比特幣最初的承諾——比傳統銀行更高效、更容易使用、成本低、直接和匿名——結果證明是錯誤的。當然，人們仍然可以用它來買毒品，但沒那么容易了。

Bitcoin Is Falling Out of Favor on the Dark Web

比特幣在暗網上失寵了

翻譯：飛雪似煬花 轉自龍騰網

Steep transaction fees and wild price fluctuations have made the cryptocurrency harder to use in the illicit markets that originally made it famous.

高昂的交易費用和劇烈的價格波動使得比特幣這一加密貨幣在黑市更加難以使用，而這也曾是它一舉成名的原因。

Of all of bitcoin’s uses—as a currency, a payment system, an investment, a commodity, a technology, a remittance network, a market hedge—perhaps its most notorious is as a facilitator of online drug transactions. For years now, the cryptocurrency has allowed anonymous purchasers to pay anonymous vendors on eBay-like markets, avoiding the use of the formal financial system and thus the easy intervention of the federal authorities.

在比特幣的所有用途中——如貨幣、支付系統、投資、商品、技術、匯款、市場對沖——或許最臭名昭著的是作為在線毒品交易的推動者。多年來，這種加密貨幣允許匿名買家在類似ebay這樣的市場上支付給匿名賣家，避免使用正式的金融系統，從而方便聯邦政府的干預。

“Making small talk with your pot dealer sucks. Buying cocaine can get you shot. What if you could buy and sell drugs online like books or light bulbs? Now you can: Welcome to Silk Road,” the journalist Adrian Chen wrote in?an exposé?for Gawker on the now-defunct market, back in 2011. At the time, Chen called it “the most complete implementation of the bitcoin vision” of freewheeling, anarcho-libertarian anonymity.

“和大麻販子閑聊很糟糕、危險，買可卡因更可能會讓你被槍斃。如果你可以像購買書籍或燈泡一樣在網上買賣毒品呢？現在就可以：歡迎來到絲路（購物網站）”記者阿德里安·陳(Adrian Chen)在2011年為Gawker網撰寫的一篇關于現已停業市場的文章中指出了這些問題。當時，阿德里安·陳稱其為“比特幣愿景中最完美的實施”，這是一種隨心所欲、無政府自由主義、匿名化的狀態。

Seven years later, though, problems with using bitcoin on the dark web—a kind of?mirror internet?that uses encryption to ensure its participants’ privacy and features websites that are not accessible?from standard browsers—have piled up. Purchasers and vendors are cancelling orders, losing money, and fleeing to other forms of cryptocurrency. Bitcoin remains in wide use for drugs and other illegal goods, but the shadowy markets that made it famous, and infamous, are turning on it.

然而，七年后，在暗網上使用比特幣的問題——一種使用加密技術來確保參與者隱私的互聯網，以及那些無法用標準瀏覽器訪問的網站——已經堆積如山。買家和賣家都在取消訂單，虧錢，并轉向其他形式的加密貨幣。比特幣仍然廣泛用于毒品和其他非法商品，但是那些讓它聲名鵲起同時又臭名昭著的地下市場，還是正在開啟它。

The first issue lies in the extreme volatility of the price of bitcoin. The cryptocurrency has, since its?very earliest days, been a highly unstable one, its price surging and collapsing much like that of a penny stock. Even so, the past year has proven unusually volatile, with dramatic day-to-day and even?minute-to-minute?swings and plunges. Investors crowding into the cryptocurrency—including those putting bitcoin on?their credit cards, or taking out equity loans on their houses to buy it—and regulatory interest from governments around the world have helped to?drive those fluctuations. And the currency’s short-term volatility has been matched by some longer-term volatility too: The currency’s value?surged 1,300 percent?last year, and it has fallen by more than half of late.

第一個問題在于比特幣的價格波動十分劇烈，這種加密貨幣自早期誕生以來就一直是極不穩定的，它的價格暴漲暴跌，就像那些低價股一樣。即便如此，過去一年的波動仍然異常劇烈，每一天，甚至每分鐘都有劇烈波動。涌入比特幣的投資者——包括那些把比特幣放在信用卡上的人，或者抵押房子拿貸款來購買比特幣的人——來自世界各國政府的監管利益幫助推動了這些價格波動。貨幣的短期波動也與一些較長期的波動相匹配：去年貨幣的價值飆升了1300%，但它的跌幅也已經超過了一半。

For Wall Street–type investors seeking to buy and hold bitcoin or risk-happy prospectors looking to make a quick buck, such price swings are generally a feature, not a bug. Nor are they problematic for many the many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs interested in the blockchain technology underpinning the currency. But this kind of volatility is a headache for participants in marketplaces with transactions denominated in bitcoin. That means the darknet markets, which have continued to crop up and collapse since the federal authorities?seizedSilk Road in 2013.

