Topic: Bitcoin as a socially fair currency - page 2. (Read 4359 times)

They, the mega whales, want to keep dominating the markets and not let today's bitcoin owners become more powerful and wealthy than the mega whales. And those big traders can easily launch their own cryptocurrency once legal regulations are in place.

Quote from: Rassah on August 24, 2014, 04:48:38 PM

Hey! I came to think of another possibility. Governments will not allow any independent cryptocurrency to become too big. They will therefore introduce an official cryptocurrency.

Easier said than done. How do you propose they not allow bitcoin to become too big? And why would anyone else use their cryptocurrency?

The total value of bitcoin today is puny compared to the trillions of dollars being swapped around on the fiat exchanges. If some of the really big players decide to cooperate and issue their own cryptocurrency they can easily and quickly pump up the price of that currency, and then the smaller investors would start to follow in order to gain on the massive upward momentum. In this way their cryptocurrency could match bitcoin within a couple of months and then go up much further leaving bitcoin behind like pocket change.

I am not sure what you mean by the "fiat exchange"....if you mean the foreign exchange market then I would have to disagree with you. The "players" in the foreign exchange market are central banks that are looking after their own economy. Central banks generally wants to make their national currency first stable and after that somewhat weak. A stable, but weak currency will make the exports less expensive in other countries, and imports more expensive making goods that are produced inside their country more favorable.

Anders

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"Citigroup currency analyst Steven Englander is out with a long Sunday note talking about everyone's favorite topic: digital currency.

In it, he makes an important observation about the extreme inequality in the Bitcoin world:

Best estimates are that there are about one million holders of Bitcoin; 47 individuals hold about 30 percent, another 900 hold a further 20 percent, the next 10,000 about 25% and another million about 20%, with 5% being lost. So 1/10th of one percent represent about half the holdings of Bitcoin and 1 percent close to 80 percent
...
The distribution of Bitcoin holdings looks much like the distribution of wealth in North Korea and makes the China’s and even the US’ wealth distribution look like that of a workers’ paradise. There are estimates of a Gini coefficient of 0.88 for Bitcoin, but if anything the estimates are low if big holders own multiple wallets and the overall concentration of Bitcoin wealth is greater than in the sample used to estimate the coefficients" -- http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-inequality-2014-1

"The Gini coefficient (also known as the Gini index or Gini ratio) (/dʒini/ jee-nee) is a measure of statistical dispersion intended to represent the income distribution of a nation's residents. This is the most commonly used measure of inequality." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient

Anders

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They, the mega whales, want to keep dominating the markets and not let today's bitcoin owners become more powerful and wealthy than the mega whales. And those big traders can easily launch their own cryptocurrency once legal regulations are in place.

Hey! I came to think of another possibility. Governments will not allow any independent cryptocurrency to become too big. They will therefore introduce an official cryptocurrency.

Easier said than done. How do you propose they not allow bitcoin to become too big? And why would anyone else use their cryptocurrency?

The total value of bitcoin today is puny compared to the trillions of dollars being swapped around on the fiat exchanges. If some of the really big players decide to cooperate and issue their own cryptocurrency they can easily and quickly pump up the price of that currency, and then the smaller investors would start to follow in order to gain on the massive upward momentum. In this way their cryptocurrency could match bitcoin within a couple of months and then go up much further leaving bitcoin behind like pocket change.

OK, so they spend a bunch of money to create a currency that they control. Then they put it up on an exchange, that they also control, and as people trade it, start buying MASSIVE amounts for billions of dollars, to pump up the price to Bitcoins level. But, all they really did is create another PalPal, with a floating exchange rate, while having none of the benefits offered by Bitcoin, since their currency is not decentralized, not anonymous, not politically neutral, is entirely backed by their company (as opposed to not depending on engine), and completely closed off to development and innovation. As soon as they stop dumbing billions of their own dollars to pump it, that currency will crash back down to almost nothing, as people exit back to the only currency that actually has the features they were looking for in the first place.

This whole exercise would be as if Microsoft were to make their own Linux, pump it by PAYING you touy it, but leave everything that makes Linux competitive out of Linux (bad security, closed source, etc.).

The WhaleCoin Cheesy

or what to call it would be just like bitcoin, a decentralized peer-to-peer cryptocurrency with anonymity etc.

Rassah

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They, the mega whales, want to keep dominating the markets and not let today's bitcoin owners become more powerful and wealthy than the mega whales. And those big traders can easily launch their own cryptocurrency once legal regulations are in place.

Quote from: Bogleg on August 24, 2014, 02:21:01 PM

Hey! I came to think of another possibility. Governments will not allow any independent cryptocurrency to become too big. They will therefore introduce an official cryptocurrency.

