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> Bitcoin value is held by a small handful of early adopters, and that the bulk of Bitcoin mining capacity is held by a small handful of large mining companies.

Yes. So what? I don't think the typical Bitcoin proponent is the kind of person to get outraged at Pareto distributions. They are against governments, they don't hate wealthy people just for being wealthy.

> The problem with that hypothetical endgame is that reallocating the world's wealth according to how early someone went all-in on a cryptocurrency gamble (and how much capital they had to invest at the time) would create inequality at unimaginable scale, not to mention completely disconnecting wealth from societal value creation.

How is that different from having invested in Amazon, Google or Apple in the early 00's?

Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) does bring value to our society as a store of wealth that's not easy for governments to control.

> store of wealth

It's funny how people keep saying this as if it's true. 99% of the market isn't buying crypto to "store value". This along with the idea that somehow it's a great currency bcs "no gov't" etc. is also a lie no one believes. Most of the market isn't actually making real-world transactions or storing value but somehow other people will start doing it in the future for some reason so gainz etc.

> Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) does bring value to our society as a store of wealth that's not easy for governments to control.

My personal take on this is that it's a temporary state of affairs. You might draw an analogy to the wild west of the Internet in the past, or e-mail. As Bitcoin goes mainstream, if it does, you will see familiar institutions built on it including fractional reserve banking that honor all the comfortable consumer things if you remain within their system.

>Yes. So what? I don't think the typical Bitcoin proponent is the kind of person to get outraged at Pareto distributions. They are against governments..

The problem here is equality. People invented and see bitcoin as a "store value" because they want to protect themselves from the inequality being forced upon them from governments printing fiat. As so, your idea that people:

>don't get outraged at Pareto distributions

is in contradiction to

>Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) does bring value to our society as a store of wealth

After all, if people weren't outraged at Pareto distributions why would it matter to them to store their wealth?

To reiterate, the greater point being made is that bitcoin ultimately won't solve anything regarding inequality. Adopting bitcoin isn't going against the man, it's just shifting who the man is from being "the government/FED" to "crypto exchanges/peddlers/other earlier hoarding crypto entities". With time people will come to hate such authorities just as they've come to hate the government. I mean just look at how people hate on mature big corps like Google these days, when many gave it fonder thoughts during it's earlier days... Bitcoin will be no different.

Would it be much different from inheritance?

Right from birth, one person is destined to be poor while the other destined to be a millionaire.

So I as a parent from the fruit of my labors have no right to help my children through life?

Also please note most millionaires in the world are self made, with over 80%. Of the other 20% most made it to millionaire status before receiving an inheritance. Also note the people you most worry about, the ones who get money young, usually plow through it and leave nothing for their children.

Wow, it's not unusual to see comments being contradicting each other by switching the side in the distance of one smartphone's screen.

You cannot just state one thing from the side of later comer, and later switch to the side of early comer. That way you are saying 2 things...

I am aware that they are two separate thoughts but they don't, to me, conflict with each other. The main theme of both of them was to not worry about what others get from their parents.

The first was recognizing that that inheritance mostly came from the labors of someone and they have a right to do with their money as they see fit. The second is acknowledging that the person who didn't work for their wealth usually squanders it so don't waste time being jealous of them.

So focus on being the person who creates wealth for themselves and try to educate your children so they will have good money habits later on in life and will squander less of what you leave them.

I want to put this out as a thought experiment. Given that current taxation policy is primarily derived from incomes, and an inheritance is by strict definition an income, then wouldn't it make sense for all incomes to be taxed equally?

I'd be more sympathetic to inheritance if the primary source of taxation was wealth.

The notion that over 80% of millionaires in the world are self made is completely ridiculous. Just because you didn't receive large swathes of money doesn't make you self made. Growing up in a secure environment, where you don't have to worry about having a job while you finish high school, where you don't have to worry about not being able to go to college. Where you don't have to worry much at all about anything aside from your future. With a good education brought by your parents. Hell, just being taught financial literacy.

Unless someone was born into poverty and fought their way out, I don't count them as self made. No doubt these people exist, but it would never be 80%.

That sounds like a classic "no true Scotsman". By poverty, do you mean under the United State poverty threshold over ~$12k/year? Because that's an average middle-class income in much of Eastern Europe. There the poverty threshold is much lower, but would also be considered middle-class in India.

There's also a stronger social safety net in many countries that are poorer than the US, where you certainly don't have to worry about not getting to college (if you have good enough grades) due to family income.

Binary categories such as "self-made" vs "not-self made" fit poorly in the real world and suffer due to each individual having a different threshold of self-madeness. For some people it means not having directly inherited a lump sum, for others it means having made every single cent without outside help.

You're defining "self made" to fit a very narrow definition. All the things you say are true to an extent, but it's not black-and-white. Would you consider Bill Gates self made, considering the magnitude of his achievements, etc?

