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It seems quiet ironic that Bitcoin/Cryptocoin advocates claim the minting and production using algorithms like Satoshi's BTC will be better than fiat when it ju
by nosuchthing 9y ago
It seems quiet ironic that Bitcoin/Cryptocoin advocates claim the minting and production using algorithms like Satoshi's BTC will be better than fiat when it just creates a new oligarchy... easier to co-opt due to the consolidation of control within the cryptocoin ecosystems.
Banks and the finance sector took note of BTC prior to 2014, and with the way BTC is produced anyone with enough capital entering into BTC - especially during the first few years would be in a position to take vast amounts of BTC at low cost and simply wait and attempt to convince other people to exchange their wealth for BTC which due to how the supply begins to be cut off, serves to enrich the minority of oligarchial squatter-speculators.
Bitcoin is often misunderstood as "deflationary" yet checking the math under the hood and we see that's a half truth. The supply inflates every 10 minutes, and for the first few years Bitcoin was hyperinflationary, granting a small group of users the majority of the supply.
Satoshi Nakamoto
Thu Jan 8 14:27:40 EST 2009
I made the proof-of-work difficulty ridiculously easy to
start with, so for a little while in the beginning a
typical PC will be able to generate coins in just a few
hours. It'll get a lot harder when competition makes the
automatic adjustment drive up the difficulty.
first 4 years: 10,500,000 coins
next 4 years: 5,250,000 coins
next 4 years: 2,625,000 coins
next 4 years: 1,312,500 coins
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https://medium.com/@balajis/quantifying-decentralization-e39db233c28e https://medium.com/@balajis/quantifying-decentralization-e39... :
One important point: if we actually include all 7 billion
people on the earth, most of whom have zero BTC or
Ethereum, the Gini coefficient is essentially 0.99+. And
if we just include all balances, we include many dust
balances which would again put the Gini coefficient at
0.99+. Thus, we need some kind of threshold here. The
imperfect threshold we picked was the Gini coefficient
among accounts with ≥185 BTC per address, and ≥2477 ETH
per address. So this is the distribution of ownership
among the Bitcoin and Ethereum rich with $500k as of July
2017.
In what kind of situation would a thresholded metric like
this be interesting? Perhaps in a scenario similar to the
ongoing IRS Coinbase issue, where the IRS is seeking
information on all holders with balances >$20,000.
Conceptualized in terms of an attack, a high Gini
coefficient would mean that a government would only need
to round up a few large holders in order to acquire a
large percentage of outstanding cryptocurrency — and with
it the ability to tank the price.
With that said, two points. First, while one would not
want a Gini coefficient of exactly 1.0 for BTC or ETH (as
then only one person would have all of the digital
currency, and no one would have an incentive to help boost
the network), in practice it appears that a very high
level of wealth centralization is still compatible with
the operation of a decentralized protocol. Second, as we
show below, we think the Nakamoto coefficient is a better
metric than the Gini coefficient for measuring holder
concentration in particular as it obviates the issue of
arbitrarily choosing a threshold.
...However, the maximum Gini coefficient has one obvious
issue: while a high value tracks with our intuitive notion
of a “more centralized” system, the fact that each Gini
coefficient is restricted to a 0–1 scale means that it
does not directly measure the number of individuals or
entities required to compromise a system.
Specifically, for a given blockchain suppose you have a
subsystem of exchanges with 1000 actors with a Gini
coefficient of 0.8, and another subsystem of 10 miners
with a Gini coefficient of 0.7. It may turn out that
compromising only 3 miners rather than 57 exchanges may be
sufficient to compromise this system, which would mean the
maximum Gini coefficient would have pointed to exchanges
rather than miners as the decentralization bottleneck.
Conversely, if one considers “number of distinct countries
with substantial mining capacity” an essential subsystem,
then the minimum Nakamoto coefficient for Bitcoin would
again be 1, as the compromise of China (in the sense of a
Chinese government crackdown on mining) would result in
>51% of mining being compromised.
- freejulian 9y agoAnyone can mine. Anyone can earn bitcoin. Early adopters have been rewarded, sure, but the distribution of bitcoin has been steadily increasing. The vast majority of the world is able to exchange their local currency for bitcoin should they decide to take that risk. How exactly do you propose a decentralized currency controlled by no one bootstrap itself?
- Retric 9y agoThe reasonable choice would be to mine a fixed amount of coins per year over ~100+ years not have a perimid scheme designed to artificially reward early adopters, and simulate a pyramid scheme. And that's sidestepping the issue with ~1/5 of all possible coins already being lost.
- nosuchthing 9y agoOr even further, keep the internal economic work:payment model consistent. All work pays equal tokens. Computational work = constant payment. Unfortunately no one has been able to create an algorithm which creates valuable compute work. Satoshi's Proof-Of-Work is more like Proof-of-Capital-Burning ÷ time passed ÷ sum of all users and capital burning in network PoW is effectively guessing a random number. Nonce-cents
- gruez 9y ago>Computational work = constant payment. With moore's law, that would result in hyperinflation. Who wants gold if the amount that is mined doubles every 2 years?
- nosuchthing 9y agoGold? Computational work is not Gold. Database tokens acquired though a software game of number guessing (Satoshi's PoW algorithm), rewarding less and less as the number grows larger would be more akin to fools gold.
- 9y ago