TED-区块链将如何彻底改变我们的经济

 TED简介：2016 | 让我们向“分散式经济”问好-区块链将要改变一切。 Warburg清晰描述了”区块链“这个复杂的技术，她告诉我们随着”区块链“技术的出现，我们将不再需要通过银行和政府这样的集中机构来促成交易，并将旧时代商业和金融模式演变成一个全新的模式：一个分散、透明、自主的交易系统。

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指尖上划看台词

中英对照演讲稿

Economists have been exploring people'sbehavior for hundreds of years: how we make decisions, how we act individuallyand in groups, how we exchange value. They've studied the institutions thatfacilitate our trade, like legal systems, corporations, marketplaces. But thereis a new, technological institution that will fundamentally change how weexchange value, and it's called the blockchain.

经济学家已经研究人类行为数百年的时间了，研究我们如何做决定，我们作为个人和群体时如何表现，我们如何交换价值。他们还研究促进我们交易的机构，例如法制系统，公司，交易市场。但现在有一种全新的技术，它能从根本上改变我们交易的方式，它叫做“区块链”。

Now, that's a pretty bold statement, but ifyou take nothing else away from this talk, I actually want you to remember thatwhile blockchain technology is relatively new, it's also a continuation of avery human story, and the story is this. As humans, we find ways to loweruncertainty about one another so that we can exchange value.

现在来说，这是个很大胆的陈述，但是如果你在这里什么都没听懂的话，我仍希望各位记得即使“区块链”技术相对很新鲜，但它也是我们人类故事的一个延续，故事是这样的：作为人类，我们一直在寻找那些能降低彼此之间不确定性的方式，以便我们能够进行交易。

Now, one of the first people to reallyexplore the idea of institutions as a tool in economics to lower ouruncertainties about one another and be able to do trade was the Nobel economistDouglass North. He passed away at the end of 2015, but North pioneered what'scalled "new institutional economics." And what he meant byinstitutions were really just formal rules like a constitution, and informalconstraints, like bribery. These institutions are really the grease that allowour economic wheels to function, and we can see this play out over the courseof human history.

目前为止，最先真正在经济学里研究如何将制度作为工具来降低我们彼此之间不确定性以便我们能够交易的人中，有一位是诺贝尔经济学奖获得者道格拉斯－诺斯。他于2015年年底辞世，但他开创了“新制度经济学”。他所说的制度是指那些正式的规则，比如说宪法，还有一些非正式的规则，例如贿赂。这些制度是带动我们经济发展的润滑剂。这些制度在整个人类历史上一直扮演重要角色。

If we think back to when we werehunter-gatherer economies, we really just traded within our village structure.We had some informal constraints in place, but we enforced all of our tradewith violence or social repercussions. As our societies grew more complex andour trade routes grew more distant, we built up more formal institutions,institutions like banks for currency, governments, corporations. Theseinstitutions helped us manage our trade as the uncertainty and the complexitygrew, and our personal control was much lower. Eventually with the internet, weput these same institutions online. We built platform marketplaces like Amazon,eBay, Alibaba, just faster institutions that act as middlemen to facilitatehuman economic activity.

如果我们回想一下，当我们还处于采集狩猎经济时代时，我们只能在自己村落里做交易，交易在空间上受到了一些非正式的限制，但是我们会用暴力或是社会影响力强制进行这些交易。当我们的社会变得更加复杂，并且我们交易的路线变得更加遥远，我们建立了更多的正式机构，例如货币银行，政府，公司。在交易的不确定性和复杂性增加以及我们的个人掌控力下降的情况下。这些机构能帮助我们管理我们的交易。最终，随着互联网的发展，我们在网上也建立了同样的机构。我们建立了交易平台，如亚马逊，易趣、阿里巴巴，这些运作更快速的机构扮演了中间人的角色，促进了人们的经济活动。

As Douglass North saw it, institutions area tool to lower uncertainty so that we can connect and exchange all kinds ofvalue in society. And I believe we are now entering a further and radicalevolution of how we interact and trade, because for the first time, we canlower uncertainty not just with political and economic institutions, like ourbanks, our corporations, our governments, but we can do it with technologyalone.

正如道格拉斯.诺斯预测的制度是用来降低不确定性的工具，让我们可以在社会中建立联系并交换各种有价值的东西。我还相信我们现在正在进入一个更深远更重大的演变，人们之间的互动和交易方式将改变。因为，这是第一次我们可以降低不确定不是通过政治或者经济机构，例如银行，公司和政府，而是单独依靠技术做到这点。

So what is the blockchain? Blockchaintechnology is a decentralized database that stores a registry of assets andtransactions across a peer-to-peer network. It's basically a public registry ofwho owns what and who transacts what. The transactions are secured throughcryptography, and over time, that transaction history gets locked in blocks ofdata that are then cryptographically linked together and secured. This createsan immutable, unforgeable record of all of the transactions across thisnetwork. This record is replicated on every computer that uses the network.

