If the balance of a Bitcoin economy relies on the assumption that certain people have lost their money, something is seriously wrong.
Regardless, a hypothetical Bitcoin economy would require much further buy-in from here, making current holders the early adopters.
> It's like saying by the time a company IPOs, early VCs have benefited the most, while that is true, you could also argue they deserve it because of the risk they took.
The VC analogy isn’t good at all. VCs invest to fund the creation of something. What did early Bitcoin investors fund? More mining and more hype?
From another angle: Imagine if PayPal created a new payment system that used shares of PayPal as the currency. Anyone who wants to use the tool must buy some shares of PayPal, because that’s the currency. And oh by the way, most of those shares are owned by PayPal founders and early adopters, who will gladly sell them at a massive gain.
Is Bitcoin supposed to be a speculative investment? Or a stable currency for a new economy? We can’t just pick and choose from either definition as convenient for the argument.
The same is the case with anything valuable that might become money, including the USD, if you consider that it was originally distributed in a manner that was pegged to gold and that gold was monetized in the same way as described above. The idea that you could materialize a money in any other way is unsupported by history.
How do you feel about the government that's about to print 1.9 trillion dollars, therefore devaluing your money?
I keep my investments in companies and assets like most other investors. The economic stimulus might devalue the <1% of USD cash I keep around for transactions, but my actual investments will likely benefit from the stimulus. As a bonus, I get to operate in an economy that has been buffered against the effects of COVID.
It’s amazing that Bitcoin proponents only ever want to talk about the USD (or other local currency) value of their Bitcoin, yet they want us to ignore the fact that Bitcoin isn’t the only option for investing cash.
they didn't take any risk though, they just "mined bitcoins", which were more abundant then.
What value did they create?
If the underpinnings of an economy accrue value purely to speculators while devaluing (in BTC-relative terms) actual assets and value creation, it has a major incentive problem.
What’s the one and only thing Bitcoiners want you to do with Bitcoin? Buy. That’s it. Any other use, including spending, is actively discouraged.
Visa is not worried.
It's like saying by the time a company IPOs, early VCs have benefited the most, while that is true, you could also argue they deserve it because of the risk they took.