Up to now: 1. only a fraction of a minority of the population have gained wealth from Bitcoin, and 2. those people had wealth enough to buy sufficient Bitcoin in the first place.
Bitcoin cannot be created out of thin air. You can't arbitrarily decide to inject more of it into the system. When you own Bitcoin, your holdings cannot be debased. Since poor people's wealth is mostly cash, debasement of currency hurts them the most.
There is a tragic irony, in where if a poor person throws their savings into Bitcoin, they are chastised as being foolish and preyed upon, and they need to be protected. If they keep their savings in fiat, they get debased (USD debased by 20% in 2020, 320% in last 20 years) as inflation eventually catches up. The Feds took away the ability to save. A Bank of America savings accounts offer 0.01% APY, 0.05% if you have more money. No one believes in a future where saving is worth anything.
A reasonable definition of 'poor' is holding no net wealth, or less - which applies to 30-40% of households in Scotland (for example):
https://www.gov.scot/publications/wealth-assets-scotland-200...
So your arguments here don't apply for my understanding of 'poor'. You have to be approaching median wealth before those arguments start to apply, if they do at all.
A poor person is not greatly affected by debasement of their savings in currency, because they don't have any savings.
A poor person is not considering throwing their savings into Bitcoin, because they don't have any savings (beyond essential cash).
"The bottom half of the income distribution had a huge share of its wealth tied up in real estate while owning essentially no shares of corporate stock. The top 1 percent, by contrast, wasn't just rich — it was specifically rich in terms of owning companies, both stock in publicly traded ones ("corporate equities") and shares of closely held ones ("private businesses")...So the value of those specific assets — assets that people in the bottom half of the distribution never had a chance to own in the first place — soared.
NPR also reported in 2017 that the bottom 50% of U.S. households (by net worth) have little stock market exposure (neither directly nor indirectly through 401k plans), writing: "That means the stock market rally can only directly benefit around half of all Americans — and substantially fewer than it would have a decade ago, when nearly two-thirds of families owned stock."
A poor person is not greatly affected by debasement of their savings in currency, because they don't have any savings.
Debasement eventually shows up in the form of inflation of consumer goods prices. And inflated housing prices makes it nearly impossible for future generations to ever own a home, depending on the city.
Sure. But nominal price inflation doesn’t matter to the poor as a class, but to those on fixed nominal income (e.g., many retirees, or people dependent on benefit programs with fixed rather than indexed benefit levels.)
Real increases in prices of goods disproportionately in demand at lower income levels matters to the poor, but that’s a different issue than general inflation.
> And inflated housing prices makes it nearly impossible for future generations to ever own a home, depending on the city.
Real increase in housing prices (or, more to the point, increases in housing prices relstive to a particular poor persons income), which has nothing to do with currency debasement/devaluation or general inflation, makes homeownership less accessible.
Home price to income ratio: https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-inco...
poor people tend to be net debtors considering dollar-denominated assets and liabilities, and to have most of their gross value of assets (even ignoring short-term consumables like perishable food) in physical goods, not cash or other dollar-denominated assets.
An argument has been made that "elites" were "brainwashed by the system" to believe that crypto would fail and thus they never bought in. Instead, "outsiders" bought crypto and may one day eclipse the old elites. However, crypto's "outsider" early adopters were mostly middle-class techies not working-class people. So yeah, Bitcoin is still not solving anything.
But meanwhile there have been several other crypto projects that have cropped up that have seen life-changing gains and are actually built on sustainable, value-adding platforms (Ethereum, Uniswap, Synthetix, Aave, etc).
lotteries are cancer and I'm in no way a supporter of them (except to acknowledge they may be the best answer to a problem that has no good solutions), but the model does work like a vice tax, in that a substantial fraction of ticket proceeds go toward various social and investment programs.
the prizes only consume 20-70% of the revenue (specific fraction depends on the game).
My original comment was just saying that I think Bitcoin is the best alternative we have, not that it would necessarily succeed.
Imagine if you were paid in BTC or saved money into BTC, you won't get diluted over a long enough time, that's the promise. When you get paid in BTC, someone gives you theirs, it's a zero-sum game.
Also, since nobody can print more of it, if someone goes ahead and plays around with high leverage and gets wiped out, their losses won't be socialized by bailouts.
On the other hand, I’ve heard from innumerable people that crypto’s volatility drives them away.
It won't be this volatile forever, as the market cap gets larger, the volatility goes down.
1: https://ftw.usatoday.com/lists/nfl-draft-trevor-lawrence-cry...
2: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/olaf-carlson-wee-first-coinba...
3: https://www.newsweek.com/miami-passes-resolution-allow-payin...
To reiterate my earlier points, none of them are doing this due to dilution concerns; rather the usual crypto speculation to cash out massive gains.
This neither fixes nor mitigates any sort of wealth inequality.
I don't care if it's cryptocurrency that we end up using. As long as we can pay people in some kind of security that cannot be inflated, then wages cannot be silently garnished via inflation.