所以什么是“区块链”呢？“区块链”技术是一种分散式数据库，它通过对等网络存储使用者的资产登记和交易信息，基本来说，这是一个公开的记录系统，上面记录了谁拥有什么和谁交易过什么。交易记录是通过密码被安全保护的，时间一过，交易记录会被封存在数据块里，然后数据块会进行加密连接并安全封存。这就创建了一个不可改变且不会丢失的记录，包含了所有这个网络下的交易记录。这些记录在这个网络的每台电脑上都进行了备份。

It's not an app. It's not a company. Ithink it's closest in description to something like Wikipedia. We can seeeverything on Wikipedia. It's a composite view that's constantly changing andbeing updated. We can also track those changes over time on Wikipedia, and wecan create our own wikis, because at their core, they're just a datainfrastructure. On Wikipedia, it's an open platform that stores words andimages and the changes to that data over time. On the blockchain, you can thinkof it as an open infrastructure that stores many kinds of assets. It stores thehistory of custodianship, ownership and location for assets like the digitalcurrency Bitcoin, other digital assets like a title of ownership of IP. Itcould be a certificate, a contract, real world objects, even personalidentifiable information. There are of course other technical details to theblockchain, but at its core, that's how it works. It's this public registrythat stores transactions in a network and is replicated so that it's verysecure and hard to tamper with.

这不是一个应用程序，也不是一个公司。我觉得最接近的描述应该像是维基百科。我们在维基百科上能看到每样东西，它是不断变化和更新的复合面貌。我们也可以在维基百科上实时跟踪这些变化，我们也可以创建我们自己的维基。因为他们的核心，只是数据的基础架构。维基百科是一个开放的平台，储存着文字和图片，以及随时间更新的数据。“区块链”，你也可以把它当成一个开放的基础设施架构，上面储存着各种各样的资产。它存储了资产的履历，包含资产的管理者、拥有者和地点等变动信息。这些资产包括像比特币那样的资产，以及其他数字资产，比如一个网络IP的所有权。它可以是一个证书、一个合同，现实世界的物件，甚至是个人的身份信息。当然“区块链”还有其他的技术细节，但它的核心是这样运作的。它是公开的记录系统，存储着该网络的所有交易记录，而且它可以复制到网络中的每台电脑，因此它非常安全，很难被篡改。

Which brings me to my point of howblockchains lower uncertainty and how they therefore promise to transform oureconomic systems in radical ways. So uncertainty is kind of a big term ineconomics, but I want to go through three forms of it that we face in almostall of our everyday transactions, where blockchains can play a role. We faceuncertainties like not knowing who we're dealing with, not having visibilityinto a transaction and not having recourse if things go wrong.

这就引申出我要说的重点，”区块链“可以如何降低”不确定性“，以及他们如何因此彻底地改变我们的经济体系。“不确定性”在经济上，似乎是一个大术语，但是我想通过三个方面来介绍我们日常交易中几乎都会遇到的不确定性问题，以及”区域块“在这些问题中可以扮演的角色。我们面对的不确定性例如：我们不知在跟谁交易，交易过程不透明，还有如果出现问题我们不知如何求助。

So let's take the first example, notknowing who we're dealing with. Say I want to buy a used smartphone on eBay.The first thing I'm going to do is look up who I'm buying from. Are they apower user? Do they have great reviews and ratings, or do they have no profileat all? Reviews, ratings, checkmarks: these are the attestations about ouridentities that we cobble together today and use to lower uncertainty about whowe're dealing with. But the problem is they're very fragmented. Think about howmany profiles you have. Blockchains allow for us to create an open, globalplatform on which to store any attestation about any individual from anysource. This allows us to create a user-controlled portable identity. More thana profile, it means you can selectively reveal the different attributes aboutyou that help facilitate trade or interaction, for instance that a governmentissued you an ID, or that you're over 21, by revealing the cryptographic proofthat these details exist and are signed off on. Having this kind of portableidentity around the physical world and the digital world means we can do allkinds of human trade in a totally new way.

