Topic: Distribution of bitcoin wealth by owner - page 7. (Read 153446 times)

I agree... Bitcoin's distribution is by no means unfair.
Especially, when you look at inequality in the real world.

in short, the world... is fucked.

I think it is somewhat annoying that 85 richest own half of the circulating currency.

Much more alarming, though, is that 99% of the money supply of the world is emitted or withdrawn by only a handful of men.

You think bitcoin distribution is unfair?

LMAO. Only delusional ignorant idiots would question the fairness of bitcoin after realizing the top 1% own more than half the entire fucking currency pool on the planet. Here you go idiots:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2014/01/23/the-85-richest-people-in-the-world-have-as-much-wealth-as-the-3-5-billion-poorest/

There are some with a lot of Bitcoin - for them it's about increasing the total value relative to the potential success of Bitcoin, not the amount of Bitcoin they have.
Holding makes everyone more wealthy only if others want to join in. One way to think of it is Bitcoin will be nearing optimum market saturation when the wealth in Bitcoin is distributed on a normal bell curve.

The value of the network has grown somewhat correlated to Metcalfe's law it seems the more people who use Bitcoin the more valuable it becomes.

One just has to do one's best to make the network more valuable, if everyone held and the network stopped growing the value of Bitcoin would drop. Generally speaking holding at any time of the 5 out of 6 years has been more profitable than trading for the average investor.

In market theory capital accumulates where it is used most productivity, and to think more than 1 out of every 1000 is more productive than 500 out of every 1000 people is evidence that we have problems, Bitcoin won't be successful if the disparity is similar.

Most involved must hold but you also need to let some go. Generally rpietila savings plan is a good start.

How in hell holding bitcoin doesn't make you more wealthy? If things go as they should, as bitcoin becomes more popular, the price of bitcoin should go up. So if you own a lot of bitcoin already, all you have to do is wait and you'll be getting ridiculously rich in 10 years. So yes, waiting and holding = more wealth, so there is a big incentive to hold and not to spend. What are you winning by spending bitcoin?

Bitcoin is at the beginning of its distribution cycle, nothing is fair, but unlike fiat having a lot of Bitcoin and not spending it doesn't alow you to accumulate more wealth. In the fiat world if you're part of the 0.01% you get paid to be the majority wealth holder. By contrast in Bitcoin if you are a majority holder you lose a lot more wealth than the wealth you cash out when you cash out.

What makes your Bitcoin grow in value is the size of the network of users, finding ways to distribute it to the people who will be responsible is not a trivial science. It would be prudent to only trust people to be responsible with there money when it comes at great hardship and expense.

So holding if you are a stake holder is hard, you need to spend it strategically to make the network grow, and manage it like you're the FED. Watching the velocity, because there are other stake holders with the same knowledge but they are in competition.

The fact is it's working extremely well, we've grown exponentially by an order of magnitude every year to date since inception.
Now that's what I find hard to believe.

I don't think anyone ever said bitcoin is fair. Clearly early adopters are rewarded more than those come after, but I figured that bitcoin's wealth distribution would eventually mirror the real world's, where the top 1% of global wealth holders own approximately 40% of the total wealth (officially). Bitcoin's wealth distribution more closely resembles that of an African kleptocracy (e.g. Angola). Then again, much of the global elite's wealth is hidden. You don't see the Rockefeller family members at the top of the Forbes richlists. Global elite such as they may very well unofficially own close to 70% of everything through obfuscated ownership schemes.

Yes, you get that right.

Don't believe the fairly tale that bitcoin is fair and liberated.

So 14,000 people own roughly 72% of all bitcoin? If there are 1 million users, then the top 1.4% owns 72% of everything? That seems high.

Side Chains (SC) offer some of the same features, but with SC there is the possibility to do it all on the Bitcoin protocol, one can uses Merge Mining to secure and process transactions without an entity controlling it.

