Topic: How can Bitcoin be a society changer with current distribution of wealth? - page 4. (Read 4397 times)

I was not responding to you.

If you don't know the benefits of Bitcoin, why are you here? Have you read the white paper?

I feel that that graphic has a tendency to misrepresent what's actually going on, I think that broad band of orange is including pool mined coins that go out to miners fairly quickly, it representing the expansion of pools, and the first hop of distribution rather than "spending" per se.

There was another study that said that 70% of bitcoins were sitting unused for months, that seemed to be "truthier" to me.

Spending $50 to purchase 5000 bitcoins in 2010 is high risk, but low cost. Buying an apartment in Dubai is substantially more risk as it could ruin your whole financial future. Show me one guy who chucked his life savings into BTC in 2010? 

I have no problem with BTC. I don't really see how their risk would justify having 50% plus of the wealth if we were to convert to a bitcoin society (the risk was miniscule up to 2011, low hashing rates, low cost of coins). This is my main point. If BTC was to replace fiat how would it benefit mankind? Thoughts regarding this question are much appreciated. Telling me which coins I would or wouldn't like is not.

Just because I am talking about bitcoin benefiting mankind does not mean I am calling for regulation. Again putting words in my mouth is not actually appreciated one bit. I understand that its a topic you feel strongly about, but could you try approaching the subject in a non-arrogant, non-judgmental way . Ta

I do understand what you are saying. But why did YOU let this happen? Many who have a lot of coins have them because they took a big risk buying early. They had no guarantee that their $5 bitcoins would not drop to $0.02. They risked more and now they have more. Sure, now that they are hundreds of dollars each everyone wants $5 bitcoins. This relationship between risk and reward exists in all markets. I wish I could go back 10 years and buy an apartment in Dubai. I didn't take that risk and it would be unfair of me to demand an apartment now.

What I like the most about your numbers are that that large percentage of bitcoin holders were here early on. They actually took the risks because they believed in Bitcoin and what it stands for.

The people who want to bring in regulations and redistribution belong to the small percentage. The longer that is true, the better. You really should try freicoin...that sounds like a better currency for you.

You base this on what?  People read your first post but you leap to unsupported conclusions because of a misunderstanding of terminology.
1 address =/= 1 wallet =/= 1 person. Due to the way that Bitcoin creates transactions most wallets will have more than one "funded" address.  They will also have addresses with a mix of value (some larger, some smaller, some left over change so small they may never be spent).   You assume that because there are 46 million non zero addresses that means there are 46 million unique entities and 95% of them have less than 1% of the total coins.  No it only means that there is a huge amount of spam in the network.   Most of those outputs below 1000 satoshis will never be spent and come from a period in time when the network had no anti-spam provisions.  As an example one company would send betters a single satoshi for each losing bet to provide confirmation that the bet was processed and lost.  Millions upon millions of them.  You treat each of those spam transactions as a single PERSON!




For the sake of the argument lets assume the distribution is as bad. You also indirectly assume that distribution won't widen.   At block 1 a single person owned 100% of the Bitcoins and now that is no longer true.  The Bitcoin money supply is ~$4B. The total wealth on earth is $263T.   Bitcoin is roughly .001% of the total wealth and is used by more than 0.001% of the planet.  

The rise in value of the Bitcoin money supply is directly linked to a wider distribution.   There is no scenario where Bitcoin will be worth tens of trillions of dollars and the same x people control 62% (your claim) of that.   It is a self solving problem.  Either the distribution widens (though commerce, speculation, and yes theft/scams/fraud) or the system won't increase in value.

Probably the latter .

The truth for fiat is that around 35% of the top 1% own all the money. 70% for the top 10%. (In the USA). Regardless of the exchanges its clear to see that distribution is actually worse for BTC. Has anyone actually read my first post or have they just read wealth distribution and already made their minds up?

Not at all. Do you spend a large portion of your life trying to find flaws in people with different opinions to yourself?

Possession is not ownership*.  The major exchanges hold a lot of coins but those coins (legally) belong to the depositors. This can't be reflected by looking at the address distribution.  Using the graph you used to illustrate a point would be like graphing where all the US dollars are and showing that 5 "people" (BofA, Citibank, etc) have 95% of the dollars.  Yes their is unequal wealth distribution in the US (and everywhere) but simply looking at who is currently "holding" the assets as a bailor is pointless.

* That being said if you don't have the private key for "your" bitcoins then you don't have any bitcoins.  At best you have an IOU for some bitcoins owed to you which hopefully will be paid on demand in the future.

Do you spend a large portion of your life worrying about what other people have compared to yourself?

It would be interesting actually to see current distribution of Auroracoin

Enjoyed the last two answers - thank you. I will consolidate my thoughts and get back to you

While it's certainly true that the distribution of BTC is not even. Just as you point out some have a lot, many have a little. But remember that distribution in the bitcoin economy is in the hands of users. If a poor person wants bitcoin they are in the same position as a rich person. There is no barrier other than their personal motivation.

Bitcoin (the coin) is not distributed. Block rewards are payment for the service of hashing and the more you hash the more likely you are to receive bitcoin. Any attempt to give coins to people because they are poor is just a distortion of the market. Since bitcoins cost money to produce, it's not even possible to do without someone getting stuck paying.

It's just like gold. Anyone can pack a mule and go to Alaska to try finding some. But nobody is going to give you gold for sitting at home and wanting it.

Is every average joe in society the exact same person? Please describe how this person that represents every single person lives, works, spends his money, etc. on a daily basis then I can address this mythical question.

I can, however, speak for myself. I live in Germany working for a US company that pays me in dollars. Thanks to bitwage.co I can get paid in bitcoins. Thanks to localbitcoins I can turn those bitcoins into euros. This conversion actually nets me more money than I am paid in dollars because of the high demand for bitcoins for cash. I like the ease of buying things online with bitcoins instead of giving all of my credit card information, making sure I use whatever address they need to match up to my credit card, make sure my credit card isn't cancelled because I used it in some foreign country without calling the credit card company.

I like that my bitcoins are not run by a central authority who needs war and violence to continue its operation. That my bitcoins are not a currency that is on the hook for over $18 trillion in debt and climbing. I like that I can go to Prague for the weekend and spend bitcoins without paying for the high conversion cost to the local currency.

Average Joe will use Bitcoin or not. For me, it is helpful.

I mean with such a minority of players (around 15,000) holding 62% of the wealth how can Bitcoin possibly be a good thing for the little guy? This has nothing to do with my personal ideologies, but I fail to see how changing Bitcoin for the 'fiat' system would benefit anyone in anyway. 

What exactly do you mean by this? Bitcoin is not a PoS coin (although many people would like to turn it into one) and current holders of BTC hold so special privileges. Latecomers might have missed out on some early gains, but that is pretty much it.

If anything, the distribution of bitcoins is not 100% correlated with the distribution of fiat, so this should improve overall wealth distribution if you believe that it is good (i.e. some fiat poor people might be Bitcoin rich and vice versa).

Elwar - refer yourself to the question in this post. How is BitCoin supposed to help the average joe in society when such a small minority own the lions share?

Pretty much sums up my feelings on the subject. Its not a libertarians dream. Its a libertarians nightmare.