Topic: How can Bitcoin be a society changer with current distribution of wealth? (Read 4397 times)

Could be, but not because of the sound money (if you by gold standard mean sound money). Some people inherited money and land, which is ok (if you can't give your possessions away, you don't really own them), but if you follow the story back in history, there was robbery. Some king took the land by force, and gave it to some agent, maybe a general, as compensation for his assistance to kill for the king.

What we can have with sound money is +no bank bailouts (because there is no money to bail them out) +commercial debtor insurance only (same reason), +stable money value (or slightly increasing due to progress) +saving in money made possible +market based interest rate unfucking the current system of systemical misallocation of capital +smaller governments because they can only loan prudently and taxes will have to be less. It is rather a lot. Big changes ahead if this succeeds.

Going to sound money will not automatically reintroduce everything from the old days. You dont need slavery, and you don't have to go back to the productivity levels of yore.

How is BTC going to stop the rigging of the game? Do you honestly think when there was a gold standard and money wasn't printed on a screen somewhere then society was somehow less rigged for the average man? It wasn't. The power and wealth was even more tightly concentrated during the gold standard period. BTC does not somehow magically circumvent this with its technology, regardless of its attribute of being unprintable. There will be a few with all the power and the herd scrapping for the scraps once more. Your argument is based on little facts, little evidence and little historical perspective.  

I know you are sarcastic, anyway you can do that at any time. For the price of a pizza you can have a share in a good wealth producing company. Prioritize otherwise, take ownership in some capital, and you can spend more later.

Right now the system is somewhat rigged, and the prudent saver is basically fucked. You have to lick ass of agents the non voluntary organization called government, now, if you want to play.

That is what we are going to change with bitcoin. We are not taking away capitalists and entrepreneurs, rich heirs (and playboys and bad music and a lot of other bad things). Only the rigging of the game.

Because most people on this forum don't hate Banks and the Financial Elite because they're scummy, most people here are upset THEY aren't the ones at the top. We could dig up the tons of "we're the new financial elite" posts.

Okay, I'll fix this....

This week, each one of you has a homework assignment. You're gonna go out, you're gonna start a talk with a total stranger, you're gonna start a talk, and determine their net worth, if it's under $50,000, pull a glock and force them to buy greater than 0.3 worth of bitcoin.

It is fair because the free market is one that allows for winners and losers. If everyone has the same the market will collapse...there will be no demand, and subsequently no supply.

Like I said in my earlier post, this is only true if you ignore the fact that Bitcoin is only a small portion of the wider economy.

Then it sounds like you need another coin.

Perhaps fork Bitcoin to change the distribution. Or create an alt coin.  See how many people follow.  Or not. That is freedom. 

Yes, in the larger scope of things of the technology curve, it could be still considered the "Early Adopter stage".

I'm referring to in the 6 year fast moving history of Bitcoin, only the miners that started in the CPU/GPU age back in 2011 to early 2013 really benefitted if they held and amassed their coin.

To the people who became interested in 2013 after the Gox and price spikes to just shy of $1200, you can say we're "latecomer".

I'd consider myself a "latecomer/newcomer" in Bitcoin years, since I arrived to the party in late 2013.

To the average person on the street, they don't know about millibits or fractions of a Bitcoin or definitely not "Satoshis".  If they actually know a little about Bitcoin, they'll reference the whole Bitcoin price of $300, because the average person doesn't deal with 8 decimals on a regular basis.

So to answer your retorts, you're actually right about your points overall.  For the people that aren't as versed as you or I or the people of this forum, this "internet of money" called Bitcoin has a steep learning curve and can seem intimidating and scary, then just pulling out a $20 bill to pay something.  You have to go get the lowest common denominator first to accept and actually use the tech, before the whales and early adopters can splash the pond.

So Bitcoin stops being magic beans for the miners, and becomes actual money for the masses. Money that people will need to earn by applying their efforts, before they are rewarded with purchasing power. Oh the horrors. How could such a money ever hope to work?

Everyone reading this post is an early adopter. In 5 years, people will complain about how unfair it is that you amassed ridiculous amount of coin. How will you respond to them?


The price of entry is no higher than it was 4 years ago. Now, just as then, if you want to own $1 worth of BTC, you can own $1 worth of BTC, and it will cost you about $1.

This would be a problem only if all wealth in the global economy was suddenly represented solely by Bitcoin. However, it is important to remember that Bitcoin represents only a small portion of the real economy. The wealth distribution within that small portion of the economy doesn't really matter because it ignores other assets. For example, I own a very small fraction of all Bitcoin in circulation, but for all you know I could still be a billionaire. I might be wealthy despite the small amount of Bitcoin I own. If I wanted to increase my Bitcoin holdings I could shift my current assets more towards Bitcoin.

