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Comment by NikolaNovak | Hacker News Reader

"have fun staying poor"

I don't understand the notion that bitcoin is making all people rich. It is a transactional system at best. If you cash out you are taking somebody else's money who decided to buy it at higher price. It has no fantastic democratizing magic which will make all people rich. It is. It building new things.

I can understand people who are invested in it wanting to perpetuate the positive story so they can eventually cash out. But the pretense it somehow helps the world / others, let alone those not well off , strikes me as callous or insencere or both.

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> It has no fantastic democratizing magic which will make all people rich. It is. It building new things.

If you prefer to hold bitcoin instead of fiat and are willing to spend a little bit effort on that and digest some transaction costs, I think it is very likely you will become wealthier.

However the promise to get rich is something entirely different. Not many people in the world can be rich. You have to take out-of-normal type of risk. The more common bitcoins gets, the more normal it is and less riskier. The later you get into btc, the less likely it is that you will get risk. However it still makes sense financially.

How does everybody become wealthier? The money to put more Bitcoin (or any other popular crypto currency) into the system is not distributed among investors, it is literally burned.

Mining Bitcoin requires energy and hardware and new Bitcoins are the way to pay for those. Next to all money from mined Bitcoins goes to energy providers and hardware manufacturers. That is how these systems are designed in their respective whitepapers.

To put some numbers on it, at a price of $60k and in the current mining epoch, Bitcoin miners rake in ~$20 billion per year in the aggregate (not even counting transaction costs). All that money comes from diluting hodlers.

Yeah, the "get rich" phase of bitcoin is over. There's still money to be made, but it's extremely unlikely it's going to see the orders-of-magnitude rises it's seen in the past.

That said, there are still plenty of opportunities in crypto to make "get rich" money. NFTs are one area in particular right now, especially for people capable of learning to code smart contracts. That's not everyone here, but it's most.

> I think it is very likely you will become wealthier.

Bitcoin does not produce or destroy US dollars. So for each US dollar that you take out of Bitcoin, some later investor needs to put in a US dollar.

What happens when the supply of new suckers stops? It's not like BTC has any dividends, or makes some product that it can sell.

>>If you prefer to hold bitcoin instead of fiat and are willing to spend a little bit effort on that and digest some transaction costs, I think it is very likely you will become wealthier.

Sure, that's a distinct possibility. But where does that "wealth" come from? You only "cash out" if somebody else buys it at that larger price. I don't see a mathematical/financial model where bitcoin makes everybody wealthier. It's not about risk aversion or smarts or anything; Bitcoin doesn't create a new thing.

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