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by reasons 1881 days ago
> ... it feels like a get rich quick scheme for its founders

Well, Bitcoin itself is a get rich quick scheme for its founders. So are most of its spinoffs.

3 comments

> Bitcoin itself is a get rich quick scheme for its founders

Regardless of what you think about Bitcoin, this claim is completely ahistorical.

Satoshi (or one of his friends) owns 5% of all bitcoins that will ever exist.

I wouldn't call it a get rich quick scheme for its founder(s) because I doubt they could have known it would take off the way it did.

But, at this point, I don't know that intent matters. Imagine if Bitcoin really did become a dominant currency... one guy would own 5% of it, a deflationary currency! The "fiat billionaires" don't come anywhere close to that kind of concentration of wealth.

Doesn't he deserve it? If you were to launch a world-changing project at the cost of disappearing completely, wouldn't you want to reap some benefit from that project if it ever succeeds?
'Satoshi' as far as we know is a fiction, it could very well be a psuedonym for an entire team of unknown size
Doesn't matter, you can reduce it down to the wallet. (At least) someone has (or at least has at one point had) access to it.
So are VC unicorns.
My hunch is that Bitcoin is actually a project to promulgate Austro-libertarian economics and "Satoshi" is actually a bunch of people hired by stratospherically wealthy libertarians (like the guy that founded Renaissance who is tight with the Mercers). Call me crazy, but after hearing the correlation between people becoming interested in Bitcoin and Austro-libertarianism simultaneously I can't help but think it's a deliberate project.
The thing with ideologies (and other kinds of socioeconomical hypotheses) is that they're hyperstitional in nature - you can't prove they're realizable without at the same time deliberately trying to realize them, using people as fodder. (See, communism.) And at least one of the ideologies promulgated in meme-space must have some basis in potential reality (otherwise people wouldn't be at all prone to believing in world-changing ideas). Might be this one, might be not.