Not only did he have the advantages that access to a computer in the 70s had, his dad's lawyer helped him with a good contract, and his mom set him up with the chairman of IBM

But the key thing is if he'd failed, he had a cushion to fall back on. Had Microsoft gone the same way as many other computer companies, he could be confident he wouldn't end up on the streets.

But he succeeded... and created something worth many orders of magnitude in value compared to what he started with... I think that still counts as self made.

Being middle class is not a crime and never was.

I wouldn't worry, in a world where Bitcoin takes over, the economic logic is such that no power can be used for non-Bitcoin purposes until profitable mining has been arbitraged away. This means that the vast majority of power generation will be dedicated to hashing while the oceans rise and the environment dies. The people with the bitcoin will not find a whole lot to buy for the coins in the wasteland when it all has played out.

> This means that the vast majority of power generation will be dedicated to hashing while the oceans rise and the environment dies.

You have no evidence for this claim, it's just a profusely fantastic image that cleaves to your political bias.

Your problem with this hypothetical endgame is an appeal to fairness.

I understand why you'd want that, fairness is a strong human instinct, but I don't see where it has any bearing on the likelihood of this future occurring.

People don't enjoy having a high number in their accounting system, they enjoy being wealthy. If, say, African central banks start purchasing BTC, and India joins them, early adopters will cash out at whatever value makes them feel like they got their money's worth. Some people will only trade for real property. Some are in a position to hodl until they can buy a whole cruise ship or whatever.

Or they could lose it all when BTC crashes to the natural value of any completely hypothetical asset, which is zero. This still seems more likely to me than central banks taking up a position in BTC, but sadly, I lack the ability to predict the future.

Is it really that different from buying the first iPod, and thinking to yourself, "y'know this is a brand new Apple, I'm putting a few thousand bucks into their stock"?

"Or they could lose it all when BTC crashes to the natural value of any completely hypothetical asset, which is zero."

It'll be interesting who's left "holding the bag" once its the end of the MLM-ponzi scheme of who you can convince to buy into it - save regulatory capture somehow forcing the rest of society to buy into it.

> save regulatory capture somehow forcing the rest of society to buy into it.

That's what happens, some little scheme gets too big to fail, so the taxpayer bails it out. Those that are in the schemes win, those that felt the scheme was stupid lose.

I remember seeing adverts on the London underground for icelandic banks offer 5% more than any other savings account. I chuckled and thought "surely nobody's that gullible".

There were many. Both individuals, who got bailed out by me (the taxpayer), and many councils (who lost money which belonged to the taxpayer)

For 20 years I laughed at these various get quick schemes. Then I realised that they don't fail. Profits are privitised, losses are socialised, and they taxpayer always loses.

When you realise that, you have to look at dodgy schemes in a whole separate light. Sure bitcoin is stupid, but as it gets larger and larger the chance of it failing without bailing out large institutions reduces, meaning the chance of me riding on the coattails increases.

And this is exactly the attitude I have encountered before that's disgusting. Two wrongs don't make a right, you're happy to take advantage of a system that's broken instead of fixing the actual problems - because that takes actual work - instead of just buying Bitcoin which then aligns a whole bunch of financially incentivized MLM propagandists.

> Is it really that different from buying the first iPod, and thinking to yourself, "y'know this is a brand new Apple, I'm putting a few thousand bucks into their stock"?

Yes, the former is just straight up gambling, the latter is investing in a company that makes good products.

Based on the fairness argument of OP, this seems even more dystopian: 1. Buy a 'good product' which only wealthy people can afford 2. Buy stock because exposure to 'good product' implies you could improve your fortune 3. ... hodl 4. Profit

40% of the US can't afford a 400$ emergency. Someone who had arguably more than that has improved their position from hodling... by 400x.

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/10-americans-struggle-cover-400-em...

Comparing the Gamestop fiasco to Bitcoin, Gamestop just looks like normal market activity, where Bitcoin looks like criminal pump and dump activity... in my opinion.

But bitcoin has been "pumped and dumped" so many times now that most of the people who were early investors have already cashed out long ago.

What you are left with now is all the people who bought the bitcoin after it had already been pumped and dumped, and they aren't willing to sell it for less than they bought it for.

This means that the perceived value of the asset is now based on the notions held by millions of people who are holding and don't want to sell.

How does this track with the fact that it's at the ATH right now, and has been steadily going up for some time?

Irrational exuberance is an amazing phenomenon... I've seen this before.

You haven’t seen a new form of money (not currency) go from $0 to $1 trillion before.

You haven’t seen something in the process of overtaking the market cap of gold—approximately $10 trillion.

The first trillion takes the longest; the next trillion will probably happen in far less time.

You assume that early adopters still hold their Bitcoins. You are (mostly) wrong.

Has anyone ever estimated how many btc might be locked up in early adopter wallets who have since lost the passwords or the hard drive, etc?

That number will only ever increase - bitcoin not only fails to grow in size with productivity and population, it actually shrinks.

It's massively deflationary, which is a terrible thing for a currency.

Depends on Satoshi.

