Comment by doggosphere | Hacker News Reader

Comment by doggosphere | Hacker News Reader

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Wealth inequality comes when you can create money out of thin air and buy bonds with it, injecting cash into the financial system. Bond owners get to sell their devaluing assets to the fed at inflated prices. Those profits get put back into the system via buying stocks, bitcoin, houses and other rare assets. The people who gain the most are the people who already own this assets, which is typically not the poor.

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.

> Since poor people's wealth is mostly cash

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).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...

"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.

> Debasement eventually shows up in the form of inflation of consumer goods prices

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.

Real prices have been increasing. They approach bubble territory.

Home price to income ratio: https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-inco...

> poor people's wealth is mostly cash

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.

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