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Comment by thrush | Hacker News Reader

I am completely on board with Bitcoin, but I'm a bit amazed (for lack of a better term really) on how wealthy current Bitcoin participants will become when Bitcoin becomes ubiquitous.

It seems that it would be more fair that everyone just transfer their current personal value into bitcoin value to avoid the inflation effect.

There is no doubt that the current participants are creating incredible value for the rest of the world, and should be rewarded, but it's truly scary how much money they will have. I'd be interested to see someone do the math on how rich they would become, but I think it would be scary.

I feel that democracy is to politics as what bitcoin is to the economy, but our founding fathers were not turned into trillionaires.

My understanding is certainly limited, but I think the reality is plausible.

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Currencies circulate. If Bitcoin succeeds as a currency, it will be because those big holders put their bitcoins back into the economy, which gives them a chance to pool at the people and organizations who are creating the most value and not the people who originally mined them. If large Bitcoin holders do not put their money back into the economy, Bitcoin will fail as a currency and their holdings will be worth nothing.

This is one reason I'm somewhat more optimistic about Dogecoin. Dogecoin culture is explicitly centered around tipping, donations, and goods & services, which is what you need to get a new currency going.

It's also quite interesting that the whole progression of gold -> dollars -> Bitcoin -> Dogecoin follows Gresham's Law [1]. At each stage, currencies that are hoarded for their value are replaced by currencies that are intrinsically more worthless, because the lower value of those currencies means they can be held by a larger fraction of the population who has a demand for goods & services but no means of payment. This makes me wonder if in the absence of central regulation, currencies are subject to the same disruptive innovation forces as the tech industry, where the success of a currency sows the seeds of its eventual downfall.

It's funny how each new copycoin tries to compare itself with Bitcoin, and assume Bitcoin will become a thing of the past. Every single copycoin does the same. Both Litecoin and Dogecoin users said "Bitcoin paved the way for Litecoin/Dogecoin". Now look at the Litecoin guys. They are starting to see how little value they added, and now that other coins like Doge did the same, their value is starting to get diluted and will probably just die eventually. The same will happen with Quark, Dogecoin, Shitcoin, etc.

And don't get me started with the obnoxious doge tips. If the tips are worth less than a penny keep them to yourself please.

I can see where you're coming from and kind of agree, but I'm cool with all the new altcoins popping up. I think it helps to legitimise the whole concept and shift it from a fringe movement to a more mainstream idea.

While I understand your frustration with Dogecoin, I think it's power (other than not taking itself too seriously) is that it's extremely liquid. It means you see it move around a lot more and can be generally used in place of karma/upvotes (which aren't really worth anything).

Ultimately I encourage all of this experimentation. I feel that entirely new economic paradigms will emerge from all of this if we let it.

Who knows where it's all going to end up, hopefully somewhere none of us can predict.

If you are talking solely about Reddit tips, the reason you see more Doge is because the bitcointip bot has been banned from basically every subreddit. And Bitcoin tips were worth real money, not imaginary points (the usual tip is 20 doge. Seriously? I could tip with Bitcoin every comment I read if I'm going to be such a cheap bastard), and usually spawned long threads explaining what Bitcoin is, the blockchain, etc. Doge tips are accompanied with dog talking and funny pictures. And then we have to withstand the "technical" arguments for how Doge will surpase Bitcoin, oh god, please kill me.

>>usual tip is 20 doge. Seriously?

Think of it not as a negative thing ("cheap bastards!") but as a cheap A/B test. Now we know how much in actual monetary value micropayments can be based on.

20 DOGE ~= $0.03 (or 3 cents).

Prior to cryptocurrencies, there was no way to test this out in a live setting because money transmission fees would have prevented this on a large scale. Pay walls have to charge enough to cover credit-card fees + operating + profit margin in monthly or yearly amounts (or per hefty per-article fees); perhaps now they can harvest real data to determine whether micropayments would work via cryptocurrencies,

Cheap, live, at-scale economic experiment in micropayments (or micro-tips if you want to be pedantic).

Micro-payments were not enabled by the cryptocurrency itself. They were enabled by the bitcointip bot (or doge or whatever), since they are off the blockchain, so nothing special was needed for this, just your usual centralized system. And if a Bitcoin clone enables microtransactions, it's because it's not big enough and doesn't need to worry about dust/spam transactions yet.

As usual, dogecoiners don't understand the first thing about their own currency. They think "more coinz is better because microtransactions". I can't believe so many people have trouble grasping the concept of decimals.

I didn't know that was one of the motivations for dogecoin. I agree that switching to a different display for bitcoins (e.g. mBTC or uBTC) would seem the more "logical" choice. But a majority of people seem stuck on this time and time again which suggests some sort of cognitive bias.

Dogecoin's genius is that they looked at how people actually act and saw "Many people have trouble grasping the concept of decimals", and then figured "Hey, we'll solve this by inflating the currency so that 0.005 BTC = 500 Doge!" It's an incredibly elegant solution to a real problem.

Logical fallacies that exist in people's heads are every bit as real as technical limitations, and much harder to work around. You can fix your product; you cannot fix a few hundred million peoples' inability to do math. So work around it and adapt your product (or currency) to the world as it actually exists rather than the world that you would like to see.

It's not incredibly elegant, it's just dumb. Would you say Infinitecoin was genius too? And it's mostly just an American problem (no wonder it exploded in Reddit, where the majority are American), since you guys are taught to use weird units, and all of you struggle trying to understand mBTC and uBTC which are simply powers of ten. Creating a new currency changing only the unit used and adding a funny picture of a dog is not genius, and saying such thing is an insult to the technology and its creator.

