1.

Forewords前言

In 2008, at the end of a social gathering, two friends of mine, one, Aubrey Hornsby,

a venture capitalist seeking to support and invest in social impact entrepreneurs,

the other Will Ruddick, the future founder of Grassroots Economics and the author

of this book, were talking. Aubrey asked Will a number of challenging questions.

It got a little heated. Afterward, Aubrey said to me, in a puzzled tone, “Will is not

motivated by money.” That’s right. Will is motivated by love, by creating harmonious

relationships, and by attempting to solve real problems, regardless of the difficulty.

    在2008年一次社交聚会的尾声，我的两位朋友，致力于帮助和投资一些有社会影响力的企业家的分线投资人奥布里·霍恩斯比同日后草根经济学的创造人及本书的作者威尔·鲁迪克进行了一次交谈。奥布里向威尔提出了许多具有挑战性的问题，交流气氛一度变得有些激烈。事后，奥布里带着困惑的语气对我说：“威尔做事并不是被金钱所驱动的。”没错，威尔的动力来自爱，对于构建和谐关系的渴望，以及经历多少困难也要解决现实问题的使命感。

Will might not be motivated by money, but his understanding of money is

profound. He sees money as a type of promise—as a fungible unit of trust. He

is exploring old knowledge, of how, over tens of thousands of years, villagers

learned to manage promises, to build trust and to take care of each other. He

is also exploring how those basic human protocols for sharing, mutual care, and

fairness can be adapted to underlie distributed ledger platforms, useful at any scale.

   威尔可能不会被金钱所驱动，但他对金钱有着独到的理解。他认为金钱是一种承诺的形式——一种可交换的信任单位。他在探索先祖留下的智慧，即在数万年的时间中，人类如何运用承诺去建立信任并照顾彼此。他也在探索将关于分享、互助、公平这些基本的人类准则适用于分布式账本平台，并在任意情况下都能完好运行。

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