The current distribution represents the fact that most people are not very invested in Bitcoin. Only a small portion of the global economy is represented by Bitcoin and a few individuals own a large percentage of that small part. The distribution will likely even out as more and more non-Bitcoin assets are exchange for Bitcoin and Bitcoin begins to represent a larger portion of the economy.

Again, the current distribution simply doesn't matter. If you look at this from an equality of opportunity/wealth distribution perspective, you are completely missing some very important points.

This is a very interesting argument and one can possibly agree on both sides of the coin.

On the one hand you have the minority early adopters like all the CPU/GPU miners that amassed ridiculous amounts of coin and held throughout, Satoshi, and the Winklevii, etc...

Then you have the late comers that are just trying to enter the space, but are finding the price of entry too high.

It's quite a quandary we have here.  Trying to bridge that gap between the "wealthy elite" and people trying to enter the club.

Personally, I think that's where "Bits" or "mBits" come in.  As development, investment, and adoption continues on an upward slope, we'll have to implement the technology to transfer, pay, remit, and transmit as fast as the fiat, click, and card swipe system.  For smaller transactions under $100, this should be a given.  For larger ones in the thousands, it'll definitely has to be faster than the 10 minute wait times we usually experience.  No one should have to wait 5-10 minutes for a confirmation to see if their flight booked or if their new Dell laptop purchase finally went through.

If the whole ecosystem speeds up and deals more with "Bits/mBits" on a daily basis more often, then they'll use it enough, that'll become a real viable method of payment and become treated like "e-cash", the way Satoshi's experiment originally wanted it to.

If we get to this point with millions of people transacting these small and medium amounts, "Bitcoin" the larger amount and commodity like cryptocurrency value will probably rise, and these early adopter bag holders will likely spend on "houses" and "cars" and "vacations" and "jewelry" and pour it into "businesses" etc...

Get the small timers involved and big timers will get involved as well.  Bitcoin is like a grass roots movement, and the wealth will be redistributed once the people on the ground start using it, causing the BTC wealthy at the top to take notice to lend a hand and redistribute.

+1

Yah, everything can happen, on the same day, 30 news articles, and market be like...

"LOL didn't read"

Next week, dead, apart from "Ashton Kucher gets sliver off plywood BTM case at Bitcoin Hackathon" .... market plunges 20%

This is bitcoin we are talking about,everything can happen

The only concern about bitcoin's distribution design is its steep setting of reward halving, which dramatically benefit the early adopters

Satoshi could set the reward halving scheme to reduce the block coin generation by 33%, or even 25% every 4 years. This will not change the nature of total limited supply, but give people much more time to join the mining and grab some bitcoins while exploring the possibilities of bitcoin

With today's 50% reward halving, it generated strong motivation to adopt as early as possible. This will have a huge advertising effect in the first several years while everyone want to join the mining game and grab their share before it is too late, but when most of the coins were mined out, the motivation for late comers can be a problem

Of course when the system is widely adopted, the transaction fee will also rise to compensate for the block reward, hopefully we will reach that state in 10 years, when the block reward is 6.25

Anyway, from a larger perspective, most of the easy gold has been digged out (170K tons in existence and now yearly production of 3k tons, means less than 2% increase per year) but still works as most honest money, so the initial distribution is not that important since it is usually the production cost decide its value

serious thread deja vu.

Hating on the Bitcoin distribution always misses the point.

The current global fiat/financial system is broken and concentrates wealth upwards. Rich get richer poor get poorer. Why? Because it's a an opaque rigged casino, with the banks, credit card companies and JP morgan et al owned high frequency algorithms siphoning off value on every single transaction.

The point being, that until the current playing field is levelled, open and mathematically honest there can never a fair distribution of wealth let alone an equally distributed one.

Even a person born after all the Bitcoins are distributed and earning a tiny trickle of Bitcoin through hard toil will be better off than in the current system.

 As it is, they are playing a rigged game without knowing the rules, blindfolded. Be a part of a possible solution, buy a few coins and give them away to those less fortunate in 10 years time. Charity is one of the best use cases.

Let's assign a monetary value to something that has already been distributed equally, like kidneys, everyone has 2. Let's say they're worth $5000 each, and let's say the market in them is completely free.... In 5 years time, what strata of society has the least kidneys?

If you don't like Bitcoin's distribution, you'll hate Ripples.

With Ripple, 3 people own 90% of the coins.