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Yes, it seems that human attention has become the ultimate luxury commodity. I think that a cryptocurrency derives a significant portion of its value from the m

Yes, it seems that human attention has become the ultimate luxury commodity. I think that a cryptocurrency derives a significant portion of its value from the mere fact that that a lot of people know about its existence. A lot of celebrities these days make huge sums of money in spite of being untalented. Being famous is valuable in itself. People (especially rich people) want to be loved and/or respected. The "why" doesn't actually matter. If you own a lot of something which a lot of people know about, then you will be respected. The blockchain is public. Everybody can see it. It's the ultimate instrument of vanity. In the future you'll be able to show off your wealth without the stigma associated with actually showing it off. People will be able to look you up on a popular blockchain and know that you are an influential individual. It solves a big problem that rich people have. They want to appear humble but at the same time they want other people to know that they are rich.

nosuchthing 9y ago
Yes, and we can see the Oligarchical squatters who acquired large stakes in Bitcoin. In economics, the Gini coefficient is the standard measure of how inequitable a society is. This is tricky to determine for Bitcoin, as it's not quiet a "society" in the Gini sense, one person may have multiple addresses and many addresses have been used only once or a few times. (The commonly-cited figure of 0.88 is based on one small exchange in 2011.) However, a Citigroup analysis from early 2014 notes: "47 individuals hold about 30 percent, another 900 a further 20 percent, the next 10,000 about 25% and another million about 20%"; and distribution "looks much like the distribution of wealth in North Korea and makes China's and even the US' wealth distribution look like that of a workers' paradise Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir found in a 2012 study that only 22% of then-existing Bitcoins were in circulation at all, there were a total of 75 active users or businesses with any kind of volume, one (unidentified) user owned a quarter of all Bitcoins in existence, and one large owner was trying to hide their pile by moving it around in thousands of smaller transactions. (Shamir is one of the most renowned cryptographers in the world and the "S" in "RSA encryption")" [1] via https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidgerard https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidgerard

nosuchthing 9y ago

Yes, and we can see the Oligarchical squatters who acquired large stakes in Bitcoin. In economics, the Gini coefficient is the standard measure of how inequitable a society is. This is tricky to determine for Bitcoin, as it's not quiet a "society" in the Gini sense, one person may have multiple addresses and many addresses have been used only once or a few times. (The commonly-cited figure of 0.88 is based on one small exchange in 2011.) However, a Citigroup analysis from early 2014 notes: "47 individuals hold about 30 percent, another 900 a further 20 percent, the next 10,000 about 25% and another million about 20%"; and distribution "looks much like the distribution of wealth in North Korea and makes China's and even the US' wealth distribution look like that of a workers' paradise Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir found in a 2012 study that only 22% of then-existing Bitcoins were in circulation at all, there were a total of 75 active users or businesses with any kind of volume, one (unidentified) user owned a quarter of all Bitcoins in existence, and one large owner was trying to hide their pile by moving it around in thousands of smaller transactions. (Shamir is one of the most renowned cryptographers in the world and the "S" in "RSA encryption")" [1] via https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidgerard https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidgerard