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I saw a great, pithy tweet recently, and I won’t do it justice, but I’ll give it a shot. Crypto, and Blockchain, are like little fiefdoms that are being create

I saw a great, pithy tweet recently, and I won’t do it justice, but I’ll give it a shot. Crypto, and Blockchain, are like little fiefdoms that are being created, and the people who create them, and in the process mine the first couple million blocks, will be the Lords. As you say, the rich getting richer. And doing it all by hijacking this message of the “little guys” banding together against the establishment.

barnabee 5y ago
Certainly bitcoin is designed that way, and it’s one of a few reasons why although BTC has a good chance of succeeding as “digital gold”, it has almost no chance of being a general purpose currency. Other chains and tokens have they problem, too, to a great or lesser extent. However that is an implementation decision for each individual project, mostly around how supply is distributed and redistributed, and the inflationary mechanics of the asset. These can be innovated on by forking the original. They are also changeable (technically even in bitcoin, though in reality it seems unlikely), with the risk of forks acting as pressure to make beneficial changes. What I’m saying here is that it is possible and even desirable to design a cryptocurrency which doesn’t work that way, either from the start or perhaps via an “exit to the community” that over time devalues the stakes of founders and early investors and prioritises the users and value creators within the network. There are lots of mechanics that can be used for this, and most experiments so far have been limited or naive but I expect to and we need to see more of this if cryptocurrencies etc. are to succeed.