https://www.cbsnews.com/news/richest-1-percent-control-more-...

Imagine what would happen if one person held literally all the money. It may be easier to imagine a 100-person community rather than the whole world.

One thing that would have to happen is everyone else would develop their own money/currency, which would turn mean that the one person with all the money is no longer the one person with all the money.

A thing quite likely to happen is that everyone would decide that whatever the money is that the one person has, everybody would decide it is not money.

It isn't entirely dissimilar from me claiming I have all the Jerfoleans on the world, and what the world is really doing about that currency right now. They're worth a zero so zero-y that even an infinite number of them is still worth a flat zero. Someone who has "all the money" might find themselves in a similar boat.

If you make a fresh piece of gold and show it to the world, you are proving that you have done some known — or at least bounded — amount of work.

In gold’s case, that work is gas, electricity, and human labor. If someone shows up with gold that cost less to produce, the price goes down.

Work for the sake of work is not valuable.

You could record video proving that you dug a hole 20 feet deep with your bare hands and then filled it up again.

That's a lot of work, but it wouldn't be valuable to anyone, except maybe as comedy.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/28/cards-aga...

However, should it be impossible to copy videos and the only way to do a video would be to capture the events as they happen, then perhaps your video would have value.

Making origami pirate ships also requires a certain amount of work. That doesn’t give it value.

I picked that because I didn't think if babies and non-earners were included when calculating the top 1% of highest earners.

I think they could mean a total number of crypto users, recently estimated to be over 100 mln.

(2) social power with blockchains (i.e. having people's ears on the social networks) is far more important than $$ power: If nobody wants to install and use your blockchain, no amount of $$ can fix that.

1) Ethereum already has a market cap of $73B [0]. That's a lot of money.

2) Controlling 51% of Ethereum would probably cause the value of it to drop [1].

So you'd spend a lot of money to control Ethereum and then end up with something that's far less valuable than it was before you took control. Not really sure what you'd get out of doing that.

[0] https://en.ethereumworldnews.com/ethereums-market-cap-is-big...

[1] https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms...

I think you're misinterpreting the paragraph. It's not that controlling 51% will cause the value to drop (it won't, see bitcoin miner control), it's that controlling 51% and trying to pull off an attack will cause it to drop.

To me "it" is pretty clearly referring to controlling 51% of staked ETH.

I don't know about the economics behind whether that would cause the value of ETH to decrease, but Bitcoin seems like a different situation altogether since miners don't control the the cryptocurrency itself.

It's convenient to measure wealth in dollars in a "how much you could get if you still it" way and it's possible because dollars are very stable but there is very little reason for the amount of dollars circulating to represent existing wealth.

Because it's not in their best interest. If the 1% pulled something like that off, the price would drop a lot and therefore their ETH would be worth less.

It's one of the core pillars of any blockchain, that the incentives are aligned in a way so the best outcome for people is the one where the gain the most, so it forces them to go for that way.

That's what they do. That's what inflation is. We work hard and save up $100,000, they (the 1%) turn that into $25,000 in 25 years.

The basic idea is that stakers' deposits act as security bonds. If a staker commits to two conflicting chains, any other staker can see that they did so, and get rewarded for publishing a proof of that. Then the cheating staker gets their stake destroyed on both chains.

I'd say the value of currencies is that you have to pay your taxes in one that is legal tender. In that case, the value of Eth is that you have to pay transaction fees in Eth. You decided how valuable those transactions are.

The Ethereum network is congested because it has users. Ethereum has the critical mass and first mover advantage.

The clones need to be sufficiently attractive (10x ?) to break that hold, it's not a technical problem but an economic, marketing and educational one.

Scarcity is unrelated to network congestion or usage.