Zimmer Zac
Technol Cult. 2017;58(2):307-334. doi: 10.1353/tech.2017.0038.
Bitcoin, the digital cryptocurrency, has been celebrated as the future of money on the Internet. Although Bitcoin does present several forward-looking innovations, it also integrates a very old concept into its digital architecture: the mining of precious metals. Even though Bitcoin explicitly invokes mining as a metaphor and gold as an example for understanding the cryptocurrency, there has been little critical work on the connections between Bitcoin and previous metalist currency regimes. The following essay proposes a historical comparison with colonial South American silver mining and the global currency regime based on the New World silver peso it created as a way to interrogate Bitcoin. The comparison with colonial South America, and specifically the silver mining economy around the Cerro Rico de Potosí, will help to develop a historical and political understanding of Bitcoin's stakes, including questions of resources, labor, energy, and ecology. Mining and the extractive apparatus that accompanies it always imply massive-scale earthworks that reshape the planet itself, a process known as terraforming. The Potosí comparison will reveal Bitcoin to form part of a similar process of digital primitive accumulation we can provisionally name cryptoforming.
比特币，这种数字加密货币，被誉为互联网货币的未来。尽管比特币确实展现了一些前瞻性的创新，但它也将一个非常古老的概念融入其数字架构之中：贵金属开采。尽管比特币明确将开采用作一种比喻，并以黄金为例来帮助理解这种加密货币，但关于比特币与以往金属主义货币体系之间的联系，几乎没有批判性的研究。以下文章提出将其与殖民时期南美洲的银矿开采以及基于其所创造的新世界银比索的全球货币体系进行历史比较，以此来审视比特币。与殖民时期的南美洲，特别是波托西银山周边的银矿开采经济进行比较，将有助于从历史和政治角度理解比特币所涉及的利害关系，包括资源、劳动力、能源和生态等问题。开采以及与之相伴的采掘工具总是意味着大规模的土方工程，这些工程重塑了地球本身，这一过程被称为地形改造。与波托西的比较将揭示比特币构成了一个类似的数字原始积累过程的一部分，我们可以暂且将其命名为加密改造。
