> But the fact that early adopters are psychotically rich for doing nothing is... one of the many signs of a flawed system
This is also the case with rich families. It doesn't make the system unusable.
This is also the case with rich families. It doesn't make the system unusable.
Bitcoiners are getting rich for designing a pump-and-dump scam & passing it along. It's called a pyramid scheme. You make a pitch that sounds convincing and then shop it out through "Multi-Level Marketing" strategies.
Why do Bitcoiners believe so much in a currency that allowed the originator to pull so much wealth out of thin air?
Say we estimate conservatively and say the Bitcoin ecosystem is only worth what was put into it. Well, now the founders own like 1/4 of all that money, for doing nothing but coming up with a convincing sounding scheme ("ummm... call it deflationary people will think that sounds intellectual"). A currency is not a currency if it is so distorted that it is radically reorganizing the wealth of those who convert to it.
You helped out the king and he granted you a lot
of land. Several generations later, your descendents
are ridiculously wealthy because you got in on the
'ground floor' of what would later become the world
economy we have today.Great headline: "Crypto-Currency of the Future Promises a Return to Medieval Economics via Anonymous Self-Proclaimed King"
Even in those systems, people had to WORK to get that $$. We're kindof seeing that now with those setting up the Bitcoin infrastructure, but early adopters are richer than they at this point -- just by trading for a couple magic beans before the masses decided they HAVE TO HAVE THEM!!!
I think the coolest thing would be if cryptocurrency folks set up the Bitcoin ecosystem decided there was a BETTER digital currency, and just utilized that same tech stack with the better product. F--k Bitcoin it was an experiment and it can rot
It's just a more ingenious version of Amway, because rather than pushing products around & trying to have to prod people into trying their hand at sales, they are being sold THE IDEA OF MONEY! And if people decide to buy that money, the value of the originator's money increases. And to make them feel as if they are equals he says "Oh well if you want you can work on these hash equations and free money will appear" but as long as it's propelling the greed for this "money" it will never hurt the value of his stash.
Sad stuff. and the greatest beneficiaries are probably the criminal organizations who use it. Half the reason i wanna see it crash is because it will wipe a lot of bank accounts used by gambling organizations etc. who prey on misery to begin with.
Bitcoin is the risk I knowingly didn't take, because I didn't think it would amount to anything in the future.
They would fall under the rubric of what the parent comment said about "rose to political power." The old nobility got that way because they supported the king in military campaigns in exchange for titles, land, and protected agricultural or mercantile monopolies and warrants. (Incidentally, the origin of the word "entitled" dates back to the titling of the nobility by royal authority. A title is, in essence, the exclusive right to something. In many cases, that right was to specific regions or lands. When we say that someone is "entitled to" something, or "has a sense of entitlement," we are figuratively harkening back to an age when an "entitlement" was something very literal.)
For what it's worth, the fluidity of the nobility is vastly underreported in popular conception. Noble families rose, fell, were made, were broken, etc., about as often as in Game of Thrones. Today's "old old money" descends from the old old noble houses who, by some combination of luck and savvy, ended up on the right side of countless civil wars, uprisings, wars of succession, and dynastic transitions.
Did these families "earn" their fortunes? I'd say no more and no less than any of today's political elites. We're kidding ourselves if we believe the political patronage system in the US is all that different from the political patronage system of the Tudor dynasty, or that of Louis XIV. The mechanics of government are different; the rules of the "Game" are entirely unchanged. (Replace "King" with "Presidential Administration.")
Even if you don't believe in bitcoin, the problem with fiat currencies is that they are insecure.
> Baaaaaw Bitcoiners' wealth are disproportionate to their merit
Just like in fiat currency, in Bitcoin, lots of people who don't "deserve" anything are rich. Deal with it or go back to your imaginary universe that gives economical advantages to people based on "merit". Notice how I'm using quotes around the words that have no objective definition.
> A currency is not a currency if it is so distorted that it is radically reorganizing the wealth of those who convert to it.