Easier said than done. How do you propose they not allow bitcoin to become too big? And why would anyone else use their cryptocurrency?

The total value of bitcoin today is puny compared to the trillions of dollars being swapped around on the fiat exchanges. If some of the really big players decide to cooperate and issue their own cryptocurrency they can easily and quickly pump up the price of that currency, and then the smaller investors would start to follow in order to gain on the massive upward momentum. In this way their cryptocurrency could match bitcoin within a couple of months and then go up much further leaving bitcoin behind like pocket change.

OK, so they spend a bunch of money to create a currency that they control. Then they put it up on an exchange, that they also control, and as people trade it, start buying MASSIVE amounts for billions of dollars, to pump up the price to Bitcoins level. But, all they really did is create another PalPal, with a floating exchange rate, while having none of the benefits offered by Bitcoin, since their currency is not decentralized, not anonymous, not politically neutral, is entirely backed by their company (as opposed to not depending on engine), and completely closed off to development and innovation. As soon as they stop dumbing billions of their own dollars to pump it, that currency will crash back down to almost nothing, as people exit back to the only currency that actually has the features they were looking for in the first place.

This whole exercise would be as if Microsoft were to make their own Linux, pump it by PAYING you touy it, but leave everything that makes Linux competitive out of Linux (bad security, closed source, etc.).

Anders

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Activity: 126

Merit: 100

They, the mega whales, want to keep dominating the markets and not let today's bitcoin owners become more powerful and wealthy than the mega whales. And those big traders can easily launch their own cryptocurrency once legal regulations are in place.

Quote from: MadAlpha on August 23, 2014, 09:24:29 AM

Hey! I came to think of another possibility. Governments will not allow any independent cryptocurrency to become too big. They will therefore introduce an official cryptocurrency.

Easier said than done. How do you propose they not allow bitcoin to become too big? And why would anyone else use their cryptocurrency?

The total value of bitcoin today is puny compared to the trillions of dollars being swapped around on the fiat exchanges. If some of the really big players decide to cooperate and issue their own cryptocurrency they can easily and quickly pump up the price of that currency, and then the smaller investors would start to follow in order to gain on the massive upward momentum. In this way their cryptocurrency could match bitcoin within a couple of months and then go up much further leaving bitcoin behind like pocket change.

Problem for bitcoin right now is it doesn't support smart contract.

Unless someone develop and integrate smart contract into btc, it will probably be left behind once smart contract coin emerges.

Ethereum is interesting but it seems to be more about technology waiting for practical use rather than something being practically used today.

Anders

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Activity: 126

Merit: 100

Quote from: Anders on August 21, 2014, 05:08:54 AM

So how is that fair?

How do you define the word "fair"? What would you consider to be "fair", and how would this "fairness" be measured?

I mean fair in the sense that bitcoin could function as a general currency. Money is like the blood flow in the body. If the money is too disproportionally distributed or being hoarded and squatted on too much, then that will lead to something similar to a cardiovascular disease where the blood is being clogged up and with too little flow to some tissue. A modern information currency has the potential to be much more efficient and inclusive than that.

It's also about power distribution. Will governments and populations around the world accept that the tiny percentage of people who own bitcoins today become super wealthy and the most powerful people in the world? Maybe, but there is a chance that some other cryptocurrency will dethrone bitcoin just because of its potential towards very skewed wealth distribution. Maybe even replaced by another cryptocurrency that's even more disproportionally distributed! (See my previous post about the cryptocurrency for the big traders.)

Bogleg

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Activity: 185

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They, the mega whales, want to keep dominating the markets and not let today's bitcoin owners become more powerful and wealthy than the mega whales. And those big traders can easily launch their own cryptocurrency once legal regulations are in place.

Hey! I came to think of another possibility. Governments will not allow any independent cryptocurrency to become too big. They will therefore introduce an official cryptocurrency.

Easier said than done. How do you propose they not allow bitcoin to become too big? And why would anyone else use their cryptocurrency?

The total value of bitcoin today is puny compared to the trillions of dollars being swapped around on the fiat exchanges. If some of the really big players decide to cooperate and issue their own cryptocurrency they can easily and quickly pump up the price of that currency, and then the smaller investors would start to follow in order to gain on the massive upward momentum. In this way their cryptocurrency could match bitcoin within a couple of months and then go up much further leaving bitcoin behind like pocket change.

Problem for bitcoin right now is it doesn't support smart contract.

Unless someone develop and integrate smart contract into btc, it will probably be left behind once smart contract coin emerges.

Anders

full member

Activity: 126

Merit: 100

They, the mega whales, want to keep dominating the markets and not let today's bitcoin owners become more powerful and wealthy than the mega whales. And those big traders can easily launch their own cryptocurrency once legal regulations are in place.