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Comment by Synaesthesia | Hacker News Reader

The fact is still that the crypto sphere is even more unequally owned than the economy or the stock market, which is already extraordinarily unequal.

When I was first excited for bitcoin, it was because of its revolutionary capacity for people to transact without governments and banks, and to own and control that means themselves. Well that really hasn't panned out at all.

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I'm sure this is true, but it's still not a good reason to put out bogus statistics. There are other ways to argue this point without hurting your credibility by lying about it.

> When I was first excited for bitcoin, it was because of its revolutionary capacity for people to transact without governments and banks, and to own and control that means themselves. Well that really hasn't panned out at all.

This has panned out. This is the exact reality of crypto right now. It has nothing to do with inequality whatsoever. Solving inequality has not panned out, but it was never expected to, nor possible.

Huh? I'm sending Bitcoin without involving any government. You're doing something wrong if you feel like you need to involve them.

Except come tax time you need to declare your crypto..

Fortunately I live in a country where such thing is a big tabu. I only need to declare my gains (and only in case I'm holding less than a year) - and there are none if I am simply using BTC to send cash.

So btc has only gone down since you bought it?

If you buy btc, and value goes up, and you use it to "send cash" that is a gain.

BTC has stayed the same price for the duration of my transfers. It's just a few hours most of the time. There is also allowance in the law for this case - I don't need to declare anything unless I profit over $1k/year.

> for the duration of my transfers

What about for the duration of you keeping it in your wallet?

I buy it when I need to transfer (usually using a Bitcoin ATM) and then transfer it immediately - and sometimes I deposit it to the target wallet directly.

> The fact is still that the crypto sphere is even more unequally owned than the economy or the stock market, which is already extraordinarily unequal.

What are the specific figures & sources you derived this claim from? Last time I looked into this it was somewhat surpising, but there are huge problems with the methodology (e.g. assuming that 1 address = 1 person is a really broken assumption)

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fbloc.2021.7301... is a good attempt, but still flawed methodology. It's latest estimate for bitcoin is gini index on wealth per account at ~0.45

Which if it was a country would make it one of the least high in terms of wealth inequality which is hard to believe.

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

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