Quote from: TomHartburg on June 26, 2013, 12:31:38 PM

Personally, no, I think free markets are bullshit, precisely because of the consolidation of wealth and power that capitalism produces. The top 10 bitcoin addresses, as of 06/20/2012, controlled 4% of ALL (as in all 21million) bitcoins, according to forbes.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/06/22/the-bitcoin-richest-accumulating-large-balances/

Interesting fact, but that alone isn't alarming. Afterall, lets say the marketcap of Bitcoin is $1.5 billion (I know, i could go look it up, but I'm lazy!).

4% of that (the amount that's controlled by the top 10 addresses is $60 million. 10% of that (each addresses share, supposing that they're equally distributed, which they aren't) is $6 million. That's interesting, but that's all it is. Afterall, they could be owned by early adopters, people who bought their way in (ie, the Winklevosses), etc.

But I fully agree with the free markets being crap. This recent financial crisis was the result of "free markets" (ie, less regulation letting banks screw things up). If not for government intervening in the free market, we'd likely have a couple monopolies to choose from, and that'd be it.

Free markets would mean that we'd buy our gas and oil from Standard Oil, we'd buy our computers from IBM, and we'd go online through AT&T phone lines connected to AOL (afterall, the free market didn't create the internet, public spending did) and we'd probably bank at JP Morgan. The government has actually done great things in regards to breaking up the results of a free market letting the market be a platform for new competitors to blossom.

Bitcoin is the ultimate "free market" experiment. Like I said, I was originally excited about it. But more and more, I'm feeling that it anything, it's just going to provide a blueprint for a future cryptocurrencies of some good ideas and some poor ideas.

To get back to the topic at hand though, that's what most of the alt-coins are, in my mind, and they deserve just as much chance to get a foothold as Bitcoin did. 51% attacks are childish and reek of doing just the same thing that the Bitcoin community abhores when the government does it.

So, yes, use your freedom of speech to explain the virtues of Bitcoin, both on its own and against other challengers. But don't use it to simply advocate attacking other altcoins in the name of Bitcoin. Afterall, a few years ago, any argument that people currently use against Alt-Coins was just as applicable to Bitcoins.