那么我们来先谈谈第一条，不知在跟谁交易。比如说我想在易趣上买个二手手机，我要做的第一件事就是确认我要跟谁买。他们是超级用户吗？他们有收到好评吗？还是说根本没有他们的介绍？评价，打分，核查标记：这些是我们今天用来拼凑对方身份信息的证据，这些信息用来降低对方身份的不确定性。但问题是这些信息非常零碎，想想你个人就有多少份简介。”区块链“可以让我们创建一个开放的、全球的平台，可以存储来自任何来源的个人身份证明信息。这样，我们创建了一个用户控制的便携的身份证明。这不只是一个简介，它意味着你可以选择性地揭示你的不同个人属性以便交易或者互动。例如想证明政府给你发了一个身份证，或者证明你超过21岁，只要揭示相关的密码凭证，就可证明这些信息是真实存在并且通过签字的。有了这种连接真实与数字世界的便携式身份证明，意味着我们可以用一种全新的方式来做任何类型的交易。

So I've talked about how blockchains couldlower uncertainty in who we're dealing with. The second uncertainty that weoften face is just not having transparency into our interactions. Say you'regoing to send me that smartphone by mail. I want some degree of transparency. Iwant to know that the product I bought is the same one that arrives in the mailand that there's some record for how it got to me. This is true not just forelectronics like smartphones, but for many kinds of goods and data, things likemedicine, luxury goods, any kind of data or product that we don't want tamperedwith.

我阐述完”区块链“在我们跟谁交易方面是如何降低不确定性的。第二个我们经常遇到的不确定性问题是交易过程缺乏透明度。比如说你要给我邮寄智能手机我想要有一定的透明度。我想知道我买的东西跟寄到我邮箱里的东西是否是同一个东西，还有一些关于这个东西邮寄过程的记录。不仅像智能手机这样的电子产品如此，很多类型的产品和数据也适用，例如药物，奢侈品，以及任何我们不想被掉包的数据或产品。

The problem in many companies, especiallythose that produce something complicated like a smartphone, is they're managingall of these different vendors across a horizontal supply chain. All of thesepeople that go into making a product, they don't have the same database. Theydon't use the same infrastructure, and so it becomes really hard to seetransparently a product evolve over time.

很多公司都有这个问题，尤其是那些生产像智能手机这种复杂产品的公司，他们通过一个水平的供货链，来管理所有不同的供应商。参与产品制造的所有相关人士，他们没有同一份数据库。他们不使用同一套基础数据架构，因此很难看到一个产品是如何随时间变化的。

Using the blockchain, we can create a sharedreality across nontrusting entities. By this I mean all of these nodes in thenetwork do not need to know each other or trust each other, because they eachhave the ability to monitor and validate the chain for themselves. Think backto Wikipedia. It's a shared database, and even though it has multiple readersand multiple writers at the same time, it has one single truth. So we cancreate that using blockchains. We can create a decentralized database that hasthe same efficiency of a monopoly without actually creating that centralauthority. So all of these vendors, all sorts of companies, can interact usingthe same database without trusting one another. It means for consumers, we canhave a lot more transparency. As a real-world object travels along, we can seeits digital certificate or token move on the blockchain, adding value as itgoes. This is a whole new world in terms of our visibility.

利用区块链，我们可以在在陌生的个体之间创建一个共享的事实。我的意思是所有在这个网络里的的节点不需要互相认识，或者互相信任，因为他们都有能力自己来监控和确认生产链。回看一下维基百科。它是一个共享的数据库，即使它同时拥有很多不同的读者和不同作者，但是只有一个事实。我们可以利用区块链来创建类似的系统。我们可以创建一个分散的数据库，让它有跟垄断一样的效果，但不用真的创建中心管理机构。因此所有的供应商，所有类型的公司，不需要相互信任，都可以使用这个相同的数据库，对消费者来说，我们对产品就有了更多的透明度。当一个现实世界的东西寄出时，我们可以它的数字认证或者标记在区块链上变动随着它的移动而添加记录值。就我们的能见度而言，这是一个全新的世界。

So I've talked about how blockchains canlower our uncertainties about identity and how they change what we mean abouttransparency in long distances and complex trades, like in a supply chain. Thelast uncertainty that we often face is one of the most open-ended, and it'sreneging. What if you don't send me the smartphone? Can I get my money back?Blockchains allow us to write code, binding contracts, between individuals andthen guarantee that those contracts will bear out without a third partyenforcer. So if we look at the smartphone example, you could think aboutescrow. You are financing that phone, but you don't need to release the fundsuntil you can verify that all the conditions have been met. You got the phone.

现在我已经描述了区块链如何在身份认证方面降低不确定性以及如何改变供应链中长距离和复杂贸易中的透明度。最后我们经常遇到也是一个最难限制的“不确定性”是违约问题。如果你不给我寄手机怎么办？我能拿回我的钱吗？区块链让我们可以在个体之间，写代码建合约还担保在没有第三方介入的情况下这些合约就能履行。因此如果我们来看手机的例子，你可能会想到第三方托管。你花钱买这个手机，但你不必在尚未确认所有合同条件都符合并拿到手机前，把钱付给卖家。

I think this is one of the most excitingways that blockchains lower our uncertainties, because it means to some degreewe can collapse institutions and their enforcement. It means a lot of humaneconomic activity can get collateralized and automated, and push a lot of humanintervention to the edges, the places where information moves from the realworld to the blockchain.

