[danShumway]

Bitcoin was created in no small part to address this problem. The fact that it's not addressing it is a legitimate criticism of the coin.

"Our brand new environmentally-inefficient, difficult-to-regulate, needlessly-complicated, easy-to-surveil currency also falls prey to the same financial consolidation outcomes of every other traditional currency" is not really the strong defense of Bitcoin that people seem to think it is. And "Bitcoin isn't established by state violence" doesn't work when states/corporations control most of the supply and have outsized control over the protocol. This kind of consolidation undermines Bitcoin's value as an experimental/democratic currency.

From the article:

> These observations led the NBER to conclude that despite the attention Bitcoin has received over the past few years, the ecosystem is still dominated by a concentration of key players, making the ecosystem susceptible to systemic risk like a 51 percent attack, where a group of miners could take control of the majority of the network.

If someone is legitimately, honestly trying to pitch Bitcoin as a democratizing currency, then seeing outcomes like this should be worrying to them. The regular dismissal that traditional currencies have the same problems makes it hard to take Bitcoin proponents seriously when they talk about societal benefits that the coin purportedly provides.

There's a disconnect here between the theory that Bitcoin allows equal participation by anyone in the network, and the reality that even the resources required to start participating in the network can be tightly regulated and are often controlled and manipulated through centralized state/corporate apparatus. And hand-wavy dismissals of that problem don't do the currency any favors. Why adopt a new currency that still has multiple downsides, if the upsides are constantly being waved away as unimportant by even the currency's own proponents?