對于華爾街類型的投資者來說，他們想要購買并持有比特幣，還有對于那些想要快速賺錢的風險投資者來說，這樣的價格波動通常是比特幣的一種特色，而并非缺陷。許多硅谷企業家對于依賴區塊鏈技術的基礎貨幣十分感興趣，這對于他們來說也不是什么問題，但這種波動對于比特幣交易市場的參與者來說是一件十分令人頭痛的事，這意味著暗網市場自2013年聯邦政府接管絲路以來，一直在不斷地發生錯誤和崩潰。

On those markets, the price of drugs and other illicit and licit goods are fundamentally pegged to dollars or euros, not bitcoin. Buyers think in terms of traditional currencies, in other words: An eighth of an ounce of marijuana is worth $$25, not a minuscule fraction of a bitcoin. And vendors think in the same terms, often purchasing wholesale goods with dollars or other government-issued currencies, or seeking to sell their wares for cash in person. As such, “the price of a bitcoin does not matter,” Nicolas Christin, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University and an expert on the darknet markets, told me. “But that it is stable matters.”

在這些市場上，毒品和其他非法、合法商品的價格基本與美元或歐元掛鉤，而非比特幣。買家在市場上是用傳統貨幣來交易的，換句話說：1/8盎司的大麻價值25美元，而不是比特幣去換算。銷售商也是用同樣的方式來進行交易，通常以美元或其他政府發行的貨幣來批發商品，或以個人付現金的方式出售他們的商品。因此，卡內基梅隆大學的計算機科學家、暗網市場專家尼古拉斯克里斯廷告訴我“比特幣的價格并不是重點，它的穩定性才是問題關鍵。”

To understand why, it helps to know a bit more about the mechanics of buying drugs on the dark web. A purchaser buys bitcoin, reviews vendors’ offers on a marketplace, and then pays for his goods. His money generally goes into escrow before it is released to his vendor. This introduces a number of financial choke points and transaction delays: between when the purchaser procures bitcoin and makes a purchase, when the vendor receives the order and receives payment from escrow, and when the vendor cashes out from the marketplace. Those are all moments when bitcoin’s volatility becomes problematic. For vendors, price drops while payments are in escrow might wipe out all the profits from a sale, for instance.

要理解這一點，需要了解一下在暗網上購買毒品的流程。買家首先購買比特幣，查看商家的出價，然后用比特幣支付他的商品。在錢款打到賣家賬戶之前，這些錢會先放到第三方機構托管。這就造成了金融監管和交易延遲的問題：買家購買了比特幣并進行交易，賣家接受訂單并同意第三方支付的錢款，可是當賣家要從市場中取出現金的時候，這些時間點都是比特幣的波動不確定的時刻。對于賣家來說，比特幣的價格下降，則會抵消掉他們暫存在第三方機構錢款的利潤。

Complaints about these kinds of scenarios are rife in popular forums where buyers and vendors chat online, including on Reddit. “Seems I hear Vendors are sitting on the sidelines. If payment is in [bitcoin and] then [the] price falls all their work is for nigh,”?one user?recently posted, worrying that fewer vendors were selling given the market dynamics at work. Another?complained, “Seriously?! I purchased coins this morning at like $$675 and within 1.5 hours it dropped down to $$625.”

在各類買家和賣家用以在網上聊天的知名論壇——包括Reddit——上，人們普遍在抱怨這種情況。“看起來這些賣家實在是無能為力，如果買家用比特幣支付，然后比特幣價格下跌，那么所有的工作的白費了”這是一名用戶最近發帖的內容。他擔心，鑒于市場的狀態，越來越少的賣家會在市場上進行銷售。另一個則抱怨“真的嗎? !今天早上我花了675美元買了一枚硬幣，然后在1.5小時內，它就降到了625美元。”

Of course, licit markets have the exact same vulnerability to swings in the price of bitcoin. But those markets—with their deep-pocketed investors and ties to the formal financial system—have come up with ways to avoid them. “Merchants who want to avoid volatility will still accept bitcoin or cryptocurrency, and can use a service provider that automatically converts it,” Jerry Brito, the executive director of Coin Center, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization for cryptocurrencies, told me. “That service provider accepts bitcoin on their behalf, automatically converts it, and deposits dollars into the merchant’s account. That way they never face the volatility.”