我觉得这是区块链在降低不确定性方面最让人兴奋的地方。因为这意味着，在某种层面上，我们可以不再需要通过机构来保证交易执行了，意味着有更多的人类经济活动，可以自动地得到担保抵押，而将很多人为干扰因素局限在外边，信息从真实世界进入到区块链后就不再受干扰。

I think what would probably floor DouglassNorth about this use of technology is the fact that the very thing that makesit work, the very thing that keeps the blockchain secure and verified, is ourmutual distrust. So rather than all of our uncertainties slowing us down andrequiring institutions like banks, our governments, our corporations, we canactually harness all of that collective uncertainty and use it to collaborateand exchange more and faster and more open.

我觉得这个技术的使用，会让道格拉斯.诺斯感到冲击的是”区块链“技术真的办到了他说的事情。而让”区块链“保持安全和正确的恰恰就是我们彼此之间的不信任。因此我们不再需要让所有的不确定性拖慢我们的脚步，或是建立一些机构像银行，政府，公司，实际上我们可以驾驭这些所有的不确定性，并用它进行更多的合作和交换，而且更快更开放。

Now, I don't want you to get the impressionthat the blockchain is the solution to everything, even though the media hassaid that it's going to end world poverty, it's also going to solve thecounterfeit drug problem and potentially save the rainforest. The truth is,this technology is in its infancy, and we're going to need to see a lot ofexperiments take place and probably fail before we truly understand all of theuse cases for our economy. But there are tons of people working on this, fromfinancial institutions to technology companies, start-ups and universities. Andone of the reasons is that it's not just an economic evolution. It's also aninnovation in computer science.

现在，我不想你有这样一个印象以为区块链可以解决任何事情。虽然有媒体称它将消灭世界贫穷，将要解决毒品问题，还有拯救热带雨林的潜力。但事实是，这个技术还处于起步阶段，在我们真正理解所有”区域块“技术在经济上的应用案例之前，我们还需观察许多实验的结果，也有可能会失败。但是有很多人正在从事这方面的研究，从金融机构，到技术公司，新兴公司和学校。其中的一个原因就是这不仅仅是一个经济方面的演变，这也是计算机科学方面的创新。

Blockchains give us the technologicalcapability of creating a record of human exchange, of exchange of currency, ofall kinds of digital and physical assets, even of our own personal attributes,in a totally new way. So in some ways, they become a technological institutionthat has a lot of the benefits of the traditional institutions we're used tousing in society, but it does this in a decentralized way. It does this byconverting a lot of our uncertainties into certainties.

“区块链”提供我们一个技术能力使我们能够创建交易记录，货币交换的记录，各种数据和物质资产的记录，甚至是我们的个人属性记录，它用一个全新的方式进行记录。所以在某些方面来说，他们变成了一个技术机构，它拥有我们以往社会中用到的传统机构的很多优点。但它是通过一个分散的方式达成的。它将很多的不确定性转化为确定。

So I think we need to start preparingourselves, because we are about to face a world where distributed, autonomousinstitutions have quite a significant role.

所以我认为我们要开始准备了，因为我们即将面对这样一个世界，这个世界里，分散的、自主式的机构将扮演相当重要的角色。

Bruno Giussani: Thank you, Bettina. I thinkI understood that it's coming, it offers a lot of potential, and it's complex.What is your estimate for the rate of adoption?

BrunoGiussani:谢谢Bettina.我觉得我能理解”区块链“将要到来，它提供了很多潜在的机会，而且很复杂。你预计”区域块“的采用率会是怎样呢？

Bettina Warburg: I think that's a reallygood question. My lab is pretty much focused on going the enterprise andgovernment route first, because in reality, blockchain is a complex technology.How many of you actually understand how the internet works? But you use itevery day, so I think we're sort of facing the same John Sculley idea oftechnology should either be invisible or beautiful, and blockchain is kind ofneither of those things right now, so it's better suited for either reallyearly adopters who kind of get it and can tinker around or for finding thosebest use cases like identity or asset tracking or smart contracts that can beused at that level of an enterprise or government.

BettinaWarburg:这是个好问题。我的实验大部分先从企业和政府方面入手，因为在现实中，区块链是个很复杂的技术，在座有多少人是真正理解因特网的运作呢？但是你们每天都在使用，所以我觉得我们在面对約翰．史考利（前苹果公司执行官）所说的情况，科技要么最好让人看不到要么让人觉得很美，而区块链目前两样都不具备。所以它更适合于早期使用者这种人既能接受它，也能修改它，或者用来从中找到最佳使用情景，比如企业或政府层级的用户可以用来做身份证明、资产追踪，或者智能合同。

BG: Thank you. Thanks for coming to TED.

BG:谢谢，谢谢你来到TED

BW: Thanks.(Applause)

BW:谢谢(掌声）

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