比特幣融合金融業的難題

The business of securities settlement ought to look like a club night with Pete Tong. Just as the DJ and electronic music pioneer stands before a crowd effortlessly manipulating gigabytes of music from a single iPad, the back offices of the world’s financial institutions are supposed to allow traders to switch in and out of trillions of dollars worth of assets without skipping a beat.

證券結算業務應該像在俱樂部裏度過一個有皮特•唐(Pete Tong)陪伴的夜晚那樣。這位DJ和電子音樂先驅會站在觀衆面前，僅用一臺iPad毫不費力地操縱海量的音樂，同樣的，全球金融機構的後臺原本也應讓交易員能夠一拍不漏地買入和賣出價值數萬億美元的資產。

In reality, their performance looks more like Rick Wakeman, the keyboardist from the 1970s prog rock band Yes, who would frantically wave his wizard-robed arms as he yanked cables out of a dozen incompatible boxes.

然而，在現實中，他們的表現看起來更像是上世紀70年代前衛搖滾樂隊Yes的鍵盤手裏克•韋克曼(Rick Wakeman)，後者將會穿着巫師袍，瘋狂地揮舞着袖子從12個不兼容的樂器盒裏抽線。

Harmonising the ledgers of the world’s banks requires scarcely less skill and energy. Records of trades have to be compiled and entered into those systems from the phone calls, emails and post-lunch handshakes that constitute the original bargains. Reconciling those trades and ensuring that all parties have the same records is a painstaking business. Electronic trade confirmations help, especially for standardised products, but in many markets paper tickets are still the norm.

協調全球各銀行的賬目需要的技巧和精力一點也不比那少。最初通過電話、電子郵件或是在午餐上談成的交易，必須記錄、彙總並錄入那些系統。整理那些交易並確保各方的交易記錄相同是個麻煩差事。電子交易確認不無用處，尤其是對標準化產品而言，但在許多市場上，紙質單據仍是主流。

Not all failures are as spectacular as those which culminated with Kweku Adoboli of UBS being found with up to $2bn of losses on unconfirmed deal tickets in his desk drawer. But mistakes slip through the net all the time, and cost money when they do. In the US Treasury market alone, about $50bn of trades “fail” every business day, incurring a charge equivalent to 3 per cent interest a year on the delinquent balances. Including private sector markets, the total volume of fails is likely to be in the hundreds of billions.

並非所有錯誤都那麼讓人目瞪口呆，不過瑞銀(UBS)的奎庫•阿多博利(Kweku Adoboli)的那次錯誤算是登峯造極了——別人在他辦公桌抽屜裏發現了一堆未確認的交易單據，導致了20億美元的損失。不過，漏網之“誤”總是會有，一旦發生就會造成損失。僅在美國國債市場，每個交易日就有大約500億美元的交易“出錯”，造成的費用相當於一年對未償債務收取3%的利息。包括私人部門市場在內，錯誤總規模可能以數千億計算。

In the world of stadium rock, the problem of standardisation was solved long ago. You do not see Radiohead’s Thom Yorke posing in front of a huge stack of electronics resembling a telephone exchange, because in 1983 the makers of synthesisers and keyboards agreed on a common standard that lets you plug one into another without an impressive work of amateur electronics.

在舞臺搖滾(stadium rock)的世界裏，標準化問題早已解決。你不會看到“電臺司令”(Radiohead)的湯姆•約克(Thom Yorke)站在像電話交換機一樣的一大堆電子樂器前，因爲在1983年，合成器和鍵盤的製造商達成了統一標準協議，這讓樂手們不用成爲半個電子專家也能連接好線纜。

Financiers may not have noticed, but a technology has been invented that would solve their compatibility problem, too. Its name is bitcoin, although it could probably do with a new one; a whiff of sulphur still clings to cryptographic currencies because of their historical association with anarchists and the customers of the Silk Road online narcotics emporium. Richard Gendal of IBM has suggested that the underlying system should be called “shared ledger technology” instead.

