科学美国人60秒 比特币有多流行（在线收听）

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.

现在流通的比特币有1600多万，总共市场价值超过1300亿美元——这比Netflix、Priceline和星巴克的市场价都要高。只从数量来说，比特币可以控制所有的货币。

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，你把600个活跃的货币作为一个金融系统来说……你可以采取循序渐进的办法，然后询问：哪一种货币最合适呢?

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.

换句话说，“每一个加密货币，比特币，以太坊，都有很多……是一个不同的品种。”Andrea Baronchelli，是伦敦大学的网络科学家。

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.

他和团队使用进化模型来模拟真实世界的密码货币。每一周的货币交易都被看做新一代的衍生品。该研究结果发表在《皇家学会开放科学》杂志上。他们发现，所谓的“中性”进化模型最好解释了硬币的行为，也就是说，没有一枚硬币有选择性的优势。

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."

这意味着“投资者选择与市场份额成正比的加密货币投资，没有考虑其他因素。所以，他们似乎并没有考虑其他的基本面因素，比如基础技术，或者某个加密货币的目的是什么。只是对市场进行采样，对每一种加密货币的市场份额进行抽样。

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.

只有当投资者开始以某种特定的属性——比如货币的便利性或其内在的技术优势——来评估硬币时，市场才会开始积极地挑选赢家。