[vrotaru]

You do not "make" money, when you hide them under a mattress.

Assuming a stable money supply, when all is said and done, you own the same fraction of total purchasing power at the end that period as you had when it started.

You do not get richer, if that's what you mean by making money. You just keep what you had.

I know, how unfair!

[davidjohnstone]

But you do make money! When the value of Bitcoin goes up, your wealth increases because the entire Bitcoin economy is worth more, even though your fraction of it remains constant.

Or, to look at it another way, imagine that Bitcoin was the only currency in the world and there were only one million people who each owned 20 Bitcoins (maybe they're communists who have just started using money). Now, give it a few years and the population has doubled so that the average person has 10 Bitcoins. Is the person who still has 20 coins richer than he was at the start? I say yes, because, assuming that people are just as productive, the entire economy has doubled in size in an absolute sense (it can produce twice as much), so those 20 Bitcoins can buy twice as much as when there were only one million people.

(As a less important point, as Bitcoins are irretrievably lost, the fraction of Bitcoins that a person owns of the "real" Bitcoin economy grows larger. And I don't see why this deflationary pressure is different to the deflationary pressure caused by somebody new getting into the Bitcoin economy.)

[danielweber]

I think the first-movers want that effect.

Say there are 1000 people in the country, and WLOG each of them owns 1/1000th of the wealth.

One of them goes away for 100 years and comes back. The entire country is richer: there are more resources, more people, more goods, more IP, more of everything. And this guy still expects to have claim to 1/1000th of everything in the country.

It's extremely obvious why that first-mover would love that system, and try to convince everyone else to go along with it. It's very dubious what the others would get out of it or why they would ever buy in, besides imagining they could some day be the one who gets to exploit the system at the expense of everyone else.

[vrotaru]

You're confusing money and wealth. And you saying it yourself, to quote "your wealth increases"

Yes, but this is not the same as making money. You're are not richer in relative terms, than you were. It's only stuff who has get cheaper around.. because people have learned how to produce stuff more efficiently, i.e. cheaper.

And you example with doubling population (in a few years no less) is cheating because.. because you have just added a lot poor people into example.. But, OK. Suppose those of two extra people a person A kids.. But what exactly logic are they not entitled to the whole value of their parent savings?