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Soooo. . . you're saying a tiny fraction of the population controls the vast majority of the resource? You mean just like every other major resource on the plan

Soooo. . . you're saying a tiny fraction of the population controls the vast majority of the resource? You mean just like every other major resource on the planet? :)

nuerow 5y ago
> Soooo. . . you're saying a tiny fraction of the population controls the vast majority of the resource? You mean just like every other major resource on the planet? :) I understand the need to try to dismiss this problem, specially from those who have a dog in the race, but the dream of having a magical pseudo-currency that solves all problems and unexplainably makes everyone richer and richer just falls out flat if there are actually men behind the curtain manipulating it's value to screw everyone over in order to benefit themselves.
- jimbob45 5y ago
  I have this problem with crypto in general on here where I can’t trust anyone with pushing arguments centered around pathos or ethos because I can never know if they’re just trying to gin up support for crypto in general so that theirs isn’t the final level of the Ponzi scheme. To everyone I’ve misjudged who genuinely enjoys the theory being crypto: I’m sorry.
- joshuaissac 5y ago
  > if there are actually men behind the curtain manipulating it's value to screw everyone over in order to benefit themselves The article does not support the claim that the top investors and miners are engaging in cryptocurrency manipulation with bitcoin.
- anonporridge 5y ago
  > magical pseudo-currency that solves all problems and unexplainably makes everyone richer and richer That's not what's exciting about bitcoin. What's exciting is that it is the first digital, global money that isn't protected by the proof of violence of the state. The US dollar is the world reserve currency because the United States is the best in the world at deploying destructive power, and the British and French currency before that when they were at the height of their power. It's a neutral currency that every nation state on the planet can be ok with, because the system is completely agnostic to who the participants are. The only thing it requires is that you have hash power and internet connectivity. Nation states will have proportional power in the system based on their respective abilities to deploy energy and compute power to the security of the network.
  - rhinoceraptor 5y ago
    Bitcoin isn't a currency, it doesn't function as such. It can only support at most a few dozen transactions per second. It's a speculative instrument, and its value is propped up by Tether, which pretty much everyone agrees is incredibly fraudulent.
    - RedBeetDeadpool 5y ago
      The Dollar isn't money, it doesn't function as such. It can't store value very well. Its a federal instrument, and its value is adjusted by the Federal Reserve, which pretty much everyone agrees is incredibly fraudulent.
      - namaria 5y ago
        Let's play a game. You get one bitcoin and I get the dollar value. Let's see who can obtain more goods in 1 hours with it.
        RedBeetDeadpool 5y ago
        Let's play a game. You get one dollar and I get the bitcoin value. Let's see who can obtain more goods in 20 years with it.
        rsj_hn 5y ago
        Let's play a different game. I get a dollar and you get the bitcoin value. Then each year, a random number is generated between 0 and 1, and if the number is more than e^(-1.5t), then each of us spends the dollar on a basket of goods and the game stops. We compare, after fees, who ends up getting more goods to decide the winner. Average velocity of money is 1.5. https://www.thebalance.com/velocity-of-money-3306130 https://www.thebalance.com/velocity-of-money-3306130 If you want to compare the usefulness of a bitcoin as an investment locked up for 20 years, then don't compare it to cash, which is used for day to day expenses. The whole point of cash is to spend it whenever you want. It's fine if you view bitcoin as an investment. But then your alternatives are other investments.
- Hermel 5y ago
  If you think the article provides evidence for any of what you are saying, you should read it again. Do you really believe the 1000 top holders of Bitcoin that control together about 15% of the supply somehow conspired together to manipulate the price? Yes, there is a lot of small scale shenanigans with crypto currencies, but Bitcoin has become very hard to manipulate due to the sheer size of the market.
  - nuerow 5y ago
    > Do you really believe (...) conspired together to manipulate the price? > Yes, there is a lot of small scale shenanigans with crypto currencies, but (...). There are no buts. Either the market is manipulated, or it isn't. You already acknowledged it is manipulated, but somehow the degree of difficulty to pull it off is of any relevance? Why do you feel this matters? Meanwhile, here's an interesting read. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-14/research-affiliates-quant-warns-of-bitcoin-market-manipulation https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-14/research-...
