爲什麼比特幣投資者男性居多

A decade older than my brother, I take some things for granted. I have a professional job, a degree, a credit card; he stays up later than me, knows the cool music and can travel for months at a time. So it came as a surprise to find that his investments were raking it in — because, unlike me, he has put money into bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

比弟弟大十歲的我，覺得有些事情是理所當然的。我有一份專業工作、學位、信用卡；他比我睡得晚，懂很酷的音樂，可以一次旅行幾個月。因此，發現他的投資賺了大錢讓我感到意外，因爲他跟我不一樣，他把錢投進了比特幣等加密數字貨幣。

Perhaps even more painful to admit, he encouraged me to buy bitcoin five years ago, when it was worth about $100, far below the $7,088 it is at the time of writing (or the almost $20,000 it was at its peak). It was an offer only a 17-year-old boy could propose: give me your money, I’ll invest it in bitcoin and give you a share of the proceeds. It turns out — even after the recent fall in bitcoin — it was an offer I was foolish to decline.

或許更令人痛苦的是承認，5年前他曾鼓勵我購買比特幣，當時比特幣價值約爲100美元，遠低於我寫這篇文章時的7088美元（或者它曾經逼近的2萬美元峯值）。這是一個只有17歲男孩纔會提出的提議：把你的錢交給我，我會用它投資比特幣，然後給你收益分成。事實證明，即使是在最近比特幣下跌之後，我那時拒絕這個提議仍是愚蠢的。

I am not alone. Ask most people outside Silicon Valley whether they own any bitcoin, and the answer will still probably be no.

愚蠢的還不止我一個人。問問硅谷以外的大多數人是否擁有比特幣？答案很可能是沒有。

So what do early adopters have in common? One factor is gender. As bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum have soared over recent months, it is mainly men who have bought in.

那麼，很早接納比特幣的人有何共同之處？一個因素是性別。最近幾個月，當比特幣和以太坊(Ethereum)等加密數字貨幣的價格飆升時，買入者主要是男性。

Accurate data on who holds the anonymous currencies are hard to find, but Uphold, a virtual currency wallet service that does background checks on its users, says 75 per cent are men, while Coin Dance, which tracks statistics on the bitcoin community, found 97 per cent of engagement was from men. If men like my brother were riding high on returns, why weren’t women?

關於誰持有這類匿名貨幣的準確數據很難找到，但對其用戶做過背景調查的虛擬貨幣錢包服務Uphold表示，75%的用戶是男性，而追蹤比特幣社區統計數據的Coin Dance發現，97%的參與者是男性。如果像我弟弟那樣的男性獲得了高回報，爲什麼女性沒有呢？

Cryptocurrencies are, of course, risky: their price is highly volatile and in some cases their digital exchanges have been hacked.

當然，加密數字貨幣是有風險的：它們的價格劇烈波動，在有些情況下，它們的數字交易所遭到了黑客侵入。

Anna Dreber, an economics professor at the Stockholm School of Economics, studies differences in risk tolerance between men and women. She cites one study that showed a 64 per cent probability that a random man would be prepared to take more risk than a random woman. Yet that alone is not enough to account for the difference between male and female bitcoin investors.

斯德哥爾摩經濟學院(Stockholm School of Economics)的經濟學教授安娜?德雷貝(Anna Dreber)研究了男性和女性在風險容忍度方面的差異。她引用的一項研究顯示，隨機選取一男一女，男性比女性願意承擔更多風險的概率爲64%。然而，僅憑這一點還不足以解釋男性和女性比特幣投資者之間的差異。

Much is down to information flow. Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies first became popular in the geekiest parts of the tech and finance industries, both male-dominated. The early word was spread mainly on Reddit and forums for discussing video games. Mt Gox, once the biggest exchange for virtual currency before it was hacked, started life as a platform for trading playing cards for a fantasy game called Magic: The Gathering.

很多事情取決於信息流。比特幣和加密貨幣首先在科技和金融行業“極客”最集中的角落流行起來，而這些角落是由男性主導的。最初，相關消息主要在Reddit以及討論視頻遊戲的論壇上傳播。在被黑客入侵前曾是最大虛擬貨幣交易平臺的Mt Gox，起步時是一個交易幻想遊戲《萬智牌》(Magic: The Gathering)卡牌的平臺。

Stephanie Hardesty, an investor who also describes herself as a bitcoin anthropologist, says she became interested in the currency in 2013 for two reasons. First, a male friend who was a software developer started telling her about bitcoin. Second, she found bitcoin allied with another interest of hers: cross stitch. After discovering she could cross stitch the QR codes that link to bitcoin wallets, she now keeps her public address as cross-stitch code on her desk at work and her private key safely offline, in a cross-stitched cold-storage wallet.

自稱是比特幣人類學家的投資者斯蒂芬妮?哈德斯蒂(Stephanie Hardesty)表示，她在2013年對比特幣產生興趣有兩個原因。首先，一位身爲軟件開發員的男性朋友開始向她介紹比特幣。其次，她發現比特幣與她的另一個興趣——十字繡——吻合。在發現她可以把鏈接到比特幣錢包的二維碼做成十字繡之後，她現在把她的公共地址二維碼十字繡放在她的辦公桌上，把她的私鑰安全地離線存放，放在一個有十字繡的冷存儲（cold-storage，指離線存放——譯者注）錢包裏。

Hardesty believes that as cryptocurrencies become more mainstream, they are attracting more diverse investors: more women, more people of colour and more leftwingers.

哈德斯蒂認爲，隨着加密數字貨幣變得更加主流，它們將吸引更爲多元化的投資者：更多女性、更多膚色的人和更多左派人士。

Many in the field are working to make cryptocurrencies more accessible. There are women leading crypto-related companies and in top roles at banks such as Blythe Masters, a former JPMorgan Chase banker who runs blockchain start-up Digital Asset Holdings, and Amber Baldet at JPMorgan.

許多業內人士正在努力使加密貨幣更容易獲得。有一些女性領導着加密相關公司，或者在銀行擔任相關的高層職位，例如摩根大通(JPMorgan Chase)前銀行家、目前經營着區塊鏈初創企業Digital Asset Holdings的布萊斯?馬斯特斯(Blythe Masters)，以及摩根大通的安布爾?巴爾代(Amber Baldet)。

Of course, now bitcoin is more mainstream there may be far less money to be made — and there’s a lot of risk attached, as its price drop of almost 50 per cent since the start of the year shows. When we spoke, Hardesty thought it would be better late than never for me, a “sad no-coiner”, to buy bitcoin.

當然，既然比特幣已經更加主流了，可賺的錢也許更少——而且還有很多風險，正如自今年初以來其價格暴跌近50%所表明的那樣。當我跟她交談時，哈德斯蒂認爲，對於我這個“悲哀的無幣者”，晚買比特幣也好過永遠不買比特幣。

Her advice is to avoid the sometimes complex process required to buy and store cryptocurrencies, head to a bitcoin ATM and lock the receipt in a fire-safe box. Or I could just ask my brother for help. Then again, given the latest market turmoil, maybe I’ll start calling myself a “lucky no-coiner” instead.

她的建議是，避免購買和存儲加密貨幣所需的有時複雜的過程，而最好是找到一臺比特幣ATM機，然後將收據鎖在一個防火箱裏。或者我乾脆找我弟弟幫忙。但是話說回來，鑑於最近的市場動盪，也許我會開始自稱爲“幸運的無幣者”。