I concur, I had 140 btc 10 years ago. Sold it all when it reached $800, which I though was peak.

I doubt the guy who sold the 5000 btc pizzas still have them.

Take this guy

https://mobile.twitter.com/GregSchoen/status/702616488117616...

Who lamented making $400 instead of $13k back in 2011. Those coins would today be worth about $95m, but there's no way he'd have kept them -- same as the buy who bought the pizzas (or the guy who sold them)

This guy was bored of $14/coin, it wasn't moving

https://twitter.com/rockerest/status/91885405368098816?lang=...

So he took the loss (in July 2011 they were at a peak, jumping from 77 cents to $15 in 3 months)

Had someone found an old laptop with the coins, they'd have been looking for it in the 2017 craze (ala Big Bang Theory) and sold then.

Bitcoin is currently 3 times the peak in December 2017.

Oh, it's a lot more than $1,000 to $1,300 in a week. If you had invested your $1,200 stimulus check in Bitcoin. It would now be worth $7,200.

Where else can the average person make 6x's their money. And, it has already made plenty of average people. Millionaires.

People were saying this about Gamestop, and I need to remind you that the value can go down as well as up: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9219447/GameStop-lo...

> Where else can the average person make 6x's their money

Go to Vegas, bet on red three times.

Or, if you don't want to get on a plane during a pandemic, trade on margin.

It's only worth that much if you sell now.

Same thing with stocks. It kills me to hear of people talk about how they "lost money" when a stock they own comes down from a temporary high price. No, you only lost money relative to your hypothetical self who sold at the top of the stock's price.

Not a millionaire till you sell. I don't care about a crypto millionaire, show me the FIAT baby.

All the "what if" is always pegged to another currency.

I don't know anyone that prices anything in just BTC (it's all BTC converted from USD or whatever, because anything else would be madness) - and I don't know anyone that doesn't peg their bitcoin to what they'd get if they sold it for "real money".

Which makes me think any endgame isn't going to be the utopian, governmentless, money-freedom future I keep hearing promised.

Not sure if it means anything, but the first thing I do when reading about the price of say some huge tunnel built in Europe is mentally convert the quoted Euro price to USD. Doesn't make the Euro any less real as a currency.

The fact that a European project was priced in Euros suggests that Euros are more of a currency than BTC. Converting to USD is a matter of convenience for you. But within the European economy that same project would have a near comparable EUR price in 12 months as it does today. That is not true for things priced in BTC as the value of the BTC is wildly fluctuating (though generally trending up).

Please find a contemporary (don't look to someone selling alpaca wool socks in 2010 and 2011), stable priced product line in BTC. Anything that I can be confident I will pay +/- 5% of the same BTC for over a 3 month period (I'm deliberately selecting a short period, most currencies are stable for 12+ months at a time when used to price goods and services).

This is all new to me, and I don't have any interest in BTC at all. But volatility and crazy inflation does happen in the realm of real currencies. BTC is unique because it's happening at the start of its existence rather than in the traditional death-spiral. Nor is currency speculation unique to BTC, it happens every day with traditional currencies. But maybe BTC can be forgiven for its volatility since it's such a unique and new concept?

As I understand it at some point there will be no new bitcoin left to mine, and it will just be available as a store-of-value currency -- if I have the concept correct. And the early adopters will be financially rewarded for helping to get it off the ground as they spend their BTC away into circulation.

What makes BTC 'less real' is that you can't use it to pay the IRS.

It's all fun and games until you don't pay taxes, or you try to pay taxes using currency not recognized by the government.

I don't think you can pay in Euros either, you'd have to convert them to good ole USD first, just like BTC.

Excuse me?

Well, you see, you actually can pay taxes with Euros. In Europe. The USA isn't the only country in the world.

What point are you trying to make? The question was about paying taxes to the IRS, which is the American tax collection agency. The assertion was that Euro's were acceptable to the IRS while BTC was not, but that actually is incorrect.

The Satoshi Standard: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/536xl9/satoshi_the...

I have thought about this as well but realised the following:

Let's say you are Swiss and are trying to buy something from Amazon and everything is priced in Euro - you also have to convert all the prices in your head. Is the Swiss Franc not a real currency anymore?

To "measure" value we need to know the purchase power. People have no feeling for the purchase power of a highly volatile asset. hence most people convert the value to their local currency. We do this with gold/stocks/crypto. there is hardly any "deeper" meaning in that. its just how our brain can grasp what could be bought with X amount of asset Y. If the stable currency would loos this property we would use another. Like if the USD would become highly volatile or if there would be hyperinflation people would no longer convert to USD. there are plenty places where the local currency isn't stable and people convert asset value to something else usually a foreign currency like the USD or EUR.

> not to mention completely disconnecting wealth from societal value creation.

You forget to mention that a lot of early adopters are actual criminals. Yeah, go make them the rulers of the world. Let's see how this ends.

Do you have a citation for this?

Silk Road is just one example, there a lot more. Though, you can use logic. Money transfers without governments control is what criminals want the most.