比特币交易所被黑后的危机管理

Visit Reddit now for a live case study in corporate communication, bitcoin-style.

现在上Reddit，你可以实时观看一个有关企业沟通的案例研究，还是比特币类型的。

Zane Tackett, director of community at Bitfinex, a Hong Kong-based bitcoin exchange, has been using the social news platform to handle panicked users’ questions about a security breach since shortly after it was announced on Tuesday.

香港比特币交易所Bitfinex周二宣布遭遇黑客入侵后不久，其社区总监赞恩•塔克特(Zane Tackett)就一直利用Reddit这个社交新闻平台来处理恐慌用户的问题。

When Mr Tackett finally took a short break from the social news platform on Wednesday, one user called JustSomeBadAdvice wrote: “Dude, you are a TROOPER. 12 hours . . . 330 posts, and god knows how many PM’s [private messages] you responded to. Bash Bitfinex all you want people, but this is some serious dedication.”

周三塔克特终于暂时离开Reddit，稍事休息，这时一个名为“JustSomeBadAdvice”（中文意为“只是一些糟糕的建议”）的用户写道：“哥们，你是一个猛士。12个小时……330条消息，天知道你还回复了多少条私信。大家尽可以猛批Bitfinex，但这真是够敬业了。”

Whether this is a good or a bad case, though, will depend what is left when the blizzard of communication has finally blown through.

然而，这是一个好的案例，还是一个糟糕的案例，要看信息暴风雪过后还剩下什么。

Mr Tackett has been explicit about what he does not yet know. Early in his Reddit marathon, answering a question about who was to blame for the breach, he posted: “We’re still investigating the hack to figure out exactly how we were compromised, but it does look like it’s on us.”

塔克特对于他目前还不知道的情况直言不讳。在Reddit上进行问答“马拉松”不久，在回答有关谁该对这次入侵负责的时候，他发消息称：“我们还在调查此次黑客入侵，以搞清楚我们是如何陷入危险之中的，但目前看起来责任在我们身上。”

Candour is better than bluff but at this early stage in handling the crisis, it may not be better than silence.

坦诚相告比故弄玄虚好，但在处理危机的早期阶段，坦诚相告或许并不比保持缄默好多少。

When Dido Harding, TalkTalk’s chief executive, announced last autumn that the UK telecoms group had suffered a cyber attack, she started by implying it could affect all 4m customers.

当TalkTalk的首席执行官迪多•哈丁(Dido Harding)去年秋天宣布这家英国电信集团遭受网络攻击的时候，她一开始就暗示400万用户可能都受到了影响。

In due course, it became clear that only 156,000 had been afflicted. Baroness Harding stood accused by some of not having properly explored the extent of the crisis before she went public — not to mention having underestimated the risk of attack in the first place.

不久后却发现只有15.6万名用户受到影响。一些人指责哈丁女男爵没有在告知公众之前适当地估计事件的严重程度，更别说最初还低估了受到攻击的风险。

In the fluid, unregulated and far from transparent world of bitcoin, the credibility of the currency and its exchanges rests on communication, for good or ill.

在不稳定、不受监管、非常不透明的比特币世界，货币的可信度和交易都依赖沟通，不管这是好事还是坏事。

That means that while there is greater potential for free expression — by users and exchanges — there is also a far greater risk of misinformation than in areas overseen by watchdogs and governed by strict rules of public engagement.

这意味着，尽管比特币领域在自由表达方面拥有更大潜力——对用户和交易所而言都是如此——这个领域受错误信息所累的风险也比受监管部门监管、受严格的公共参与规则管制的领域要大得多。

Established companies that chose to imitate Mr Tackett’s approach would also find they had tied up valuable resources in micro-communication just at the moment where they might need those people to handle the underlying crisis.

想要效仿塔克特策略的老牌公司也会发现，在他们可能需要人员来处理危机的时候，他们把宝贵的资源搭在了微通信(micro-communication)上面。

Imagine the chief executive of Northern Rock in 2007 bashing out emails to reassure individual depositors about the safety of their savings to stem a run on the bank. Or the chairman of Johnson & Johnson in 1982, calling customers one by one to explain the Tylenol product recall (still the best-known case of crisis communications).

想象一下2007年时北岩银行(Northern Rock)首席执行官发送大量邮件，试图让个人储户相信他们的储蓄是安全的，以防止银行遭到挤兑；或者1982年强生(Johnson & Johnson)董事长挨个给顾客打电话解释泰诺(Tylenol)产品召回事件（这依然是最知名的危机沟通案例）。

Bitfinex has little choice but to engage with agitated social media users. It will, however, be a sign that bitcoin has truly come of age when an exchange’s reaction to crisis is an old-fashioned statement and a simple “no comment — watch this space”.

Bitfinex别无选择，只能与激动不安的社交媒体用户接触。然而，当一个交易所对危机的反应是发布老套的公告、并附上简单的“无可奉告——参看这个页面”时，那就表明比特币真的发展成熟了。