Against Overuse of the Gini Coefficient
vitalik.ca
vitalik.ca
I don't think most people care about the Gini in crypto because they are afraid of the crypto poor starving. I think they care because a high Gini means there are some super rich that could flood the market with their coins and make the price tank.
So the discussion in crypto about Gini is held from an investment perspective.
Is there good data out there to use as input for those formulas?
Often when I read about distribution of crypto, the numbers used seem very foggy. Like account balances on the chain. Those could mean anything. One individual might own 1000 accounts (in a wallet). One account might belong to 1000 individuals (on an exchange).
I would love to hear about some rough estimates for different crypto currencies. Like "How much ETH do the top 10 holders hold"?
I imagine you would have to talk to the analytics firms to get the best-in-class attempts to figure out what the split between individual users is.
In this linked tweet, it says the top 100 holders hold 26.4M ETH:
https://twitter.com/adamscochran/status/1255332319180840960
That should be roughly 1/4th of all ETH.
> Cryptocurrencies, even those that turn out to be highly plutocratic, will not turn any part of the world into anything close to dystopia A
This is possible and maybe even likely, but it is somewhat ironic to hear such a bearish case on crypto's usfeulness made by vbuterin :)
> First, start with some utility function representing the value of having a certain amount of money. `log(x)` is popular, because it captures the intuitively appealing approximation that doubling one's income is about as useful at any level: going from $10,000 to $20,000 adds the same utility as going from $5,000 to $10,000 or from $40,000 to $80,000).
Is there something I'm missing in the use of the word "utility"?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_threshold#United_State...
Vitalik uses the word "utility" the same way (mainstream) economists do: A numeric estimation of the satisfaction, pleasure, benefit, advantage, or happiness given by an increase in wealth.
What you're calling out is that the concept itself is problematic: as you pointed out, the assumption of log-utility of wealth is not entirely accurate because, in reality, increments in wealth have diminishing utility.
There are other limitations with the idea, for example, is it possible to capture in a utility function the well-accepted notion that losing a given amount of money is more painful than it is pleasurable to gain it? Or that receiving a small amount of money now may have much more utility than receiving a large amount of it in the future? Maybe, maybe not, but this is how economists attempt to capture and quantify human behavior regarding our wants and needs for wealth, inadequate as it is.
He's conspicuously burned or donated hundreds of millions of dollars (albeit not super liquid) in other crypto assets basically because they were a distraction. He's given away billions in Eth, and has approximately 0 conspicuous consumption.
Source? Also, is it "billions" ...of ETH? ...of dollars? At present market value? Or market value at the time of transaction?
It was 1 billion at time of donation but sits at about 400MM now. Im not sure about his eth donations but he has shown he isn’t greedy for money.
The above was talking in dollars not ETH.
>It was 1 billion at time of donation but sits at about 400MM now
The source you provided says he donated $1B in various tokens/coins, not in ETH (as bpodgursky originally claimed). This is an important distinction, because a $1B donation in a very thinly traded coin/token is worth significantly less than a $1B donation in a popular cryptocurrency like eth/btc. The same source also says he only has about $1B in ETH, which makes me even more doubtful he actually donated $1B (in value after liquidation, not at market price).
Take a look at any subreddits for these currencies too and you'll find the same sort of thing too. For example, I think the tech behind polkadot is a neat idea, but go to r/polkadot and all you'll find is discussion about prices and staking rewards.
I have a lot of mixed feelings about the space. A lot of the tech is pretty interesting and is pushing distributed consensus forward. On the other hand, 99% of people involved are trying to make a quick buck.
One of the problems crypto has is that it would be really hard to make a currency that was inflationary and still have any adoption. Bitcoin and others have tried various economic incentives to bring early adopters in and reward them. Is this the best way? Im not sure other coins like NANO have tried to distribute coins early by captcha and this was actually very helpful to people in poorer countries. Ultimately though most of them sold it as soon as they got it and the distribution looks to be about the same as bitcoin and others. Other solutions exist I’m sure but bitcoins decreasing inflation seems to be the best so far if you are making a crypto you want to succeed.
The same logic though could be applied to startups or any business. The first people in do a large amount of the work in helping it grow and are rewarded for that. Maybe too much but that’s hard to quantify.
Also reddit has never been the place to talk about tech. Most of the people buying hardly understand it. If you want to have better conversation they normally have developer channels. And again you could say the same thing about people talking about stocks on reddit.
Edit: a reminder not to downvote just because you disagree. This always happens in crypto threads and really just enforces that you always have the same discourse on them. Sad to see on HN i expect it on sites like reddid.
