I will even say more that all these super-rich people from the top ten richest people on the planet do not keep all their funds in the form of Fiat cash or in Bank deposits, but keep the bulk of their capital in the form of shares or shares in their business. Recently, the mass media slipped information about Elon Musk who does not have his own money and he constantly borrows it from others for living and food, so all this talk about fake wealth is both true and false.
That's a great point! From such perspective both the top50-500 in Forbes can be considered as "fake rich", but what differentiates them from other common people is that they know how to manage leverage for own benefit, while the average person falls into the debt trap and rarely succeeds to get out of it by getting addicted to the "cheap money needle". But actually, there's a theory (not sure how true that is) that the really powerful ones and elites who control most of the assets and money are not even in Forbes, or at least not the tops ones there.
But it will exist? As long as there are bitcoin nodes running and preserving the ledger, your assets will completely safe.
And do you think that it is plausible that the internet will just disappear for an extended period of time while billions of people have already come to rely on it, and hundreds of millions make a living off of it? Please.
I'm still confused as what exactly you mean by the "fake rich". Are the Winklevoss twins a part of the "fake rich" because they weren't as elite before BTC rallied? No, they are still two very high net worth individuals.
And even old wealth is flocking towards BTC right now, just look at the amount of institutional demand.
And do you think that it is plausible that the internet will just disappear for an extended period of time while billions of people have already come to rely on it, and hundreds of millions make a living off of it? Please.
I'm still confused as what exactly you mean by the "fake rich". Are the Winklevoss twins a part of the "fake rich" because they weren't as elite before BTC rallied? No, they are still two very high net worth individuals.
And even old wealth is flocking towards BTC right now, just look at the amount of institutional demand.
Well yes it can exist (or not - depending on severity of the assumed scenario), but in such case why would people need Bitcoin in that world?
As for Winklevoss twins, well it depends on their asset composition. If they hold most of assets in crypto, I wouldn't consider them that rich. One day things might turn out to be in such case that state would completely ban non-state-backed cryptos (yes, another post-apocalyptic scenario, but we saw that in China for example already), and what will happen to their wealth? What if states around the globe coordinate to fight against uncontrolled money supply and take expropriate all BTC from people? - This is not that impossible as it happened with gold before. At that time all fiat-based elites ones will remain where they were, all asset-ones also, all crypto-based elites will vanish...
As for old wealth flocking in BTC, - well yes and no. Yes - it is happening, no - we don't know the reasons for that, and the history showed that they do take opportunities to speculate on hypes (and even Goldman Sachs did before), thus we can't really call it that "old money is flooding to crypto", at least not yet.
However, the poor (not literally poor) ones want to show off, want to get hot girls, want to get attention from rich guys, want to show they also belong to the elite class. So what they can do? – They pretend to be rich / from higher social class.
As the others mentioned before, they are not Bitcoin's problem. Indeed Bitcoin emerged for realizing “Financial sovereignty”. Although nowadays it looks like it failed on its mission, but this is another story for another day.
I want address the “fake” rich problem by a philosophical point of view.
In ancient Greece civilization there were two kind of people, freemen and slaves. Whereas slaves have to be involved in the painful labor and life to satisfy their masters needs and their bodily needs, the free men have time to do the “heroic action”. The action by which excellence produces beautiful deeds. One could distinguish oneself from others, because of what “action” he did and not because of what he has in possession.
The “heroic action” is what we are missed in our civilization -since we are modern slaves-. So we pretend to be freeman by possession and not by doing “action”.
We have to act, particularly “heroic action”.
As the others mentioned before, they are not Bitcoin's problem. Indeed Bitcoin emerged for realizing “Financial sovereignty”. Although nowadays it looks like it failed on its mission, but this is another story for another day.
I want address the “fake” rich problem by a philosophical point of view.
In ancient Greece civilization there were two kind of people, freemen and slaves. Whereas slaves have to be involved in the painful labor and life to satisfy their masters needs and their bodily needs, the free men have time to do the “heroic action”. The action by which excellence produces beautiful deeds. One could distinguish oneself from others, because of what “action” he did and not because of what he has in possession.
The “heroic action” is what we are missed in our civilization -since we are modern slaves-. So we pretend to be freeman by possession and not by doing “action”.
We have to act, particularly “heroic action”.
Yes, in the modern world there is little room for feats and beautiful deeds.
Man creates new smartphones and computers. However, don't computers and smartphones change the mind and psyche of people?
People can learn by imitating more successful people by adopting certain behaviors from them. However, modern people do not admire other people, but new iPhones. And they don't learn from humans, but from computers. As a result, humans themselves become androids. Information and information flows are the most important thing in the modern world.
There is no place for feats and beauty in the modern world.
Man creates new smartphones and computers. However, don't computers and smartphones change the mind and psyche of people?
People can learn by imitating more successful people by adopting certain behaviors from them. However, modern people do not admire other people, but new iPhones. And they don't learn from humans, but from computers. As a result, humans themselves become androids. Information and information flows are the most important thing in the modern world.
