Comment by sillysaurus3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sillysaurus3 | Hacker News Reader

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From your Reddit comment:

I have no issue with the people that invented a specific technology getting rewarded for that. But that's not what's happening here. You're giving a few early adopters most of what you want to then use to price all the assets in the world.

I'm not sure anybody is saying that bitcoin will be used to price all assets in the world. USD currently isn't, for example. It's just the dominant currency.

A reasonable estimate for all the dollars in the world is 10 trillion. Say that bitcoin being a full sucess is it being valued at a total of 5 billion. Now consider that Satoshi has about 5% of all bitcoins that will ever exist. That puts him as 3x richer than the current richest man in the world. I don't see anything in bitcoin that justifies that kind of payout and that's for the inventor of the thing.

We don't have a justice system. We have a legal system. And this seems to be allowed under our legal system, so I'm not sure the moral argument is valid.

Why do you feel it's immoral for Satoshi to own 5%? We don't even know if he's alive or still has access to the coins, but let's say for the sake of argument that he does.

To go one step further, who says inventing a better currency shouldn't be worth 3x as much as creating e.g. walmart or microsoft? Sounds exactly like the sort of civilisational step forward that should be rewarded handily. Remember, we're talking about a world in which bitcoin has absorbed 50% of the world's assets, presumably because it's better in some real way than other currencies.

>Remember, we're talking about a world in which bitcoin has absorbed 50% of the world's assets

Bitcoin proponents keep misunderstanding this. Most of the world's assets are not currencies, they are stocks, bonds, land, etc that we do use currencies to price but we are not holding currencies when we own them. The fact that central banks can inflate currencies doesn't change the value of assets just their pricing under those currencies. So creating a new way to price assets with something that has a guaranteed fixed supply is not a big innovation. If you want that just use gold. It has a much longer history, much less volatility, much less chance of being replaced by the next fad, and isn't mainly owned by a few recent early adopters.

>presumably because it's better in some real way than other currencies.

That's the point someone still needs to make. Modern financial systems are pretty efficient and featureful. Bitcoin is for people that believe in a narrow scenario where normal institutions have failed and yet the internet and the mining infrastructure is still working. To me that seems incredibly unlikely especially given how mining economics and evolution have made it highly centralized in a few players in China.

Considering how old gold is its distribution is pretty slim

https://www.wealthdaily.com/articles/who-owns-worlds-gold/24...

And it's far from immune to being manipulated.

http://news.goldseek.com/GoldSeek/1489601367.php

>I'm not sure anybody is saying that bitcoin will be used to price all assets in the world. USD currently isn't, for example. It's just the dominant currency.

Most things are actually priced in dollars to some extent, perhaps with some conversions. Maybe euros in some other cases.

>Why do you feel it's immoral for Satoshi to own 5%? We don't even know if he's alive or still has access to the coins, but let's say for the sake of argument that he does.

I'm not making a morality argument. Just pointing out that it will be a hard pill to swallow that for the (in my view small) advantages of cryptocurrencies we as a society complete the most massive wealth transfer to a single individual ever attempted. For me it's an argument as to why it's implausible crypto currencies will take hold as they exist today. They require a huge wealth transfer to a few early adopters for very little gain. If the advantages were greater it seems more likely to me that a new chain would be bootstrapped but I'm not even convinced it's worthwhile enough that it will actually take hold on a massive scale.

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