legal risk, and the possibility of being cracked down on cannot be ruled out. For example, in the 1980s there were still many people who were tried for speculation and profiteering, but some other speculators became the first generation of entrepreneurs after reform and opening up. During a period of historical transformation, such things are normal. I hope the relevant law-enforcement agencies can be a bit more tolerant, and I also hope entrepreneurs can be a bit bolder, so that together they can explore a new order.
14、Exchange platforms are being attacked frequently. BTC users’ property safety, in a sense, concerns Bitcoin’s survival. How do you view this issue?
Overall, although exchange platforms are often attacked, not that many are actually breached and have coins stolen. And if you withdraw Bitcoin into your own possession, it is probably safer than ordinary cash and online banking.
15、What do you think is Bitcoin’s biggest flaw? What is the thing that will affect its ultimate fate?
There is no single biggest flaw. Any flaw is relative; first one has to say relative to what one is speaking of flaws. Bitcoin’s total supply is fixed. To many people this seems like a flaw, but it will trigger a kind of paradigm revolution in the financial world, and the standards by which value is measured will all change.
As for what affects Bitcoin’s ultimate fate, I think there is only quantum computers. The cryptographic technology on which Bitcoin is based may in the future be cracked by quantum computers. But at present nobody knows: if quantum computers gradually develop and give the Bitcoin community enough buffer time to respond, then even if quantum computers really can crack Bitcoin’s cryptographic mechanism, there is nothing to fear. The only possibility is a sudden strike by high-performance quantum computers, catching the Bitcoin community off guard and making it hard to update the algorithm in time; it is not impossible for the whole front to be lost.
16、From a technical point of view, can Bitcoin applications escape the fate of being regulated?
This is also relative; first, regulated by whom, and second, regulated in what way. When we speak of regulation now, we generally think of the government, and of top-down, coercive regulation, but it does not have to be only that. In the Bitcoin community, regulation is bottom-up and self-organized. For example, when a new exchange opens—say GBL—it first has to advertise in the community. At the time, netizens in the community would spontaneously inspect it, and as a result they discovered that the site’s registration information was fake, that the introduction text was copied, in short, that it was untrustworthy in every way. Later there were all kinds of suspicious moves, which had already been exposed in the community long before; countless eyes were “regulating” it. The problem lies in the fact that there are some people who do not read or do not believe the community, and there are also some who know perfectly well it is a scam but, driven by huge profits, still join the gamble. They still participate there, and in the end when GBL ran off, they lost however much they lost; actually, they were just asking for it. The entire GBL跑路 incident in fact proved how effective the mechanism of community self-organization is. Bitcoin’s open-source, open, decentralized features force merchants to consider accountability to the bottom rather than to the top, to be frank and open with the community, to operate in as public and transparent a manner as possible, and to accept everyone’s constant regulation rather than merely having to deal with inspections from some superior authorities. If such an ecology develops, the structure of society may also undergo a transformation, shifting from a pyramid-shaped top-down control structure to a network-like form of mutual constraint and mutual promotion.
17、No matter how free a tool is, will it still become a tool of despotism? What do you think?
It is not entirely like that. A despotism society is itself the product of a corresponding technological environment. In a primitive tribal society, it is very hard to have a despot with great power in hand. Why? Because there are not enough tools to sustain despotism. To sustain despotism, one needs weapons for wielding force (for example, bronze battle-axes), and media for maintaining order (for example, writing; in an oral society, power can hardly radiate to another city). And the emergence of new technologies sometimes destroys the political order built under the original technological environment. For example, the appearance of iron broke the ancient aristocratic system, while the spread of gunpowder in turn broke the feudal system of Western Europe. Printing made modern universal suffrage possible (how can the citizens of Los Angeles learn about a candidate born in New York?), and so on. Changes in the corresponding technological environment will drive changes in social structure. I believe that under the new technological environment opened up by the internet and Bitcoin, the form of social organization as a whole will change. Even if despotism remains unavoidable in future society, the form of despotism will also change.
18、Some people study the distribution of Bitcoin node transactions and argue that Bitcoin’s rich-poor divide is extremely severe, that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Wouldn’t this go against Bitcoin’s freedom and fairness by nature?
It is still because right now Bitcoin is in a period of rapid growth, and most people are mainly hoarding coins, especially those who identify with Bitcoin’s ideas and believe it has a great future. Obviously, the people who hoard the most coins are surely those who believe most strongly in Bitcoin’s future. Then in their eyes Bitcoin is of course still in the early stage of development, with a long way to go before the appreciation space is exhausted; naturally they will not rush to cash out, but will instead become even more determined to hoard coins. For example, I believe Bitcoin can rise ten thousandfold, and it has already quickly risen tenfold now. Does this fact strengthen or weaken my confidence that it will rise ten thousandfold? Of course it strengthens it, right? So the more it rises, the firmer my confidence becomes, and the more I want to add to my investment. But what about those lacking conviction and grand expectations? They test the waters and stop there; they may have thought Bitcoin would rise threefold, but then they find it has risen tenfold, so very likely they will hurry to cash out and leave. So the current situation is that those with confidence hoard more and more, while those without confidence split off less and less. This is very normal. They are both pioneers and explorers, and they also hold firm beliefs; having put in so much, what is wrong with them being richer? Let those who more deserve wealth enjoy wealth—if that is not fairness, then what is?
