Mining digital gold

摘要

In 1999 an 18-year-old called Shawn Fanning changed the music industry for ever. He developed a service, Napster, that allowed individuals to swap music files with one another, instead of buying pricey compact discs from record labels. Lawsuits followed and in July 2001Napster was shut down. But the idea lives on, in the form of BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer file-sharers; the Napster brand is still used by a legal music-downloading service. The story of Napster helps to explain the excitement about Bitcoin, a digital currency, that is based on similar technology. In January a unit of Bitcoin cost around $15 (Bitcoins can be broken down to eight decimal places for small transactions).