标签：Bitcoin

Bitcoin’s New High Commemoration (II): How Far Are We from the Eternal Bull Market?

Web3 & Cypherpunks2020.12.02
Bitcoin’s New High Commemoration (II): How Far Are We from the Eternal Bull Market?
Today the dollar price of bitcoin broke its historical high, surpassing 19,800 dollars. In the renminbi market, however, it has not yet surpassed its historical high, but that does not really matter, because the trend in recent years has been for the renminbi market to shrink dramatically, with the dollar market once again taking the lead in the bitcoin industry. The last time I wrote “Commemorating Bitcoin’s New High” was on January 5, 2017. Back then I was still calculating in renminbi; it had broken through 8,000 yuan, and I was in the midst of seeking a position at Tsinghua. My first bitcoin-related article was on April 19, 2013. At…
Web3 Bitcoin blockchain economy
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2020年12月2日
“A History of the Technology and Philosophical Study of Blockchain” Receives National Social Science Fund Grant

History of Science & Scholarship2020.10.05
“A History of the Technology and Philosophical Study of Blockchain” Receives National Social Science Fund Grant
Many crypto folks have often hoped I would write a bit more on related topics, and now that’s good: for the next couple of years I really am going to come back to writing about blockchain. The social science fund project I applied for was fortunate enough to be approved: “Research on the History of Technology and Philosophy of Technology of Blockchain.” This is a combination of my academic interests and the blockchain field. At first I had wanted to paste the main body of the application directly, but a colleague reminded me that when the social science fund project is finalized, they need to check for plagiarism, so one…
Web3 Bitcoin history of technology decentralization
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2020年10月5日
Is Digital Currency Beautiful? — A Review of *The New Currency War*

Web3 & Bitcoin2020.09.25
Is Digital Currency Beautiful? — A Review of *The New Currency War*
Published in China Science Daily (2020-09-24, page 7, book review). This book is actually not all that great; at first glance I thought it would be about Bitcoin, but it turns out the real topic is digital payments. Bitcoin is only mentioned in passing, and even then in a conspiratorial way. To be frank, if you can talk conspiracy theories about such a completely transparent open-source project, that only shows there is definitely something off with your intelligence. I would still write the review, on the one hand because it was commissioned, and on the other because, even with conspiracy theories mixed in, the problems this book wants to address…
technology book reading Bitcoin book review
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2020年9月25日
A Brief Q&A on Bitcoin Halving

Web3 & Cypherpunks2020.05.11
A Brief Q&A on Bitcoin Halving
Bitcoin is about to undergo its third “halving.” There has already been far too much discussion about Bitcoin halving for me to say anything terribly new, but precisely because there has been so much discussion, it may all seem dizzying to outsiders. So here I’ll try to answer, in a concise way, a few basic questions about Bitcoin halving. If you know nothing at all about Bitcoin, you might start by reading my “Bitcoin: A Popular Introduction.” 1.What——What is halving? “Halving” is a basic part of Bitcoin’s issuance mechanism. Every time Bitcoin produces 210,000 blocks, or roughly every four years, the block reward is “halved” once. Since going online in…
Web3 Bitcoin blockchain money
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2020年5月11日
From “Information Blocks” to “Blockchains”: Blockchain as a Completion of the Internet

Web3 & Bitcoin2019.10.27
From “Information Blocks” to “Blockchains”: Blockchain as a Completion of the Internet
A commissioned piece riding a hot topic for JieMian. I’m currently in Hefei attending the annual conference on Chinese history of science, and I wrote this last night on my bed after a full day of meetings, so it’s a bit rushed. Still, this counts as my first article that departs from Bitcoin and talks specifically about blockchain. In my view, the core application of blockchain is undoubtedly still currency; blockchain technology divorced from currency, or from currency in the broader sense (securities, etc.), is basically just a gimmick. But that does not stop us from indeed being able to seek a place for blockchain technology in the history of…
China Web3 Bitcoin history of technology
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2019年10月27日
Newtonian Mechanics and Modern Currency