And this is only the initial stage. Imagine the future world in which Bitcoin becomes mainstream: would wealth and poverty still be divided so sharply? No, it would not be like this. In today’s fiat-currency world, because the entire money supply is continuously expanded from the top down, the closer one is to the source of money, the richer one becomes. More specifically, that means the financial industry, that is, Wall Street. In the United States, 1% of the people hold 50% of the assets in the investment market, and these people, relying on finance, are still continuously increasing their wealth. It is precisely the financial logic of “money begets money” that makes the rich richer and the poor poorer. But in the Bitcoin world, this law is hard to sustain, because Bitcoin itself is a store-of-value asset and will not be inflated; people with more capital also cannot rely on the central bank’s favor, using “money begets money” and “compound interest upon compound interest” to easily increase their wealth. Bitcoin is hard to use financial dividends to expand automatically; it can only rely on real industry to earn profits. The process of accumulating wealth will be additive, not exponential. Therefore the rich are more likely to spend money until they have less and less, while the poor can more easily accumulate wealth through labor, without having to worry that their savings will depreciate and thus be forced to put their hard-earned income into the financial market, where it is slowly devoured by financial giants. So in the ideal Bitcoin world, the flow of money will tend toward balance: the rich spend and the poor earn. Although this still seems far away now, it will surely be more “fair” than the world today.
19、As a researcher in the field of philosophy of science, how do you evaluate the claim that “Bitcoin is a social experiment”?
The theories I can connect with from the field of philosophy of science are mainly two. One is Kuhn’s theory of paradigms. He pointed out that the Scientific Revolution is not merely the accumulation and replacement of specific scientific knowledge, but rather a transformation of the whole: the entire worldview and standards of value are changing. Under the old paradigm, the standards by which one judges what counts as a scientific problem, what counts as truth, what counts as a scientific object, and so on, all undergo transformation. What is considered good and correct under the new paradigm may be wrong under the old paradigm, or may not even be considered at all. It is hard to find a set of standards that stands above both paradigms simultaneously (that would require a third paradigm). In connection with Bitcoin, I think Bitcoin is not merely something more valuable or less valuable than fiat currency; rather, in the Bitcoin world, the standards of value themselves will also undergo a transformation. Things considered necessary and good under the current paradigm, or certain indispensable top-priority matters (such as government intervention in and regulation of market “liquidity”), may become completely irrelevant under the new paradigm; and things considered good under the new paradigm are also very hard to translate for people who think in the old paradigm. During the Scientific Revolution, the embryonic forms of the old paradigm and the new paradigm competed together, and the arguments between them were often like a chicken talking to a duck—much like the current state of the Bitcoin field. And those who cling to the old paradigm often ultimately cannot be persuaded; one can only wait for them to grow old.
The other theory is from philosophy of technology, namely that technology (media) is not neutral, but has its own value bias. People sometimes say technology is a double-edged sword, able to injure good people and also uphold justice, depending on how people use it. But this is rather superficial. Still, the so-called bias of technology does not mean that some technology is necessarily good or bad. The key lies in the fact that the very standards by which good and bad are measured are themselves influenced by the corresponding technological environment. For example, in the age of the sword, in the age of cold weapons, value tendencies such as the spirit of chivalry, the spirit of the warrior, the spirit of knighthood, and so on, took shape; but after firearms replaced swords and blades, these cultures and values became detached from any support. Therefore, when we want to assess the value of a technology, besides introducing an existing value system to judge it, we also need to pay attention to what kind of value bias this technology itself contains.
As for money, it is not only a neutral medium of exchange, but also shapes people’s values. Even the word “value” itself is closely tied to money. People begin to measure the value of things by the numerical amount of money. This may be a narrow-minded kind of money worship, but let us not dwell on that for now. Even within a culture that uses monetary amounts as the standard for measuring value, we can still ask: with what kind of money?
Measuring value in dollars and measuring value in Bitcoin are fundamentally different. For example, if you are asked to choose between receiving 80 dollars now and 100 dollars in five years, which do you think is worth more? You will very likely choose the former, because the characteristic of continual dollar depreciation makes people more inclined to consider immediate interests. But between 80 Bitcoin now and 100 Bitcoin in five years, the choice may be completely different. Bitcoin leads people to think farther ahead and invest more cautiously, rather than choosing to live by eating next year’s grain this year, borrowing new money to repay old debts, patching up pollution only after the fact, and so on.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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