[throwawaycoder]

This story made me realize that eventually we will get some sort of "FemCoin", though. Anybody who continues to use Bitcoin will be labeled a sexist and be made a social pariah.

The reason is that women didn't have a fair chance to get into Bitcoin in time because the community was so hostile. Therefore all the Bitcoin wealth is unfairly shifted to white men.

Edit: turns out Femcoin already exists https://bitbucket.org/valerieaurora/femcoin

[hosh]

That's interesting. What you are suggesting is that, with lower barriers of entry to create new currencies, we will see a rise in forking economies just as open source and distributed source control allowed open source communities to maintain forks.

Leaving aside that, however, notions of "fairness" is flawed. Fairness for me means that a hostile community self-destructs under its own weight of hostility, not that "Bitcoin wealth is unfairly shifted to white men."

An unfair economy that discriminates against a class of people will see people leaving. I am not sure if it will happen like that, but that's an interesting thought.

[throwawaycoder]

There are already a lot of forks of Bitcoin, some even moderately successful.

Actually independent of feminism I have long wondered if other cryptocoins might supersede Bitcoin exactly for the reason of fairness. Assume the world wakes up to Bitcoin in a couple of years. Then the BTC wealth will be very unequally distributed. Why should people start using BTC if they are poor in it? They could as well say "hey, cryptocurrencies are swell, but let's use another one were nobody had a headstart".

I guess part of dogecoins success story is that everybody got rich in dogecoin quickly (1 Million doges per minute). A lot of people who didn't like Bitcoin like dogecoin.

[hosh]

Sure, I know there are lots of forks of Bitcoin. I'm talking about forking the whole economy though, which requires being able to at least trade for basic survival needs.

From an existential point of view, there is no such thing as fairness and yet, people still create whatever notions of fairness. Fairness tends to be deeply rooted into emotional makeup of a person. Many conflicts come about because the parties involved have different, deeply rooted sense of fairness.

Forking in open-source software allowed it to more or less outcompete commercial software in many (though not all) areas, and what finally made it work was a relatively cheap way for forked projects to be merged back together again. In other words, if we are forking along the lines of fairness (and come to think of it, notions of fairness are the psychological factor from which economies arise from), then eventually, for things to work out means being able to merge economies back together again.

[hosh]

@throwawaycoder I see. You're underlying assumption is that there will ever be only one single "economy" of which there are multiple markets. I'm not sure that is wrong either (though I am not sure that is right). Thanks for bringing that up.

[hosh]

@throwawaycoder huh, not sure why your comments get downvoted.

The forking I mean is not necessarily the technical part of it, but rather the interactions of people. On the other hand, I also just talked with someone I know who has been in the payment space for a long time -- he says he prefers to keep things simple, so not necessarily a "forking" that happens.

Eh well, something to think about for me. I think the "forking" concept is useful for me when we start talking about markets for which there is oppression. I'm not particularly interested in things like drug or gun trade. I'm much more interested in things like, being able to 3D print a tractor so people can farm land and grow food even if vested interests try to suppress that tractor.