Inflation scales with your networth too but it doesn't reward you. You'll have to find an income source to cover the loss. Most inflation protected income streams rely on employing humans.
If you were to pay out a fixed UBI to all people and finance it with inflation then basically people with above average deposits would see the value of their bank account decrease and approach average wealth and people with below average deposits would see the value of their bank account increase and approach average wealth as well.
Assuming inflation = low unemployment holds then incomes would rise vs wealth which would be a reasonable approximation of the theoretical UBI I proposed above.
With a business where you hold shares, the business generates cash flow. That cash flow is invested in the business, in share re-purchases and in dividends. This cashflow increases the intrinsic value of each share of the business. The expectation is that holders of equity will be rewarded through the future performance of the business.
Those early folks are rewarded by people who derive value from the system - the customers of the business, whoever they are. They're rewarded for building a business not shilling their equity. The equity value is a consequence of the business being built.
On the other hand the sole source of gains from crypto come from future buyers. Worse, miners, especially on PoW chains, have to be paid and so constantly extract huge quantities of welfare from the system. With Bitcoin, it's something like 20-30 million dollars per day. That gets turned almost directly into CO2 and e-waste. 67MT of CO2 and 6.5kT on e-waste per year.
Early holders are simply rewarded for shilling, hoping someone else will grab their coins for a higher price. It's just an MLM scheme which yields zero intrinsic value.
Ergo, bitcoin is strongly negative sum while equities are positive sum vehicles.
The thing is, most people don't understand the economics or the fundamentals. Those who do get it (especially bankers, ex-wallstreet folks) intentionally downplay it rather than educating folks because they know their paycheck depends on people not understanding. The community pretends or fails to understand and looks the other way. They're all convinced they're "getting in early, on the ground floor of the future of money" - classic MLM stuff.
They're really only superficially similar, in the sense they're traded on brokerage-like services.
I work for a bank. Applying your analysis, one could argue that banks offer zero intrinsic value. After all, all they allow you to do is to move money around back and forth between different people.
But, as it turns out, moving money back and forth between different people is a very valuable service. Let me be clear: there are many activities practiced by banks that add very little value to the world. For example, one could argue that high frequency trading (beyond the point needed to provide market liquidity) adds very little value.
But banks allow people to exchange goods and services without having to barter. Banks allow people to store wealth and transport wealth and exchange both with other people without having to move around carts laden with gold and higher huge numbers of guards to keep it safe. Banks help to match together people who have capital ("investors", "savers") with people who could accomplish things if only they had capital ("borrowers","entrepreneurs") and facilitates them working together through interest payments.
Just as banks are far from useless (although some of the things they do add little value to humanity), so cryptocurrencies *MAY* be far from useless (although I agree the majority of people involved at this point are doing little more than engaging in a broad Ponzi scheme).
It's funny how low inflation or even deflation (if you consider 2% to be price stability) caused a rush of money into mortgage bonds and subsequently destabilized fiat currencies and cryptocurrencies try to beat fiat currencies on their way to becoming useless as a medium of exchange and subsequently make it useless for financing via debt.
You have too much faith in financial literacy of the participants in this market. [1] It doesn't really matter as much as you may think because they (1) are using these casino tokens to borrow more tokens to buy yet more tokens and (2) they see liquidations as a natural part of such lending.
[1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/are-we-dumb-financial-illiter...
What I meant was that it's the bank shares that capture the value you describe, not dollars. And because the bank does create the value you describe, the shareholders of that bank are rewarded by and increase in shareholder equity value.
There's no reason for the intrinsic value of dollars to go up because banks exist beyond their value increase attributable to a growth in GDP as a result.
The role you describe here maps to miners, which are in fact the third party that in aggregate facilitates bitcoin transactions. They are rewarded via block rewards for this service which similarly increases their shareholder equity. Bitcoin doesn't enable people to move bitcoins between wallets, miners do. Bitcoin basically unbundles the services banks provide, but it doesn't internalize them or capture the value they create.
So it’s all just redistributing wealth, burning a bunch of it in the process, and rewarding those with early enthusiasm for the idea of turning a lot of money into a CO_2 producing lottery.
You don't need to be on reddit. Also you can apply this logic to many things and it will sound good to people that have a bone to pick but will be flawed to everyone else analyzing it objectively.
Bitcoin is probably the least efficient system humanity has ever conceived of let alone reduced to practice at scale. It's an anti-efficient anarchocapitalist game of musical chairs with the safeties off whose sole job is to redistribute wealth from late entrants to early entrants. It yields no value, and once you factor in the miners, produces negative value from the perspective of the other participants. It's an MLM scheme for the tech crowd. 125X leveraged Herbalife meets a mob casino.
