Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Synaesthesia 1960 days ago
I don’t get how Bitcoin can become a viable currency or store of value in the future. It’s almost exclusively owned by a small group of individuals. Are we gonna accept that level of centralisation? Of course not.
2 comments

Bitcoin is permissionless and bootstrapped. It had to start with 0 users and $0 value. 10 years later it is now worth $50K and has 100M users (doubling every ~2 years).

We are currently living in a world in which the rich get richer (bailouts, stocks, real estate, efficiency gains) while the poor get poorer (cash only, inflation, wage stagnation). Every $1 that trickles down from the top 1% is returned to them as $2 freshly printed from the central banks. Wealth and income inequality continue to rise as a result.

Bitcoin has a fixed supply, and now you can't bailout the riches anymore while having the poor pay the bill in the future via inflation.

Do we accept that inflation causes wealth centralisation? Of course not, but until Bitcoin there wasn't anything we could do about it.

Do you think that centralization of Bitcoin is worse than centralization of USD?
Or gold, or stocks, or real estate or anything that can be used as a store of value today.
It is probably yeah.