    - csee 5y ago
      The subject of those two sentences is different. The first is BTC, the second is smaller coins.
  - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
    I really believe that. Remember that the size of the housing market didn't protect it from manipulation in the early 2000s - having a huge pile of independent market participants doesn't mean they can't all be tricked into trading at the same inflated prices.
- koonsolo 5y ago
  > a magical pseudo-currency that solves all problems and unexplainably makes everyone richer and richer That is not what cryptocurrency enthusiasts believe. I understand that you have to explain to yourself why others are dumber than you, even though they made crazy amounts of gains. But maybe in the end, we just see something that you refuse to see.
  - emptyfile 5y ago
    A chance for a fast buck with much risk and little work? How revolutionary...
    - koonsolo 5y ago
      The best investment is to buy something that is undervalued. That also means you have to see value where others won't.
  - EdwardDiego 5y ago
    > But maybe in the end, we just see something that you refuse to see. I'm assuming you see an infinite supply of greater fools.
    - koonsolo 5y ago
      That is not what I see. That is what you tell yourself what I see.
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  "but the dream of having a magical pseudo-currency that solves all problems and unexplainably makes everyone richer and richer " I never heard that claim from crypto supporters, only from critics.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - EdwardDiego 5y ago
    You need to read more of their subreddits then.
    - mudlus 5y ago
      That's for he mislead, the normies, the grifters and shitcoiners. Those of us in the small minority "controlling Bitcoin" read stuff like this: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-d...
tromp 5y ago
The capped supply and heavy bias of coin emission toward initial years create a strong incentive for hoarding and pure speculative use. I would expect much wealth concentration if the emission had been purely linear with a fixed block reward, taking MUCH longer to get down to a small yearly supply inflation (100 years to get to 1%). Such a SLOW emission would focus on the use as a currency rather than "store of value". It likely would have made Bitcoin's environmental impact much smaller as well, without speculators pushing up the price.
- spiorf 5y ago
  But that wouldn't exist in isolation. A less inflationary cryptocurrency would be more desiderable to traders, miners would flee too and the system wouldn't be secure against attacks. You would end up with the same situation as now, just with some name swapped.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
No, this problem goes way beyond wealth concentration. The centralization of mining activities is extremely dangerous. The whole point of bitcoin is to be decentralized so that outside influences are minimized or eliminated. There is absolutely no point to this coin if it's centralized. All the energy spent mining it is being wasted on a useless coin that serves no purpose and whose only valuable quality is its brand.
danShumway 5y ago
Bitcoin was created in no small part to address this problem. The fact that it's not addressing it is a legitimate criticism of the coin. "Our brand new environmentally-inefficient, difficult-to-regulate, needlessly-complicated, easy-to-surveil currency also falls prey to the same financial consolidation outcomes of every other traditional currency" is not really the strong defense of Bitcoin that people seem to think it is. And "Bitcoin isn't established by state violence" doesn't work when states/corporations control most of the supply and have outsized control over the protocol. This kind of consolidation undermines Bitcoin's value as an experimental/democratic currency. From the article: > These observations led the NBER to conclude that despite the attention Bitcoin has received over the past few years, the ecosystem is still dominated by a concentration of key players, making the ecosystem susceptible to systemic risk like a 51 percent attack, where a group of miners could take control of the majority of the network. If someone is legitimately, honestly trying to pitch Bitcoin as a democratizing currency, then seeing outcomes like this should be worrying to them. The regular dismissal that traditional currencies have the same problems makes it hard to take Bitcoin proponents seriously when they talk about societal benefits that the coin purportedly provides. There's a disconnect here between the theory that Bitcoin allows equal participation by anyone in the network, and the reality that even the resources required to start participating in the network can be tightly regulated and are often controlled and manipulated through centralized state/corporate apparatus. And hand-wavy dismissals of that problem don't do the currency any favors. Why adopt a new currency that still has multiple downsides, if the upsides are constantly being waved away as unimportant by even the currency's own proponents?

