Quote from: zooitje on March 15, 2013, 10:36:38 AM

Quote from: MoonShadow on March 15, 2013, 04:54:59 AM

It doesn't have to. Before Silk Road, there was an early coin mixer on Tor, that I suspect was either morphed into or annexed by Silk Road. I believe that it may have been the first to call itself The Bitcoin Laundry, iirc, but there have been other mixers that have taken that name since the one on Tor faded away. I wouldn't be surprised if there are more on Tor that use that name, either. I don't know this to be true, but when Silk Road first came out, I opened an account to poke around, and was struck by the similarity of the onboard bitcoin mixer to that of the previous mixer I had seen on Tor. Those similarities may have just been a product of a common intent, or copied sourcecode, but maybe not.

Sure. It probably was a bitcoin mixer as you call it and those cryptoscientists stumbled upon it.

But that doesn't change the point of the amount of control over Bitcoin by a very small group (60% of all BTC now? 25% in 2140?). As mentioned above the way money is spread around the US now, is not in any way balanced. But that's _only_ the US. If the US messed up, the Chinese wouldn't have a problem with that. Bitcoin has potential to grow to a world wide scale (and it looks like it might will). Just imagine Bitcoin going mainstream worldwide in a long time. In that case we have a currency where, say, 0.00000001% of the entire population has control over (or maybe a few hundreds of people, i don't know exactly).

In my view, but please correct me if i'm wrong as i'm still new to Bitcoin, this is way too risky to build a serious global economy around.

You're wrong, but I don't have the time to explain why. Still, the wealth distribution of the US $ is actually worse, and for many practical reasons we can expect that the distribution of bitcoins will improve over time as the value increases an those early adopters choose to divest.