當然，合法市場也同樣容易受到比特幣價格波動的影響，但這些市場——有財力雄厚的投資者和正規的金融體系——已經找到了規避風險的方法。“商家雖然想要避免貨幣波動，但仍會接受比特幣或加密貨幣來支付，并且讓服務提供商來進行貨幣自動轉換” 。 Coin Center（加密數字貨幣的非營利研究和宣傳中心）的執行董事杰里布里托告訴我“這個服務商接受比特幣，并且能自動轉換，將美元存入商家的賬戶，這樣商家就不會面對比特幣劇烈的波動。”

But such businesses want nothing to do with illegal markets, meaning that marketplaces, vendors, and buyers have few if any ways to hedge. Some drug dealers urge their customers to “finalize early,” letting their payments out of escrow before they receive their goods. And some marketplaces have built in their own mechanisms to help manage volatility. Indeed, the original Silk Road provided a kind of insurance system against volatile cryptocurrency prices. “Ross Ulbricht was a very smart young man who got into a line of work he should not have been involved in,” said Christin, referring to the creator of Silk Road, who was arrested in 2013 and is now serving a life sentence. “He had very clever ideas, like this hedging system that exists in banks.” But other markets do not have the technological wherewithal to do so, or the willingness to absorb any volatility risk from their customers and vendors. As a result, many vendors cancel orders, or requests that their buyers cancel orders, to manage the swings.

但這些企業不希望與非法市場有任何關系，這意味著市場、銷售商和買家幾乎沒有辦法對沖。一些毒販提醒他們的顧客“提前完成交易”，在收到貨物之前就付完款。某些市場已經建立了一套自己的機制來幫助控制貨幣的波動性，實際上，早期絲路網站針對不穩定的加密貨幣價格提供了一系列的保險制度。克里斯汀說，“羅斯·烏布里希特是一個非常聰明的年輕人，他從事了一項他不應該參與的工作”，他指的是絲路的締造者，他于2013年被捕，現在正服無期徒刑。“他非常聰明有想法，就像銀行里的對沖系統一樣”。但其他市場沒有這樣的技術資金，也沒有愿意承擔任何波動風險的買家和商家。因此，許多商家取消訂單，或要求買家取消訂單，以控制波動的風險。

It is worth noting that volatility has proven less of a problem when the price of bitcoin was shooting up, as buyers and vendors holding bitcoin found their currency worth more and more. (Indeed, in forum posts, some vendors note that they have made more money holding bitcoin than selling drugs.) But a crash in the price of bitcoin gives vendors far less of an incentive to do business on the darknet markets. “Volatility upwards is, of course, largely a good thing for [the darknet markets], as they produce a wealth effect,” wrote Gwern Branwen, a cryptocurrency researcher who?goes by a pseudonym, in an email. Branwen added, “The really bad thing is when prices crash. This sets up an ugly dynamic for sellers: typically you still have to pay your expenses and your supplier in a fiat, so do you continue shipping out orders pre-paid with bitcoins which are now worth a lot less and may well incur a loss?” ?

值得注意的是，當比特幣價格飆升，買家和賣家發現手中持有的比特幣的價值越來越高時，波動性就不是個問題。(事實上，在論壇帖子中，一些賣家指出，他們持有比特幣賺的錢比賣毒品的錢要多) 。但是，比特幣價格暴跌時，讓賣家在黑市上做生意的意愿大大降低。加密貨幣研究員格溫·布蘭文用筆名回復郵件稱“波動性上升當然對（暗網市場）來說是一件好事，因為它們產生了財富效應”。他接著補充，“真正糟糕的是價格崩盤，這讓賣家很難做：一般情況下，你仍然需要給商家支付費用，在價值更低，甚至很可能會導致損失的時候，你是否繼續用比特幣支付預付款呢?”

The second reason bitcoin is falling out of favor on the dark web has to do with the sudden increase in the cost of transacting in bitcoin. Here, again, it helps to get into the technical details for a moment. All bitcoin transactions are kept in a decentralized and public ledger. When someone makes a transaction with bitcoin, miners in the network solve cryptographic puzzles to verify and log it—and get paid a small fee in bitcoin to do so. That has given the cryptocurrency ascaling problem: As demand for transactions has gone up, the price to transact has gone up. Indeed, the price of a bitcoin transaction recently?spiked as high?as $$55.