Soooo. . . you're saying a tiny fraction of the population controls the vast majority of the resource? You mean just like every other major resource on the planet? :)

nuerow 5y ago

> Soooo. . . you're saying a tiny fraction of the population controls the vast majority of the resource? You mean just like every other major resource on the planet? :) I understand the need to try to dismiss this problem, specially from those who have a dog in the race, but the dream of having a magical pseudo-currency that solves all problems and unexplainably makes everyone richer and richer just falls out flat if there are actually men behind the curtain manipulating it's value to screw everyone over in order to benefit themselves.

jimbob45 5y ago
I have this problem with crypto in general on here where I can’t trust anyone with pushing arguments centered around pathos or ethos because I can never know if they’re just trying to gin up support for crypto in general so that theirs isn’t the final level of the Ponzi scheme. To everyone I’ve misjudged who genuinely enjoys the theory being crypto: I’m sorry.
joshuaissac 5y ago
> if there are actually men behind the curtain manipulating it's value to screw everyone over in order to benefit themselves The article does not support the claim that the top investors and miners are engaging in cryptocurrency manipulation with bitcoin.
anonporridge 5y ago
> magical pseudo-currency that solves all problems and unexplainably makes everyone richer and richer That's not what's exciting about bitcoin. What's exciting is that it is the first digital, global money that isn't protected by the proof of violence of the state. The US dollar is the world reserve currency because the United States is the best in the world at deploying destructive power, and the British and French currency before that when they were at the height of their power. It's a neutral currency that every nation state on the planet can be ok with, because the system is completely agnostic to who the participants are. The only thing it requires is that you have hash power and internet connectivity. Nation states will have proportional power in the system based on their respective abilities to deploy energy and compute power to the security of the network.
- rhinoceraptor 5y ago
  Bitcoin isn't a currency, it doesn't function as such. It can only support at most a few dozen transactions per second. It's a speculative instrument, and its value is propped up by Tether, which pretty much everyone agrees is incredibly fraudulent.
  - RedBeetDeadpool 5y ago
    The Dollar isn't money, it doesn't function as such. It can't store value very well. Its a federal instrument, and its value is adjusted by the Federal Reserve, which pretty much everyone agrees is incredibly fraudulent.
    - namaria 5y ago
      Let's play a game. You get one bitcoin and I get the dollar value. Let's see who can obtain more goods in 1 hours with it.
      - RedBeetDeadpool 5y ago
        Let's play a game. You get one dollar and I get the bitcoin value. Let's see who can obtain more goods in 20 years with it.
        rsj_hn 5y ago
        Let's play a different game. I get a dollar and you get the bitcoin value. Then each year, a random number is generated between 0 and 1, and if the number is more than e^(-1.5t), then each of us spends the dollar on a basket of goods and the game stops. We compare, after fees, who ends up getting more goods to decide the winner. Average velocity of money is 1.5. https://www.thebalance.com/velocity-of-money-3306130 https://www.thebalance.com/velocity-of-money-3306130 If you want to compare the usefulness of a bitcoin as an investment locked up for 20 years, then don't compare it to cash, which is used for day to day expenses. The whole point of cash is to spend it whenever you want. It's fine if you view bitcoin as an investment. But then your alternatives are other investments.
Hermel 5y ago
If you think the article provides evidence for any of what you are saying, you should read it again. Do you really believe the 1000 top holders of Bitcoin that control together about 15% of the supply somehow conspired together to manipulate the price? Yes, there is a lot of small scale shenanigans with crypto currencies, but Bitcoin has become very hard to manipulate due to the sheer size of the market.
- nuerow 5y ago
  > Do you really believe (...) conspired together to manipulate the price? > Yes, there is a lot of small scale shenanigans with crypto currencies, but (...). There are no buts. Either the market is manipulated, or it isn't. You already acknowledged it is manipulated, but somehow the degree of difficulty to pull it off is of any relevance? Why do you feel this matters? Meanwhile, here's an interesting read. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-14/research-affiliates-quant-warns-of-bitcoin-market-manipulation https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-14/research-...
  - csee 5y ago
    The subject of those two sentences is different. The first is BTC, the second is smaller coins.
- SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
  I really believe that. Remember that the size of the housing market didn't protect it from manipulation in the early 2000s - having a huge pile of independent market participants doesn't mean they can't all be tricked into trading at the same inflated prices.
koonsolo 5y ago
> a magical pseudo-currency that solves all problems and unexplainably makes everyone richer and richer That is not what cryptocurrency enthusiasts believe. I understand that you have to explain to yourself why others are dumber than you, even though they made crazy amounts of gains. But maybe in the end, we just see something that you refuse to see.
- emptyfile 5y ago
  A chance for a fast buck with much risk and little work? How revolutionary...
  - koonsolo 5y ago
    The best investment is to buy something that is undervalued. That also means you have to see value where others won't.
- EdwardDiego 5y ago
  > But maybe in the end, we just see something that you refuse to see. I'm assuming you see an infinite supply of greater fools.
  - koonsolo 5y ago
    That is not what I see. That is what you tell yourself what I see.
hutzlibu 5y ago
"but the dream of having a magical pseudo-currency that solves all problems and unexplainably makes everyone richer and richer " I never heard that claim from crypto supporters, only from critics.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- EdwardDiego 5y ago
  You need to read more of their subreddits then.
  - mudlus 5y ago
    That's for he mislead, the normies, the grifters and shitcoiners. Those of us in the small minority "controlling Bitcoin" read stuff like this: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-d...

