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How do you foresee cryptocurrency alleviating those problems when existing capital can simply produce and acquire the majority of coins/tokens in existence? Fo

How do you foresee cryptocurrency alleviating those problems when existing capital can simply produce and acquire the majority of coins/tokens in existence? For all we know the executives at the Goldman Sachs spent a few million dollars slowly purchasing BTC any any of the other altcoins since day 1. Money only has value if someone is willing to accept it. Existing capital merely transfers into whatever other forex, seashell, or feather trading system there might be. For long-run wealth distribution, what matters most is avenues to extract economic rent on a recurring basis That's oddly simplistic. No mention of wages, education, and tax policy? regulatory capture, political privileges, etc, and new forms of money like cryptocurrency could alleviate these. How would new forms of money impact any of those? There's certainly the possibility it could make all of those issues 1000x's worse.

CryptoPunk 9y ago
>>How do you foresee cryptocurrency alleviating those problems when existing capital can simply produce and acquire the majority of coins/tokens in existence? That is still a net gain for society. Look at it this way: cryptocurrency could potentially replace high rent-extracting institutions, and it would only be able to do so if it provided its owners with much lower levels of economic rent than the institutions it replaced (that's where it derives its efficiency advantage). Just to clarify: economic rent is defined as income that is not derived from productive activity. It is unearned, from a broader economic perspective. So now imagine the wealthy shareholders of Goldman Sachs sell their shares, and buy up all of the cryptocurrency. They're still very wealthy, but the assets they own don't hold the same unfair advantage that the GS shares that they once owned held. That is what it means to be in a fairer world. Eliminating opportunities for exploitation (which can roughly be mapped to rent seeking) is how you durably reduce income unequality. >>That's oddly simplistic. No mention of wages, education, and tax policy? It's simplistic because it's a very broad analysis that only distinguishes rent-seeking from none-rent-seeking activity. In this case I think it's appropriate given cryptocurrency has the potential to have a very fundamental impact on the macroeconomic picture. Moreover, speculating about the finer details of its impact might not be all that useful, given how hard it is to anticipate exactly what those more specific effects will be. The broader effects are easier to predict and thus a more appropriate object of speculation in my opinion.

CryptoPunk 9y ago

>>How do you foresee cryptocurrency alleviating those problems when existing capital can simply produce and acquire the majority of coins/tokens in existence? That is still a net gain for society. Look at it this way: cryptocurrency could potentially replace high rent-extracting institutions, and it would only be able to do so if it provided its owners with much lower levels of economic rent than the institutions it replaced (that's where it derives its efficiency advantage). Just to clarify: economic rent is defined as income that is not derived from productive activity. It is unearned, from a broader economic perspective. So now imagine the wealthy shareholders of Goldman Sachs sell their shares, and buy up all of the cryptocurrency. They're still very wealthy, but the assets they own don't hold the same unfair advantage that the GS shares that they once owned held. That is what it means to be in a fairer world. Eliminating opportunities for exploitation (which can roughly be mapped to rent seeking) is how you durably reduce income unequality. >>That's oddly simplistic. No mention of wages, education, and tax policy? It's simplistic because it's a very broad analysis that only distinguishes rent-seeking from none-rent-seeking activity. In this case I think it's appropriate given cryptocurrency has the potential to have a very fundamental impact on the macroeconomic picture. Moreover, speculating about the finer details of its impact might not be all that useful, given how hard it is to anticipate exactly what those more specific effects will be. The broader effects are easier to predict and thus a more appropriate object of speculation in my opinion.