比特幣在暗網中失寵的第二個原因與比特幣交易成本的突然增加有關。在此，說明一下技術細節，所有比特幣的交易都被保留在一個分散和公共的賬目上，當有人用比特幣進行交易時，網絡礦工們破解密碼用以驗證和記錄信息——并獲得一筆小額比特幣的費用。這給加密貨幣的收費帶來問題:隨著對交易需求的上升，交易價格也隨之上升。事實上，比特幣交易的價格最近飆升到55美元了。

That might not be a problem for an investor. But for someone who’s just looking for some weed? “If you look at the average transaction on cryptomarkets, half of transactions are something like $$30 or $$50,” said David Décary-Hétu, a professor of criminology at the Université de Montréal. “It makes no sense to pay a commission of $$35 for $$50 of drugs.” Such transaction fees become especially problematic for anyone trying to make many smaller bitcoin transactions in order to avoid the attention of the authorities—such as drug dealers. ?

這對投資者來說不是問題，但是對于一個正在尋找毒品的人來說呢?蒙特利爾大學的犯罪學教授大衛?德-赫圖表示:“你看一下加密貨幣市場的平均交易，大約一半的交易是30美元或50美元，花35美元購買50美元的毒品是毫無意義的”。對于任何想要進行小額比特幣交易的人來說，這個交易費都是一個問題，因為他們想要避開官方的注意——比如毒販。

Bitcoin’s fees and transaction delays have also pushed darknet market participants away from the cryptocurrency. “Which markets would YOU recommend, now that the bitcoin literally became unusable in low amounts?” one Reddit?forum poster?asked. “How should one adapt to this? The fees got enormous, the sites I use to buy [bitcoin] set their minimum amount you can buy up to 500.” Another commenter stepped in to advise the user, recommending a rival cryptocurrency: “Monero appears to be the way forward, at least for now: as you said, bitcoin is currently unusable for smaller transactions.”

比特幣的費用和交易延遲也讓這些暗網消費者遠離了加密貨幣。Reddit論壇一個帖子問道“你會推薦哪個市場？現在，比特幣實際上已經無法使用了”。“我們該如何適應這種情況呢?比特幣的交易費是巨大，我用來購買比特幣的網站設置了最低購買金額，你最多可以購買500歐元。”另一位評論者回帖向用戶建議，推薦競爭對手的加密貨幣:“門羅幣似乎是以后的發展方向，至少現在是這樣，正如你所說，比特幣目前對較小的交易無法使用。”

Another posting reads: “I think [it is] officially time to step away from [bitcoin], at least for the time being. Went to do a direct deal today with a vendor, realized my $$250 purchase would end up costing me $$315 or so with fees and would still take probably 24 hours to get to him,” a Reddit?user wrote. “As of this morning the lowest electrum fee was approx $$32 to send coin.... and people reporting at the highest level still not having coin move 12-16 hours later.”

另一篇帖子寫道:“我認為(現在)是時候遠離比特幣了，至少目前是這樣。”一位Reddit用戶的帖子中寫道:“今天，我和一個賣家進行了直接銷售，最終的250美元的價格購買。否則，用比特幣交易的話，含手續費大約需要花315美元，而且可能還需要24小時才能到達他的手中”。帖子中說“今天早上銀金礦費用最低是32美元左右兌換比特幣....而在12-16小時后比特幣依然沒有達到峰值。

A third issue has to do with anonymity—or really, a lack of it—as law-enforcement and regulatory agencies have become more interested in and sophisticated about monitoring cryptocurrencies. Though bitcoin initially promised completely anonymous transactions, the public nature of the blockchain system in fact has always meant that savvy observers could amass huge amounts of information on bitcoin users, identifying the addresses of popular darknet markets and making money-laundering more onerous. “It’s pretty well established at this point that bitcoin is not anonymous, and it is traceable,” said Sarah Meiklejohn, a cryptography expert at University College London. “If you are buying drugs, using bitcoin is not the best bet.”