What is your definition of currency?
Currency is something relatively stable, it's not a trading platform. I spoke about it in this way the other day --
One should not have to consult an exchange rate to figure out how much their currency is worth. They should know what it's worth by how much it costs for a dozen eggs. If that number changes rapidly (dozen eggs costs 1 BTC Monday, 3 on Friday, .5 next month, 100 in the future, .002 after that) well.... you don't have a currency, you have a speculative commodity.
The only reason Bitcoin users don't complain is because they're mostly hoarders/traders & the general trend is up.
Please explain to me (or refer me to material explaining) how USD can possibly be stable when used by billions of people. Just because it's been stable from my point of view, doesn't mean it's stable for everyone. If your explanation relies on trusting a single person or organization, you see why I favor Bitcoin.
> The only reason Bitcoin users don't complain is because they're mostly hoarders/traders & the general trend is up.
The only reason fiat users don't complain is because from their perspective it looks like it's working.
He's the single person YOU rely on -- the one who designed the mining system, currency caps, etc. Ridiculous.
USD is more distributed than Bitcoin just because people are always watching theorizing monitoring USD. Bitcoin is at the mercy of market manipulators and there are no legal protections provided against even basic tricks.
> He's the single person YOU rely on.
For security, no. The protocol is public. So I assume you mean only by market manipulation. But how so? Is this the same way I rely on Bill Gates not to trade all his money to a foreign currency?
Inflation figures for USD are readily available. That it is more stable when considered against most goods and services than bitcoin is not something about which there is any room for serious dispute.
This is not the observation of one person or perspective. It's the actual purchasing power of USD.
I am assuming that you are fine with 90% loss in purchasing power of the US dollar in the last 100 years.
This is just not true for many currencies that have undergone hyper-inflation and hyper-deflation. You are only comparing btc to the most dominant currencies in the world right now, and btc obviously is not one of the most dominant currencies.
This is true. But generally speaking, people go quite a bit out of their way to use currencies that are perceived to have a predictable future value.
This is why the dollar (and the Euro) is so popular the world over; it's value is pretty predictable, compared to most other commodities.
When that happens, people tend to abandon them as currencies (though a currency undergoing hyperdeflation would be hoarded as a store of value).
Doing what amounts to a a "reverse split" on the currency is a measure issuers take to get the unit value of currency to a usable value.
They didn't just buy a few bytes of data & see the value appreciate by 9billion% just for sitting on their fat asses.
And that's the other issue. Land is an ACTUALLY limited resource. We don't know how to pull it out of thin air. The Bitcoin currency is artificially limited just to force a supply/demand situation. People can make other competing currencies just by forking the code.
Or really anyone who buys a stock early for a company that becomes huge.
I mean, if you buy bitcoins right now you are speculating that it will become a stable currency at some point. It offers a bunch of interesting and disruptive features that cut out a lot of middle men.
.com addresses appreciated in value because they are an actual good -- an address on the web that only 1 person can own. Bitcoin is a currency that isn't serving its purpose yet and whose function can be easily mimicked. All it is is an open source codebase & some infrastructure. If another coin (Litecoin, for example) were to take off, they would just add support for that too no big deal.
Point being, it isn't the sole implementation of this concept. .com addresses are by nature unique.
There are alt DNS systems as well.
IMO, the best analogy for Bitcoin is gold. Gold is valued way beyond its intrinsic value and yet, few people claim that gold is a pyramid scheme.
I don't want to get into the other thing. There are a ton of things that distinguish gold from BTC. For one, it has an intrinsic value. As in, "worst case scenario I have to sell this gold to a metalworker/scientist/jeweler/whoever who worse with gold".
If Bitcoin doomsday hits who is gonna pay a cent for one more file on their system. Useless bytes of data are not a commodity.
All markets get created out of thin air. Everything you use now at one point had someone looking at it thinking, "what the hell is that ever going to be good for?"