Quote from: freebird on December 07, 2013, 06:05:36 AM

Quote from: bitbeg on December 07, 2013, 05:48:13 AM

It's not so much my opposition to wealth disparity in general, but my concern with how Bitcoin (cryptos) can potentially make the extreme disparity we have today look a lot less extreme in the future.

The best case scenario would be the creation of a new altcoin, with superior features to bitcoin, and its creators to be humanitarian type of people who would market the new coin as much as possible to ordinary people, so that there would be (1) more early adopters, and (2) more diversity among the early adopters rather than only geeks. It would have to be a project in which developers would work together with philosophical, socially conscious type of people to achieve a common goal of a "people's currency" that spreads wealth around rather than concentrating it.

My honest opinion is that bitcoin itself is going to become the cryptocurrency for the financial establishment. It's already starting to be embraced by hedge funds, and sooner or later it will be traded as an ETF on the stock market, and within a few years it will be playing a store-of-value role similar to gold in billion-dollar investment portfolios.

I will continue to own bitcoin, because it's a good way to make money and it's a useful tool for sending money abroad without incurring large fees. But I don't believe it's going to fundamentally transfer power to the common folks or anything like that.

Quote from: bitbeg on December 07, 2013, 05:48:13 AM

You say anyone should take the chance, but my point is that not just anyone can take the chance, nor will they.

True. But that, alas, may be part of the human condition. The smart and the lucky have advantages. It is what it is.

Quote from: bitbeg on December 07, 2013, 05:48:13 AM

I appreciate you actually engaging in a discussion. With that said, I think your position can be questioned. You say that this is a chance for ordinary people to get a fairer share, but if self-limited cryptos are the way of the future, then aren't a very small amount of early adopters and/or the ones with enough money to invest, going to always form a very small and highly disproportionate amount of wealth holders-- as is already the case today?

There is nothing actually stopping ordinary people from buying bitcoin. They just need to be made aware of it, and they need to be persuaded that it's worth the risk. Even somebody who buys a few hundred bucks worth of it today, could still make thousands of dollars from it within a few years.

The smart would look at this as nothing more than a speculative bubble-- everything about it is a classic bubble. If they are smart, they will probably stay away. There is a difference between smart and informed. So the informed might say this isn't a bubble at all, but they will have an extremely hard time justifying that to someone who is rightfully skeptical and using their smarts.

The ordinary might only need to be made aware, but since they're already relatively late to the game, their success will depend on the people that come after them. If there are none, they will fail. The people that got in early, or have already cashed out are the only winners so far. Time will tell if anyone buying in now will profit, but the fact remains that they will drive the price up most for those who got in early. So the later they get on board the less of a potential payout exists, not only because they're late to the party, but because the more people that buy in, the less potential there is for every new 'investor'. That will make it harder to get any ordinary, smart, or even extraordinary folks to buy in.