第三個問題與匿名有關——或者說，缺乏監管——因為執法部門和監管機構對監管加密貨幣越來越感興趣，也越來越富有經驗。盡管比特幣最初承諾完全匿名交易，但區塊鏈系統的共享本質實際上意味著，懂行的人可以積累大量比特幣用戶的信息，鑒別當下流行的暗網市場網址，并讓洗錢變得更加麻煩。倫敦大學學院的密碼學專家薩拉 米爾克約翰說 “在這一點上，比特幣已經非常成熟，比特幣不是匿名的，它是可以追蹤的。如果你正在購買毒品，使用比特幣不是最好的選擇。”

Other coins offer?more privacy, and people who use darknet markets are moving to options like Ether and Monero. “Alex Cazes is dead because he believed bitcoin mixers obfuscated his money trail,” one forum poster said, referring to the founder of the now-defunct market AlphaBay and “mixers” that would supposedly hide his illicit bitcoin transactions. “My advice. Convert your bitcoins into Monero.” Another?argued: “While many of us have benefited from the surge in BTC price, it’s time we left it in the past and move on to something safer and more efficient. The wave starts with getting vendors and markets on board. While making an order I urge you to ask your vendor if they have considered switching to Monero (or alternative). If more customers want to pay with Monero, vendors and markets will want to switch to where customers have money.”

其他貨幣提供了更多的隱私，暗網市場的人們也正在轉向選擇像以太幣和門羅幣這樣的貨幣。“亞歷克斯?卡澤斯已經垮掉了，因為他堅信比特幣混合器，從而破壞了他的資金鏈，我的建議是把你的比特幣兌換成門羅幣”。一位論壇發帖人說，他指的是現已不存在的暗網市場AlphaBay和暗網混合器的創始人，這個人可能會隱藏他的非法比特幣交易。另一個回帖人則認為:“雖然我們中的許多人都受益于比特幣價格的飆升，但現在是我們拋棄過去，轉向更安全、更高效的時候了。揮手過去，開始讓供應商和市場也參與進來。在交易的時候，我強烈建議你問問你的供應商是否考慮換成門羅幣(或其他選擇)。如果有更多的客戶想要使用門羅幣付款，供應商和市場就會想要換到客戶方便支付的場景。

Even with these three factors, bitcoin still remains the common currency of the dark web. Given the difficulty of purchasing drugs and the lucrative nature of selling them, people are willing to put up with high transaction costs. Moreover, market participants have many other prent risks to worry about, and transaction difficulties to deal with: the threat of law enforcement running a market?as a honeypot?to catch dealers and purchasers; the threat of vendors stealing their customers’ bitcoin and suddenly disappearing; whole marketplacesscamming their vendors?and customers; the question of how?to launder?huge amounts of money converted from bitcoin. “If you want heroin, you might be willing to pay a fee, or take these risks,” said Décary-Hétu.

即使存在著這三個因素，比特幣仍然是暗網的共同貨幣。考慮到購買毒品的困難和銷售這些毒品的利潤豐厚，人們還是愿意承擔高額的交易費用。此外，參與者們還存在許多其他常見的風險以及難以處理的交易問題：比如執法的威脅，它將市場作為一個誘餌來抓捕經銷商和購買者；供應商竊取客戶的比特幣并突然消失的威脅；整個市場都在欺騙他們的供應商和客戶的威脅；如何從比特幣兌換大量資金的問題。“如果你想要海洛因，你可能愿意支付一筆費用，或者承擔這些風險，” Décary-Hétu說道。

Plus, they have few alternatives—unlike participants in licit markets, whose advantages bitcoin-denominated markets throw into sharp relief. The dollar and euro are stable, with prices shifting just a few percent per year. Online payment systems are cheap and reliable, with credit cards charging just a few percentage points to process a near-instantaneous transaction. Contemporary financial markets are rich marvels, offering hedges, insurance, security guarantees, and a seemingly infinite variety of other products to make buying goods and doing business easy.

此外，他們幾乎沒有其他選擇——不像合法市場的參與者，他們的優勢被比特幣計價的市場迅速消解。美元和歐元是穩定的，每年的價格變動僅為幾個百分點。在線支付系統便宜可靠，信用卡只需支付幾個百分點就能處理近乎即時的交易。當代金融市場是一個財富的奇跡，它提供對沖、保險、安全保障，以及看似無窮無盡的其他產品，從而使購買商品和做生意變得容易。

Not so with bitcoin. Its original promise—to be more efficient, easy to use, low-cost, immediate, and anonymous than traditional banking—has turned out to be false. One can still use it to buy drugs, of course. But not so easily.

比特幣的情況并非如此，它最初的承諾——比傳統銀行更高效、更容易使用、成本低、直接和匿名——結果證明是錯誤的。當然，人們仍然可以用它來買毒品，但沒那么容易了。