I stumbled upon the article "What happens if bitcoin succeeds?" in which John Danielsson, Director of the Center for Systemic Risk at the London School of Economics, argues that the inequality between rich and poor will be further exacerbated.
https://voxeu.org/article/what-happens-if-bitcoin-succeedsThat leaves us with two interesting questions. What happens to the holders of bitcoin? And what happens to everybody else?
To begin with, the current owners of bitcoin will become the wealthiest people in the world, rivalling the kings and emperors that ruled over empires in centuries past. They literally will own all the money. They can buy anything they want. There aren't that many of them. Compared to the multitudes that own assets today via all the pension funds and mutual funds and the rest, it is a tiny group of people.
So, a sharp increase in inequality is an inevitable consequence of bitcoin success. And unlike the richest people of today – the Jeff Bezoses and Elon Musks, whose wealth comes from creating companies that benefit most of us – the bitcoin aristocrats will get their rank just by buying early. They will make no contribution to society.
And again, these conclusions are that bitcoin is a bubble, and because it is volatile, it will not be able to equalize with money.
So what are the risks of bitcoin going forward? Is it really capable of seriously dividing society and causing even greater inequality?
This is something that some people are already achieving with Bitcoin's current value and yes, their contribution would be questioned because all they were doing was investing at the perfect opportunity. Its also possible that in the near future, governments would take an interest with this matter because having someone so rich in a third-world country will pose as a threat to them but having Bitcoin in an advance country is not much of a threat since some people believe that Cryptocurrency owners will take a long time before overtaking people with businesses but that is not the case for Third-world countries.
I believe Bitcoin moving forward will have its pros and cons and with those not being realized by the governments is a huge threat for them and they might create rash decisions that would hurt Cryptocurrency users greatly in the future if this continues.