I agree, but 1% of society holds more wealth than the bottom 50%. To a passing observer of crypto, they see that a few have extreme amounts of wealth, just like every other currency, and think everything seems normal.

And the solution is something where 0,000001% society hold 50% of the coins/"wealth"?

The reason bitcoin will never be the main currency is, that even in case case crypto will ever be technically/UX viable as a currency (is very, very, very far from it) nobody of the 99% that do not own bitcoin now will choose bitcoin as the main currency. They will choose some most likely government started crypto where they can exchange their current money 1:1 and not buy into some stupid old thing that gives them nothing.

So if crypto ever succeeds it is the death of bitcoin as the new system that converts from the old will win by a million miles

They don't see the difference in mechanisms. Getting rich through pump and dump vs getting rich through making or doing something people find valuable.

I think we're past believing that our top .1% is bringing value that's worth billions of times more than the rest of the population.

They're all hoarding wealth and offloading risk on others, it's just that in comparison, the crypto-rich are not (yet?) a social class with an army of lobbyists on its payroll.

Average wealth of the top 0.1% in the US is ~$50m. Average wealth overall is ~$100k. So it’s not billions of times more, it’s ~thousands of times more.

Most high net worth individuals keep their wealth in stocks and shares. This is not what hoarding means.

The comparison to crypto scams is absurd.

> I think we're past believing that our top .1% is bringing value that's worth billions of times more than the rest of the population.

Fortunately, we do not have to rely on our beliefs here, we have an objective measure, which we call "money".

If someone starts a company in their garage, and a decade later that company is worth few billions of dollars then that's the value this person brought to society - because people willingly paid them those billions of dollars for their product/service.

Of course the whole logic breaks down with purely speculative financial assets such as crypto.

By that measure Nobels are thousand of time less valuable than Sam Bankman Fried

He didn't say it's the only measure.

Nobel prize winners are bad example, because their work is usually theoretical, hard to put to use. If someone writes a paper tomorrow proving that faster-than-light travel is possible then the only immediate value it brings is that you now have a nice lecture to read in bed. There are still thousands man-years of work required before an actual spaceship will be available for sale in your local dealership.

Parasitic rents and many other market distortions/extortions exist.

Saying that something exists isn't a complete thought.

Statements in a conversations do not stand alone. Thoughts flow from one to another.

Thoughts can't flow if they aren't expressed completely. Insinuation can flow, but not open thoughts.

Alternatively, you could let people pay whatever they want for the product. That would also give you a very accurate and objective measure of how people value the product.

What? You don't think the two measures would converge? In either case, the one with more market power would use that to improve their side of the bargain? Who'd've thunk...

That would not tell you anything about how much someone values a product. Everyone will happily pay 0 for something they value at 10. It's a fantastic deal for them. Too discover the true value you have to raise the price until they refuse to pay it. Which is what a market is intended to do.

> If someone starts a company in their garage, and a decade later that company is worth few billions of dollars then that's the value this person brought to society - because people willingly paid them those billions of dollars for their product/service.

What was the value FTX or Theranos brought to society?

You'll note that when it goes wrong in each of those cases, we lock the perpetrators up in a box. And their company's value drops according to the new information.

Totally, because the _expected future value_ changes with the new information. If they had actually created something of value, that wouldn't change because of new information. But they hadn't, and yet their companies were worth billions.

"Provides value" is loosely connected to "expected future value", but it's certainly not the same thing.

I agree. Except creating something of value isn't the same as company value - company value should be derived from ability to make money at a certain rate while spending it at a certain rate. This does include what you say, but with some extra bits.

But back to your point: it is possible to simulate either or both of those things and have eager investors get in early, but that's why they (probably) get in for less money than if the company had done what it claimed. They took a risk, and taking a risk is one of the valuable contributions one can make to a company.

You're missing the difference between ownership and money. People who make extremely useful companies own parts of them. They don't have that money in cash. The only thing they can do with that ownership is to sell it, which the market also seems a valuable thing. They have to constantly do valuable things to have money. They aren't like a government, which can lock you in a box for not paying them. Companies have to earn it.

To be fair, it's a little bit harder to see the difference between pump & dump vs getting born rich.

That's neither fair nor obvious.

Inheritance makes providing value worth doing past the point of one's own comfort. Many people's work becomes most valuable in their latter years, and so we would want them to keep working and pass on wealth, as opposed to either stopping working or just splashing their money out on nonsense.

The principle of being able to own things and work to one's own good, and the good of those whom one choosing to transfer it to, is the fundamental basis on which we now exist in the most advanced societies the world has ever seen, and the most rapidly advancing societies. It's not perfect, but every authoritarian attempt to make things better by centralising power in the name of fairness has gone terribly.

Pump and dump schemes are just nothing like that.

From the perspective of those born poor with little prospect of improving their station, I don’t see how it’s obvious that the people who inherited wealth are more deserving of the money than the people who got it by scamming.

The legitimacy of the social contract that respects private ownership depends on the prospect of a good life for those who work for it.

When people lose belief in that prospect, they have no reason to respect the rules of that social contract.

I don't think you can lump people unable to improve their lot into a homogenous group all unable to see what money is. Some will; some won't. And that doesn't make money something else than what it is.

I agree that as individual liberty is eroded, and it's easier to just become yet another BS cog in a giant BS machine, with no incentives to make anything better, then you can descend into something authoritarian that promises a better way, such as our previous attempts at socialism, but the way out isn't to reinforce (or repeat) incorrect assumptions about money. It's to campaign for more liberty and fairness.