You know, I realize that slapping a GPU into a mobo isn't that tough, but I have to say I'm pretty impressed.  Were you at least weaned off of breast milk before you got started?

In the US, there's been zero income gap-shrinking, sorry.  Certainly not since the 90s - it's been exclusively gap-widening.  Actually it's been gap-widening since the 50s, the time when labor was most organized and taxes on the rich at their highest.   See: http://www.businessinsider.com/15-charts-about-wealth-and-inequality-in-america-2010-4  (It's also true that that time was when the bulk of the rest of the industrialized world was in ruins due to WWII).


Sure, there are different reasons, but the biggest reason is this: at least half of the rich are rich because of inheritance.  I'm not sure how ruthless or smart one needs to be to come chargin' outta that privileged uterus.  Here's how it was in 1997: not much different today. 

http://www.faireconomy.org/press_room/1997/born_on_third_base_sources_of_wealth_of_1997_forbes_400

To be clear, I'm not saying that it's hopeless to use Bitcoin, P2P or the web or anything.  I'm saying that overstating the power of these things does us all a disservice and that equal time and attention should be given to the real world we live in as these cool new systems arrive.  As a writer, that's kind of what  I'm here to do

Hahahaha

Yes, I said those things.

Exactly.

http://themagicdragon.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/eidoBong.jpg

From the point of view of the rich, yes, that is what I am saying.

To the rich, the net has provided new avenues for venture capital, and expanded the opportunity for investment in net-related technologies, but these by and large have been bubble investments.  And the rich were already profiting from bubbles - for example, nobody needed the web to invent mortgage-backed securities.  Generally, very little change there.

Sure, there are exceptions, but by and large, the "immutable bylaws of business" have continued to accrete capital to the rich.   In 1996, the wild-eyed among us were certain that capital itself was being democratized and decentralized (such as Bitcoin/P2P cryptocurrency is often said to be doing).  That is, to say the least, not the case a decade and a half later.

 

Hey all,

I'm a writer based in Chicago.  I'm not a miner or trader, but I am very interested in the sociology and economics of the Bitcoin experiment.

I also find the goldbuggery / currency crankery that Bitcoin tends to attract to be personally hilarious.  I was around for the adoption of the web, and I see something around Bitcoin that is very familiar to something I saw on USENET and early forums:  a huge volume of dramatically wrong utterances espoused by so many people that the world as we knew it was over, man.  

Right.  Fifteen years later on, giant corporate monoliths are actually bigger, the biggest piles of capital are still pushed around by idiots whose only qualification is to have been pooped out of elite business schools, and with very few exceptions, internet entrepreneurship has created investment bubbles rather than substantive change in value creation.    

Cryptocurrency is awesome.  It isn't going to make economic libertarian whackos happy, though.  The only thing that will do that is weed.

Anyway, I love P2P stories and I find Bitcoin amazing.