There is no place for feats and beauty in the modern world.
I cannot disagree with you guys. In the modern world, you either "eat, or be eaten". And us, learning from computers, phones, books are de facto controlled by the ones who produce those and feed their ideas into those computers, books and phones. And your social circle of mostly less intelligent people (since most of us (but not all) will think we are the smartest in our own group), will be fed by others other ideas which will circulate in this social circle thus reinforcing those ideas which were injected by others. This creates a closed loop which is hard to escape from.
As for Bitcoin - yes, it wasn't created as a mean to be "fake rich". But to make simple analogy what I mean is: Bitcoin is a hammer, you can use it to build your own house (real wealth), or you can keep it and collect other hammers. But the real wealth is in the hands of the ones who control that hammer and the means to produce it (iron and wood if you wish) and can take it away from you any moment, or ban you from using it. Those controlling means of production (hammer and wood) controlled it for thousands of years and didn't change. It's just now they allow you to use it, and smart ones will use hammer to build houses, sell them and transit to owners of hammer and wood. The ones who keep collecting hammers will be out of the game when the music stops playing.
This is what I meant as "fake rich"
There is no place for feats and beauty in the modern world.
Right now, it looks like true, but there are solutions too.
What we need is a new paradigm, in which people are respectable, because of their believes and their “acts” of making life easier for others, we need a “practical altruism”. Something beyond just pure morality. A game theory in which everyone has to do the right act in order to make benefit themselves. A system in which even evil can not do bad things. Of course bad doers always can do the bad but the cost of bad must be far higher than doing good. Right now “we have” the necessities for this system and game theory and “we have to” do that as well.
Only in this system can we can hope survive the humankind, whereas in modern history and modern governments (less than 200 years comparing all our thousands years of history) we ruined most of our natural resources and environment and humanity.
The problem is, if right now, one of the evils (supposing a few evils are governing the world) dreamed to stop bad doing and start to good doing, immediately the other bad doers swallow him. As a result, the world is a place of constant conflict and fight between the forces of evil and worst evils.
We -slaves- have no place in this fight. In fact we are the material and victims of this war. We are supporter of this wrong pillar of economy and culture, when we buy their products. we reproducing this social order when we “show off” our possessions, and finally we remain slave and force our child be slave as well if we do not “acting”. The act by which we will create our new political organization.
I am not a dreamer, and I am pretty sure we have all the tools we need, in order to achieve human prosperity.
Right now, it looks like true, but there are solutions too.
What we need is a new paradigm, in which people are respectable, because of their believes and their “acts” of making life easier for others, we need a “practical altruism”. Something beyond just pure morality. A game theory in which everyone has to do the right act in order to make benefit themselves. A system in which even evil can not do bad things. Of course bad doers always can do the bad but the cost of bad must be far higher than doing good. Right now “we have” the necessities for this system and game theory and “we have to” do that as well.
Only in this system can we can hope survive the humankind, whereas in modern history and modern governments (less than 200 years comparing all our thousands years of history) we ruined most of our natural resources and environment and humanity.
The problem is, if right now, one of the evils (supposing a few evils are governing the world) dreamed to stop bad doing and start to good doing, immediately the other bad doers swallow him. As a result, the world is a place of constant conflict and fight between the forces of evil and worst evils.
We -slaves- have no place in this fight. In fact we are the material and victims of this war. We are supporter of this wrong pillar of economy and culture, when we buy their products. we reproducing this social order when we “show off” our possessions, and finally we remain slave and force our child be slave as well if we do not “acting”. The act by which we will create our new political organization.
I am not a dreamer, and I am pretty sure we have all the tools we need, in order to achieve human prosperity.
You depict the current system pretty well, but I personally really don't see it changing. Even Bitcoin was created for good of people, but it ended up where we are now. And as the time goes - it will get only worse. I wish and really hope you to be correct that we do have all the tools and what is needed to change the system and achieve human prosperity, but I don't think it is the case now...
It could be a simple solution for example - arrange a day X around the globe and raise and awaken to fight the old slave-owners, but this is what is likely to happen. Imagine we crate a simple sign-up and watch time website. People will sign-up for sure. There will be people thinking it's fake and will forget about this. There will be people thinking that "oh, my pizza delivery on that day is more important", "oh, I didn't finish my work assignment, so f*ck the Day X", "I have a date with a pretty girl, - definitely more important than some freaks doing some day x". In the end, for sure there will be some people who will try to raise and fight, but they all will get arrested, and some of them will try to cooperate with the police to get some materialistic benefits by turning in their friends whom they know actually went to "fight". And all this will end pretty quickly... It's an poisoned cycle - to change a system, you need resources, to get resources, you need to become part of system, and by the time you become part of it, you enjoy those resources so much that you don't wanna change anything, because you know well that if you do anything - your resources and nice lifestyle and safety will be taken away from you...
P.S. really love to see all you guys sharing such deep ideas and thoughts on this topic. Really didn't expect that it will attract such smart people!