金融業人士可能沒有注意到，但能夠解決兼容性問題的技術也已經發明出來。它的名字是比特幣，不過它八成也不反對有個新名字；祕鑰貨幣仍然帶有一點火藥味，因爲它們過去與無政府主義者有些牽連，銷售麻醉品的在線商城“絲綢之路”的用戶也曾使用這種貨幣進行交易。IBM的理查德•根達爾(Richard Gendal)表示，這種基礎系統應改名爲“共享賬目技術”。

So far as legitimate finance is concerned, the utility of this technology has little to do with its supposed ability to make transactions untraceable — a feature, if that is what it is, which can easily be switched off. It has everything to do with the “blockchain”, a public record of transactions that is updated whenever one person sends payment in bitcoins to another. Every bitcoin user can consult this shared ledger, and any copy is as good as another; there is no uniquely authoritative source. Clever encryption keeps the copies in sync, by making it easy to tell whether one of them has been doctored.

這種技術對合法金融的功用，無關乎其所謂讓交易無法追蹤的能力——這一功能（如果能叫做功能的話）可輕易關閉。其功用與“區塊鏈”(blockchain)密切相關——區塊鏈是一種公開的交易記錄，每當有一人向另一人支付比特幣時，這個記錄就會更新。每位比特幣使用者都可以查閱這個共享賬本，所有拷貝都一樣可靠；沒有任何獨特的權威來源。聰明的加密算法可以讓識別某個拷貝是否遭到了篡改變得容易，從而讓所有拷貝保持同步。

This is exactly what securities settlement needs: a way of recording every transaction once, sharing that record between the counterparties in exactly the same form, and updating in an agreed and standardised manner. It provides an easy way to set up the settlement systems for new or customised products.

這正是證券結算所需要的：一種記錄每筆交易的方式，在交易方之間以完全相同的形式分享該記錄，然後以協商一致的標準化方式更新。它爲新的或者定製產品提供了一種創建結算系統的簡便方法。

It also automatically creates a full, agreed record of transactions, which would assist risk management and compliance functions hugely. And, with such a system in place, it should be straightforward to ensure that netting opportunities are never missed; if one trader sells units in an exchange traded fund and a colleague buys units in the same fund, their institution need not transact with any external parties.

它也會自動創建一份全面而得到一致認可的交易記錄，這將極大地有助於風險管理和合規職能。而有了這樣一個系統，確保軋差機會從不會被錯過應該會變得輕而易舉。如果一名交易員賣出了一支交易所交易基金(ETF)的一些份額，而他（她）的同事買入了同樣的一支基金，則他們所屬的那家金融機構無需與任何外部交易方交易。

There is the potential for cost savings that go well beyond eliminating mistakes. Back-office employees earn salaries into six figures for reconciling settlements and confirming trades by hand. (One of the shameful secrets of financial services is how many people do jobs that could be made obsolete by a small computer program for pasting data from one window into another.)

這種技術有可能節約的成本將遠不僅限於消除出錯機會。後臺員工拿着6位數的薪水，做的事情不過是手工整理結算和確認交易（在金融服務業，只需編一個將數據從一個窗口粘貼到另一個窗口的小程序，就會讓許多人失業，這是這一行的一個可恥的祕密）。

The biggest obstacle to the adoption of “shared ledger”, of course, is one which has delayed much necessary investment in the past. It is unlikely that the banks will take on bitcoin in its current form, so they will have to agree on the design of a new standard. That means working together and trusting each other. Alas, those are habits that come less easily to bankers than to musicians.

採用“共享賬目”面臨一個最大的障礙，這個障礙在過去當然也曾延遲了許多亟需的投資。銀行不太可能會使用當前形式的比特幣，因此它們將必須就新標準的設計達成一致。這意味着要合作，要相互信任。可惜的是，銀行業人士比音樂家更難養成這些習慣。