History of Science & Scholarship2018.08.20
Newtonian Mechanics and Modern Currency
On July 16, I was invited to give a short talk at an event organized by Shiliu Blockchain. The original title was “Newtonian Mechanics and Modern Currency.” A couple of days ago, they released the video and a written transcript, retitled “The Hidden Connections Between the Scientific Revolution and Modern Currency.” The manuscript was prepared by them based on my lecture; in fact, before the lecture I had already written my own speaking notes, which of course differ from the actual talk. I’m posting them below for reference. The Affinity with Bitcoin Like many people, I saw news about Bitcoin very early on in the tech media, but I never…
science history of science Web3 Bitcoin
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2018年8月20日
The Ontological Basis of ‘Scarcity Makes Things Valuable’—With a Discussion of Why Bitcoin Is Valuable

Philosophy & Thought2018.01.22
The Ontological Basis of ‘Scarcity Makes Things Valuable’—With a Discussion of Why Bitcoin Is Valuable
This was originally meant to be a short piece about Bitcoin. On a whim I gave it a flashy title, but as I wrote it, it turned into a philosophical essay. In fact, the title is not all that outrageous. From the very beginning, what drew my attention to Bitcoin was that I saw it as an application of my own philosophical ideas. Over the following years, I have continued to use my philosophy of technology or media philosophy to interpret the significance of Bitcoin. By setting a fixed cap of 21 million, Bitcoin guarantees scarcity. As the saying goes, “what is rare is precious”; Bitcoin is so scarce, so…
philosophy Web3 Bitcoin value
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2018年1月22日
On ICOs: The Future of Stocks

Web3 & Bitcoin2017.09.14
On ICOs: The Future of Stocks
This year ICO has exploded. Many big names and veterans from the Bitcoin world have gradually become unable to sit still, and have taken up ICO, raising enormous amounts of money, only to finally dig their own graves. First, ICO was deemed illegal fundraising; now the entire domestic Bitcoin trading platform ecosystem is facing shutdown. How exactly will these big names end up? We shall wait and see. As for ICO, I have always kept a respectful distance from it. Although this may well have caused me to miss out on a chance to get rich dozens of times over, I have always adhered to an investment philosophy of safety…
Web3 Bitcoin blockchain decentralization
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2017年9月14日
Bitcoin: A Layperson’s Introduction

Web3 & Bitcoin2017.07.27
Bitcoin: A Layperson’s Introduction
After hyping Bitcoin for so many years, I’ve written quite a few articles, but on careful reflection, I still haven’t written a popular explanation of Bitcoin’s basic principles. Although you can find a ton of them with a casual search online, I haven’t found one that really suits my taste. During a spell of battling Shanghai’s heat, I had a sudden urge to write one myself and see how it goes. (This article is obviously not very timely; what’s hot lately is the Bitcoin fork crisis. I posted two Weibo updates about this issue recently, and they’re appended at the end.) I hope to explain Bitcoin’s basic principles in as…
technology Web3 Bitcoin value
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2017年7月27日
Is the threshold for “learning” Bitcoin higher? — Also on the Different Levels of Technical Knowledge

Web3 & Bitcoin2017.02.19
Is the threshold for “learning” Bitcoin higher? — Also on the Different Levels of Technical Knowledge
Recently on Weibo I again mentioned the issue of the learning threshold for Bitcoin: People always say Bitcoin has a high threshold and is hard to learn, and even some Bitcoin enthusiasts say so too. I think this is grossly misleading. In fact, it is not Bitcoin that has a high threshold, but old knowledge that has a high threshold, to the point that people who know a lot of old knowledge are unwilling to lower themselves and admit their own ignorance in order to learn new knowledge. If everyone were starting from zero, would understanding Bitcoin’s principles really be harder than learning all those M1, M2, interest-rate cuts, reserve-ratio…
philosophy technology Web3 Bitcoin
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2017年2月19日