 The big difference is SC alow you to secure BTC, and mover the value onto another blockchain, this changes the dynamic that motivates miners to mine Bitcoin.

If a miner can mine a SC and earn, he could abandon Bitcoin mining or mine empty Bitcoin blocks worse 51% attack Bitcoin, without sacrificing her mining income. The scenario is far fetched but just the possibility puts me off.

A more likely scenario is SC-tokens backed by Bitcoin get exchanged for other SC-tokens, and a SC that stores Bitcoin but isn't as secure as Bitcoin is attacked or exploited, cutting of the return path for the BTC, thus permanently removing value from the Bitcoin blockchain.

If there were a failure or loss of some Bitcoin it would be a Bitcoin failure, unlike Gox there won't be anyone to blame.

None of this is a concern while Bitcoin's block reward is high, or SC are implemented in centralized entities, but just the fact that a for profit company is proposing a protocol change that makes possible the option to separate BTC the currently form the value stored on the blockchain is a red flag.

The biggest advantage I see is decentralized exchange and we don't need to change Bitcoin to alow SC for that.

Simplistically OT uses N of M multisig wallets distributed on many servers to secure your coins, when there is consensus say in a trade on an exchange the coins are released. The server could be as distributed as BitTorent or multiple servers on the net.

With regards to Tokens yes they would be controlled by a single entity,  they issue you tokens in exchange for your Bitcoin the cool part is they don't have access to your Bitcoin. 

If more than one server could process a transaction, what stops two of them from doing it? I thought that OT solved the double spend problem by having one and only one entity that could validate a given token.

I'm a huge supporter of OT, but I'm not sure it's a replacement for sidechains. The two technologies do different things and have different goals. I look at OT as the liability system to Bitcoins asset system, and sidechains are still assets pegged to the original bitcoin without needing any third party to do the peg. OT is best for pegging tokens to other things, like precious metals or shares of a company, with a third party doing the peg. Even if pegging to bitcoin using a distributed pool, you still need to trust the third party group of cosigners that control that pool.

Very interesting read, thanks for the insight gents.

OT is one such technology, that dosn't need to change the Bitcoin protocol, so no risk of of Side Chains altering the incentives in mining Bitcoin over time.   

OT can be a  "decentralized exchanges" here is an intro as to how to do it without screwing with the bitcoin protocol.
http://youtu.be/teNzIFu5L70?t=1m

and some more info.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtJcUM5-TeA

From Vlad's comment, I'm not sure if he is as familar with them as he could be.  2 way pegged sidechains can be as secure as the main chain and can implement just about any technology off the main chain.

You can read more here, this is somewhat technical:
http://www.blockstream.com/sidechains.pdf

They enable people to implement many features that might be risky on the main chain while leveraging bitcoin's infrastructure in ways an altcoin can't.

Check out the paper's authors.

There are other threads discussing this, so I don't want to derail this thread with a side topic, but my only point is that from the financial, usage, and tech sides there are many things that can impact fiat price and consequently long term distribution.

What is this technology?

Sidechains [at best] will only ever be half secure.

The only real purpose for sidechains is due to the fact that Bitcoin can not scale fast enough [next year].

Well, what if there is another identical coin like Bitcoin which can and will scale?  A fully matured Bitcoin clone? Bitcoin will still serve the purpose of attracting investments, as a savings account and the other coin will be the daily currency.

The only question then is, how long until Bitcoin has outlived its purpose?

But sidechains, they will not survive - better technology is already here.

But this is off topic so let's not take this issue any further on this thread.

Cheers!

Those were nice posts.

I'll just add that your scenarios also only account for the financial events that should hit in the next few months (ETFs etc).  Hopefully.  Sidechains (will be big) and other technical improvements will increase the usability scenarios on the non financial side.

If (when?) these confluence of events begin to hit, not to mention now that we are 18 months from the next halving, it should impact price significantly.  No guarantees of course, but the scenarios out there hav tremendous upside.