About the Author

Saifedean Ammous is a Professor of Economics at the Lebanese American University and member of the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University. He holds a PhD in Sustainable Development from Columbia University.

关于作者：

Saifedean Ammous 他是一个经济学教授，在黎巴嫩贝鲁特的私立大学和资本主义中心成员和哥伦比亚大学学会。他拥有哥伦比亚大学可持续发展博士学位。

Foreword

前言

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Let us follow the logic of things from the beginning. Or, rather, from the end: modern times. We are, as I am writing these lines, witnessing a complete riot against some class of experts, in domains that are too difficult for us to understand, such as macroeconomic reality, and in which not only is the expert not an expert, but he doesn't know it. That previous Federal Reserve bosses Greenspan and Bernanke, had little grasp of empirical reality is something we only discovered too late: one can macroBS longer than microBS(1), which is why we need to be careful of whom to endow with centralized macro decisions.

让我们从一开始跟着事情的逻辑。或者更确切地说，从最后开始：现代史。在我写这几行字的时候，我们正在目睹一场彻底的暴乱来反对一些经典专家，在我们难以理解的领域，比如宏观经济的存在，在这里专家并不是专家，但他并不知道。在之前美联储主席格林斯潘和伯南克，对经验现实知之甚少是我们发现得太晚：可以宏观BS更长于微观BS，这就是为什么我们需要重视中央宏观决策的人。

(1)While the book is about the Bitcoin Standard the phrase tells the tail of the details beneath the marketing.

The realization that they come to is that BS refers to Bovus Excretus or Bull Sh*t. The idiom of BS-ing is to talk, speak at length and basically bloviate all with the end value of said excrement, that is, none at all.

I understand the meanings of these macroBS and microBS in the Bitcoin world. But here the delineation between macroBS and microBS is between talking in large, grand terms devoid of detail vs. talking in micro, smaller terms where the lack of detail is eventually, if only too late, apparent.

"And dull surprise when payment due exceeds accounts received."

(1)虽然这本书是关于比特币标准的，但这句话却道出了营销背后的细节。

他们意识到，BS 指的是 Bovus Excretus 或 Bull Sh*t。BS-ing 这个成语的意思是滔滔不绝，长篇大论，基本上是胡说八道，其最终价值就像粪便一样，根本没有价值。

在比特币世界中，我理解这些宏观BS和微观BS的含义。但在这里，宏观BS和微观BS的区别在于，大而化之，缺乏细节；微而化之，缺乏细节。

"当应收账款超过实收账款时，我们会感到惊讶"

What makes it worse is that all central banks operated under the same model, making it a perfect monoculture.

更糟糕的是，所有中央银行都按照同样的模式运作，使其成为一种完美的单一文化。

In complex domains, expertise doesn't concentrate: under organic reality, things work in a distributed way, as F. A. Hayek has convincingly demonstrated. But Hayek used the notion of distributed knowledge. Well, it looks like we do not even need the “knowledge” part for things to work well. Nor do we need individual rationality. All we need is structure.

It doesn't mean all participants have a democratic share in decisions. One motivated participant can disproportionately move the needle (what I have studied as the asymmetry of the minority rule). But every participant has the option to be that player.

Somehow, under scale transformation, a miraculous effect emerges: rational markets do not require any individual trader to be rational. In fact they work well under zero intelligence—a zero‐intelligence crowd, under the right design, works better than a Soviet‐style management composed of maximally intelligent humans.

Which is why Bitcoin is an excellent idea. It fulfills the needs of the complex system, not because it is a cryptocurrency, but precisely because it has no owner, no authority that can decide on its fate. It is owned by the crowd, its users. And it now has a track record of several years, enough for it to be an animal in its own right.

For other cryptocurrencies to compete, they need to have such a Hayekian property.

Bitcoin is a currency without a government. But, one may ask, didn't we have gold, silver, and other metals, another class of currencies without a government? Not quite. When you trade gold, you trade “loco” Hong Kong and end up receiving a claim on a stock there, which you might need to move to New Jersey. Banks control the custodian game and governments control banks (or, rather, bankers and government officials are, to be polite, tight together). So Bitcoin has a huge advantage over gold in transactions: clearance does not require a specific custodian. No government can control what code you have in your head.

Finally, Bitcoin will go through hiccups. It may fail; but then it will be easily reinvented as we now know how it works. In its present state, it may not be convenient for transactions, not good enough to buy your decaffeinated espresso macchiato at your local virtue‐signaling coffee chain. It may be too volatile to be a currency for now. But it is the first organic currency.

But its mere existence is an insurance policy that will remind governments that the last object the establishment could control, namely, the currency, is no longer their monopoly. This gives us, the crowd, an insurance policy against an Orwellian future.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb January 22, 2018