The genesis block of Bitcoin disagrees with you completely.
Wall Street is having a bonanza with crypto. It's normalized the plundering of retail investors to a level not seen in a century.
In Bitcoin (fixed supply cap) that part is very very different.
One big difference is that fiat/political money (political because political decisions decide how money is created and spent first before it inflates and arrives to the rest of the population).
Like El Salvador: they use the Dollar. But do they get some of the newly (for free) created trillions? Or do they only see the consequence of that money, meaning seeing their money inflated away… their part of the pie stays constant while the rest of the pie got inflated/bigger.
[1]: just google “cantillon effect”. It is interesting (the power is not only in the hands of the money holders but also in the political decision makers and those who have good relationships with them… a bit like it used to be with religion and the state… but now still with money and the state)
I hasten to add that BTC currently experiences money supply growth of 1.7% p.a. (though of course BTC inflation has approached 100% in the last half year).
Sure it was. Definitely not the only selling point, but there is a ton of drivel out there about how it is supposed to liberate us from the big bad banks (banks are now replaced by Coinbase et al) How something that's supposed to be decentralized, consensus-based, not prone to manipulation by the greedy corporations, greedy individuals and governments is now actually turning out to be something else. And it even has some real equality-related use cases like wiring remittances to Argentina, or the failed El Salvador experiment. But overall trending in the opposite direction to equality.
While this isn’t without its downsides (though see Yanis Varoufakis on CBDCs [1]), the gains from it are socialized.
By contrast, an enormous percentage of bitcoin and all other major cryptocurrencies was mined (or worse, “premined”) in the first few years after launch. What nation of people benefits from this form of inequity? Cryptocurrency is entirely nationless.
[1]: https://the-crypto-syllabus.com/yanis-varoufakis-on-techno-f...
Ultimately, I agree with your assessment of the research avenue as a straw man.
Actually, cryptocurrency is almost two orders of magnitude more unequal. The top 1% owns 38.5% of the wealth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite..., compared with the top 0.01% of bitcoin owners.