How Fit Is Bitcoin?
比特币是否有优势？
A new analysis treats bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies as species in an evolutionary model—and finds bitcoin has no selective advantage. Christopher Intagliata reports.
一项最新研究将比特币和其他电子货币视作经济学演化模型中的一员，发现比特币在电子货币中并没有选择上的优势。
撰文\播音：克里斯托弗·因塔利亚塔（Christopher Intagliata）
翻译 Ada
审校 潘磊
There are now more than 16 million bitcoins in circulation, with a total market cap of 130 billion dollars—more than the market value of Netflix, Priceline or Starbucks. Just going by numbers, bitcoin is the one coin to rule them all.
如今有超过一千六百万比特币在流通，其市值更是达到了一千三百亿美元——远超Netflix、Priceline和星巴克。单从数字上看，比特币可以说是群龙之首。
But if you consider the spectrum of 600 actively traded cryptocoins as a financial ecosystem…you can take an evolutionary approach, and ask: which is the 'fittest' of the coins?
但是如果把现有600多种频繁交易的电子货币当作一个经济生态系统……利用经济演化的方法，就会有一个问题：哪一种才是最有优势的货币？
Or, in other words: "Every cryptocurrency, bitcoin, ethereum there are many…are a different species." Andrea Baronchelli, a network scientist at City, University of London.
或者换句话说：“每一种电子货币，比特币、以太币，数量都非常大……它们是不同的种类。” 来自伦敦城市大学的网络科学家安德里亚 巴龙凯利。
He and his team used evolutionary models to approximate the real-world behavior of cryptocurrencies. Each week of currency trading was treated as a new generation of progeny. Reporting their results in the journal Royal Society Open Science, they found that a so-called 'neutral' model of evolution best explained coin behavior…meaning no coin had a selective advantage. [Abeer ElBahrawy et al., Evolutionary dynamics of the cryptocurrency market]
他和他的团队采用演化模型来模拟电子货币在现实世界的表现。每周的货币交易都被视作一次更新换代。接着，他们发现有一种所谓的“中立”模型最适合于解释这些货币表现……这个结果意味着，这些没有一种电子货币有选择上的优势。
Which implies that: "Investors choose which cryptocurrencies to invest in only proportional to the cryptocurrency's market share, and nothing else. So they are not apparently considering other fundamentals like the underlying technology or the purpose for which a certain cryptocurrency has been designed for. They are just sampling the market, sampling each cryptocurrency proportional to its market share."
这项研究成果说明：“投资者会选择哪一种货币和它占有的市场份额正相关。所以他们不会考虑其他的因素，比如这种货币所包含的技术或者货币被创造的目的。投资者们其实是在选择市场，从而选择每种与市场份额成比例的货币。”
And only when investors begin to value coins for a particular attribute—such as their convenience or their intrinsic technological advantages—will the market start to actively pick winners.
只有当投资者开始明白这些为特定属性而生的货币的价值——比如说它们的便捷或者是其固有的科技优势——市场才能开始在其中选出优胜者。
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