A few of the very earliest participants in the bitcoin community (who got in before the first big peak at $32) have 100K BTC.

As a rough order of magnitude estimate, if Bitcoin gets to be as big a thing as gold, then it will be worth about $10 trillion. Since there will be about 20 million BTC by then, those individuals will be worth about $50 billion. This is a lot of money to be sure, but there won't be many of those people, and this is not out of line with the world's very highest net worth individuals.

The people who got in after that peak will probably be worth at least an order of magnitude less. And if Bitcoin turns out to be a smaller deal than gold, it might "only" create fortunes worth 9 figures of USD.

Apparently Satoshi has around 1 million BTC [0] which is staggering plugging your numbers. That'd put him at $500 billion which is insane. Since you said 20 million BTC (less than the total there will ever be), we're talking within about 20 years right? It would be incredibly interesting to see what happens if somebody ends up with a theoretical worth exceeding the top 10 wealthiest people in the world, but I wonder whether the mystery of who he is could actually stop that happening. Also only 4 individuals are worth more than $50B so that's pretty incredible too. [1]

[0] http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/bitcoin-mints-its-first-bil... [1] http://www.forbes.com/billionaires/list/

That also assumes that he still has the private key to his address(es).

Inflation adjusted, that would put him in the range of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Mellon, etc. If (and it's a big if) bitcoin was worth as much as the world gold market, it isn't disruptive like an internet startup, it's disruptive like Marxism. We could argue about the insanity suggesting that bitcoin will reach that sort of value, but if it somehow did, then $500 billion isn't totally out of line.

I think it's pretty obvious at this point that Satoshi Nakamoto is just Gavin Andresen's pseudonym. Is there anything wrong with that assumption?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_Andresen

https://github.com/gavinandresen

https://twitter.com/gavinandresen

https://plus.google.com/117494054859918211010

I haven't really researched either character, but Gavin seems to claim/imply he isn't Satoshi.

' This is quoted from the defunct Bruce Wagner Bitcoin podcast:

"Bruce Wagner : When was the last time you chatted to satoshi <laugh> Gavin Andresen: Um... I haven't had email from satoshi in a couple months actually. The last email I sent him I actually told him I was going to talk at the CIA. So it's possible , that.... that may have um had something to with his deciding " '

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=113609.0

My reading of that thread is that it's common knowledge/expected that they're not the same person, but I certainly wouldn't claim to be sure.

That does very little to exclude him from the list of candidates potentially responsible for the Satoshi Nakamoto alter-ego.

A lot of people are using 'gold' as the measuring stick, but i dont think gold goes far enough.

The basis of all wealth is trust. Gold has value because people have trust that it won't be duplicated easily. The worth of all gold in the world is ~ 10 Trilion.

The stock market has value because people trust that commerce will continue to happen regardless of much else on the world. The value of all the world's stock is around 600 Trillion - which means there is more faith in the continued operation of companies than there is in the demand for gold.

The REAL breakthrough of bitcoin has nothing to do with money; it's the blockchain - an indisputable public record. If people trust that system to continue - a system oriented around an irrevocable record - it could easily be worth some fraction of the stock market. What happens if btc market cap goes up to 100T?

I think gold's real utility is that it's useful for things other than currency: jewelry, electronics, alloys, etc...

Correct me if I'm wrong: are you suggesting that instead of allowing a small number of early-ish adopters to get wealthy, you want to ensure that the small number of currently wealthy stay wealthy, for fairness' sake?

Your post reads like penny stock hype, which ultimately just hurts us in the alt coin community. Many smart people on both sides of the market have priced in future expectations and determined current coin prices. Certainly the hope is it will rise over time but to imply a free market is mispriced by orders of magnitude is disingenuous.

Don't be silly. The statement above is not meant to manipulate anything. Bitcoin will do what it does regardless of what is said here.

It's a very interesting thought. Wealth distribution is a concern is it not? In the fiat economies ~80 people hold half of the worlds wealth. There's nothing wrong with thinking about the present distribution among BTC, and how do we think it will evolve?

Amazement is related to awe, which has components of surprise and fear: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Plutchik-.... Fear will drive you to cognitive dissonance if you don't pay careful attention.

Your second statement makes no sense from a practical standpoint as there would be no way to transfer all personal values into any system en masse. This implies an unresolved argument is forming.

Your third statement confirms your fears and the reason for the argument.

Decentralized crypto currency technologies can also conceivably eliminate the need for the current government structure. Your comparison excludes this and limits Bitcoin to just the economy. Our founding fathers were mostly wealthy to begin with and their involvement in forming our government helped build that wealth further.

This is conjecture, but based on the fact we're seeing an unprecedented amount of sharing and giving going on in the alt coin ecosystem, I think any Bitcoin trillionaire/billionaire is going to turn out to be quite liquid with their funds, especially where building the ecosystem is involved. There's something to being able to trust whoever you choose to give funds to actually gets the funds without an intermediary getting involved. Add contracts to that, and you get massive intent initiated on a global scale for a given effort.

What is the difference between bitcoin early adopters versus startup early investors in the unicorn club? Both sets of people would have "scary" amounts of money (presumably if both valuations increase rapidly).

An on-going and updated analysis of the estimated wealth distribution of bitcoins shows up on the Bitcointalk.org forum[1].

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=316297.msg4779800#ms...

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