tromp 5y ago

The capped supply and heavy bias of coin emission toward initial years create a strong incentive for hoarding and pure speculative use. I would expect much wealth concentration if the emission had been purely linear with a fixed block reward, taking MUCH longer to get down to a small yearly supply inflation (100 years to get to 1%). Such a SLOW emission would focus on the use as a currency rather than "store of value". It likely would have made Bitcoin's environmental impact much smaller as well, without speculators pushing up the price.

spiorf 5y ago
But that wouldn't exist in isolation. A less inflationary cryptocurrency would be more desiderable to traders, miners would flee too and the system wouldn't be secure against attacks. You would end up with the same situation as now, just with some name swapped.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

No, this problem goes way beyond wealth concentration. The centralization of mining activities is extremely dangerous. The whole point of bitcoin is to be decentralized so that outside influences are minimized or eliminated. There is absolutely no point to this coin if it's centralized. All the energy spent mining it is being wasted on a useless coin that serves no purpose and whose only valuable quality is its brand.

danShumway 5y ago

Bitcoin was created in no small part to address this problem. The fact that it's not addressing it is a legitimate criticism of the coin. "Our brand new environmentally-inefficient, difficult-to-regulate, needlessly-complicated, easy-to-surveil currency also falls prey to the same financial consolidation outcomes of every other traditional currency" is not really the strong defense of Bitcoin that people seem to think it is. And "Bitcoin isn't established by state violence" doesn't work when states/corporations control most of the supply and have outsized control over the protocol. This kind of consolidation undermines Bitcoin's value as an experimental/democratic currency. From the article: > These observations led the NBER to conclude that despite the attention Bitcoin has received over the past few years, the ecosystem is still dominated by a concentration of key players, making the ecosystem susceptible to systemic risk like a 51 percent attack, where a group of miners could take control of the majority of the network. If someone is legitimately, honestly trying to pitch Bitcoin as a democratizing currency, then seeing outcomes like this should be worrying to them. The regular dismissal that traditional currencies have the same problems makes it hard to take Bitcoin proponents seriously when they talk about societal benefits that the coin purportedly provides. There's a disconnect here between the theory that Bitcoin allows equal participation by anyone in the network, and the reality that even the resources required to start participating in the network can be tightly regulated and are often controlled and manipulated through centralized state/corporate apparatus. And hand-wavy dismissals of that problem don't do the currency any favors. Why adopt a new currency that still has multiple downsides, if the upsides are constantly being waved away as unimportant by even the currency's own proponents?