Nice summary. Worth discussing but I'm still not buying it.

As an aside, I think there are a lot of mixed metaphors and final paragraph doesn't follow in anyway from the previous paragraphs.

Note: I think it is 21,000,000. But agreed, there is a virtual account which the blocks are being debited from.

However for your metaphor, who is this very rich man? Why is he the ONLY one with money when we start the system? Why does this guy get to decide what the price for OUR services are? That doesn't seem very market based to me?

My metaphor twist is important because I want to show that the way blocks are trickled out is really a sociological trick.

If you believe in a fixed currency, the trickle out system should really bother you. It is by definition and design "monetary inflation". Obviously, the first person who received 50 BTC had all the value. That made him the second very rich man. However, according to your rules, if the second block was generated by someone else, 1/2 of the second rich mans values was taken away and given to a third now rich man.

By your very own terms, who is this very rich man, that he can choose to reallocate shares of wealth arbitrarily?

The only rational way to answer this question is to say, he's the very rich man! He gets to make the rules of his game. If you don't like the rules of his game you don't have to play with him. Therefore, by common agreement among all who choose to play the very rich mans game, there exists at least one moral reason for an individual or group to reassign other people's wealth. So you have given a first affirmative answer to your #1 question. I'll suppose you are asserting that there exist no OTHER moral reason.

Now, let's look at a different but more consistent metaphor that could have been used to boot the system, if you were a real austrian purest.

Suppose the rich man said, I'm dying. You 21 closest friends of mine get all my BTC. Take care of it and trade it with the world. He then gave each person 1,000,000 BTC.

Now you have the same logical stable state as you will have in "100 years" in your given example. It just gets here sooner. But the benefit is, you don't have to compromise on your most important value. Now there exists no group or individual who can reassign other people's wealth. Ideologically it is a perfect system.


I think you can give me a dozen reasons why my pure system will fail. I'll give only one to advance the argument.

1) Why on earth outside of the initial 21 now very rich men, would anyone else choose to use the system? Who are those 21 guys to make all the rules for all time? Why do they get to be the initial rich people and not me? What did they contribute that I am not contributing?

This inductive logic holds for any fixed commodity fiat money system.

I would guess there are roughly 21,000,000 motown records which were pressed in 1966. Why not use them as your fixed commodity? They are already "fairly distributed" among the initial population.

Or perhaps you could use the roughly 21,000,000 Playboy magazines that were printed in 1957. Those are "fairly distributed" as well. Well if you decide men should be most of the initial rich people.

In that case we could all decide that if you happen to have a 1966 motown record or a 1957 Playboy, you get a starting bitcoin.

After that every bit of your logic still holds. They don't even have to all be redeemed at once. You could redeem them for bitcoins as you stumbled across them (like finding gold!)


This is where the sociological trick comes in. Everyone here who is normally an austrian but tolerates the trickle in system does so for one reason. They want to be one of the initial rich people. To get something for nothing is very motivating.


So the #1 question I have for you is, as the chances of being awarded blocks goes down. Why on earth is anyone going to want to play the silly game invented by you people who happened to stumble upon easy BTC first?

After all, Knightmb has 10% of all the exiting BTC. He probably bought and generated them for less than $1,000 at the time. If I decide to trade some commodity worth $10,000 I would likely end up with less than half of his stash.

He put in $1,000 and I put in $10,000 a couple of months later. He is more than twice as rich as me. If someone tries to trade $100,000 worth of commodities for BTC a few months after me, is he going to be half as rich as me and a quarter as rich as knightmb?

That seems like a poor game for him to play.