What I suspect the parent was saying is that the modern economic system for all its flaws rewards founders and early builders of businesses who create value for customers, not a random selection of ancaps on Reddit in 2010 who created a negative-sum MLM. It's a perversion - totally unjustifiable wealth inequality. At least you can point to Tim Cook and go, yeah, that guy created value. Giancarlo Devasini? Paolo Ardoino? Pomp? The Winkelvii? Really? Those guys? You sure?
A lot of the positive sum games only reward society collectively if it is cooperative and punishes society if it is competitive.
Pretty much every time there is a balance A = B people in a competitive society will try to increase A without increasing B because that is where they derive their individual benefit. Subsequently someone else will have to decrease their A because B stayed the same and A = B is always true for the entire economy therefore A must stay the same and we get a zero sum game that didn't have to be one. This generally happens when A is considered good and B is considered bad by society.
Here are some examples: income = spending, savings = investments, deposits = debts, produced goods = consumed goods, benefit of externality = cost of externality
Just try to convince people that both A and B are equally important. You'll fail every single time.
I don’t see why you think anyone is lording this over someone. The blog just addresses that the gini coefficient doesn’t fit well here. You can agree or disagree with that but you just seem to be hurling insults for whatever reason.
Bitcoin will take care of fiat money, and Ethereum, too. It's solving for the $1 quadrillion dollar problem, and after a few decades or generations, wealth around the planet will begin to be a little more evenly distributed, since even the Bitcoin billionaires will eventually need to spend their Bitcoin.
My point is that people that get in early in crypto are no different, of course they are more wealthy than those that come after, as long as they don’t waste it. There are always monetary rewards for people that recognize good investments before the rest of the crowd.
That person did not "get in early" on USD. They got in early on Facebook stock. Currencies are designed to stay flat-ish, and ideally have a low, predictable rate of inflation to among other things incentivize investment. Your job is to allocate that currency towards getting in early on something productive. Like an upstart social network.
The point of "investing" in Bitcoin is to make it harder to access its utility and make it harder to further invest into Bitcoin.
With stocks you aren't supposed to "overinvest". If the company is overvalued you'll lose your money one day.
If the former, am I understanding correctly that you're upset ETH is an appreciating asset?
If the latter then you're incorrect. Right now it's inflationary and after the merge to PoS it'll still be inflationary but less so. EIP 1559 has a gas burning mechanism that can make ETH deflationary but it depends on usage. Even if that is the case, it will only be short term until an equilibrium with the price is met (as ETH price increases, less gas will be needed/burnt, reducing the effect on inflation).
When I think of it that way, the Proof-of-Stake looks like it benefits mostly the large, early holders. I could be wrong but the current 6.1% return Ethereum gets is a very nice mining profit available to large stake holders. It seems like staking would be most easily done by people who already have large holdings and want to generate income from it. In that sense it's almost kind of feudal and I am wondering if POS was at least partly set up for that purpose.
But Ethereum didn't begin as POS, it began as POW and has been POW for 6 years now. They allowed anyone to participate in the pre-sale in 2014 and got BTC deposits from thousands of people to bootstrap the network.
As a result, no one has more than 1% of ETH supply. Vitalik himself has about 300K ETH or so (less than half a percent).
BTC Proof-of-Work today requires large amounts of capital to earn new coins and already ~89% of the supply has been mined. To mine the last 11%, you need massive datacenters filled with ASIC miners, access to massive amounts of electricity, and you need to spend capex on upgrades the whole way.
There's no perfect solution as each approach have trade-offs, but at least Ethereum is a platform. Anyone can launch a token on top of the platform, create a protocol like Uniswap and turn it into a multi-billion dollar DAO.
You have the same problem with any distribution that you want to summarise with a single number, e.g. colour temperature, CRI, house price indexes, rainfall measurements, etc. etc.
Now, governance concentration, that's a useful metric for a cryptocurrency.
A Gini coefficient is only useful if you treat it as a currency of a sovereign state, but it has basically no attributes of a good currency - and certainly doesn't have a state. It's not broadly accepted anywhere, it's not the unit of account for anything and nothing is priced in it. So yes, to your point, a Gini coefficient with that in mind makes no sense.
However because it says "currency" on the sticker, someone's gonna run the numbers as though it is one.
So unless you're measuring the world as a whole, you're measuring communities that have porous relationships with the outside world to some degree or other. But of course, cryptocurrencies are still much more porous than countries are.
But of course I believe in practice Gini is not calculated over people but over wallets.
Only deflationary if everyone rallies around bitcoin and ignores the altcoins, which isn't really what's happening.