Q: "Who's got all those 11M Bitcoins?"
A: "Some impolite guy in Eastern Europe running an underground asset market, BF members like Erik Voorhees and Roger Ver, an anonymous hacker(s) we're supposed to love because he/they wrote a good program, a few others."
Which was my point. He's purposely skewing his responses to show his own bias.
I was hyperbolizing to make the point that many newbs will find the true distribution of the money supply highly inequitable.
They'll only see it as inequitable if they believe your false assertions. You have no idea how much Bitcoin's Silk Road, Voorhees, Ver, Satoshi or anyone else has. "A few others" is an understatement to say the least. How is the distribution of Bitcoin less than XRP, the vast majority of which is held by one corporation and its funders?
Equality in this context is complete crap anyway. In all business ventures the creators and early adopters will always have an unequal share. There's roughly another 10M BTC to be mined, no one is stopping anyone from grabbing their fair share. Like I keep pointing out to you, the reaction you're getting is due to how you're spinning your answers. You're not talking about the 10M
BTC that's out there in the free market for anyone to obtain or that you can obtain free Bitcoin from numerous sites. You're telling people they need to upfront $130, which isn't true, you can easily buy $1 of BTC as you can $1 of XRP. And you could actually buy something with that $1 in BTC, the $1 in XRP only allows you to activate your account.
I don't know if you're genuinely trying to pitch both technologies to "newbs" or not, but if you are, I'm trying to show you why you're getting a more positive response to one over the other. It has nothing to do with the technology, it has everything to do with your pitch.
Honestly, I'd have serious reservations about trying to pitch the opportunity of Bitcoin mining to Joe Regular.
You're right that anybody can buy even $5 worth of Bitcoin. The question is:
WHY will they buy Bitcoin?
How to convince Joe Regular to buy them and use them? He knows about them. He's watching the ticker. Getting them is easy. Using them is easy-ish. Why isn't he buying? Shouldn't the price of Bitcoin be $200 or $500 by now? It's not, because he's not buying.
People won't trade in the FED and/or wtvr amount of sovereignty comes from a national currency for the fucking novelty of it. They need MANY MORE reasons why Bitcoin is great!
Ripple, a threat to Bitcoin? Let a few people pitch it that way if they want. I think the idea is ridiculous. The space is huge, and there's room for many innovative solutions. Bitcoin's competition is the USD, EUR, YEN, etc... Not Ripple. Slanderers of Ripple are shooting themselves in the foot.