Which of course they're not. Nor will they ever be. Even if you forced things to be this way on some particular day, they wouldn't stay that way, because people have different needs, different expectations, and different judgments about the best ways to use their money. And in a free market, they will act differently because of those differences, and quickly trade away from any "even distribution" of anything.
> If you have a healthy banking market with several competitors the banks will compete to the point where none of them can extract too much profit.
I agree that banking should be a competitive free market (as I think every good and service should be).
> you end up with companies extracting wealth in any market where they get too much of a monopoly
If "monopoly" means "ability to buy favors from the government to avoid free market competition", then I agree with this. But such a "monopoly" in no way requires there to be a lack of competition in an industry. There is plenty of competition in banking. It just all takes place against a backdrop of monetary manipulation by the government.
"I don't believe we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government, that is, we can't take them violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something they can't stop" F.A. Hayek
I would avoid just picking out BTC (which being stable in supply is prone to hoarding as digital gold and not really used as a means of commerce) and look at what other crypto has to offer as well, such as Ethereum which has a dynamic supply limit that is tied to its usage - in times of high usage such as today, it actually becomes deflationary. As usage slows, it becomes inflationary again which in theory should promote network usage.
We are essentially in an ongoing experiment of the denationalization of money and I personally think it will be fascinating how it will play out in the next couple decades.
Any digital network that doesn't use the best store of value is not going to be able to compete with one that does.
The claim PoS is not the best store of value is asinine. PoW in BTC has consolidated around a cabal of a handful of miners and the power usage is of course a well-known sounding bell for PoW apologists everywhere.
The truth is PoW was the best they had at the dawn of blockchain, then technology improved. It's really this simple and I'm baffled when people get religious about consensus algorithms. It's as if people would say we need to keep using bubblesort instead of quicksort because bubblesort was discovered first.
If a money isn't proof-of-work then it implies that some people can create it without doing work.
Gold's proof-of-work stood it in good stead for thousands of years. It was only some of it's physical limitations that led to fiat beating it. In fact fiat would be worthless if it wasn't boot-strapped into having value by originally representing gold's proof-of-work. Now we have digital proof of work in bitcoin. It doesn't have the physical limitations of gold, and fiat is going to hyperinflate to 0 once again - but this time it will stay there.
"If a money isn't proof-of-work then it implies that some people can create it without doing work" Have you seen how much work goes into being a validator? There is definitely work being done - just much more sophisticated that guessing a random value...
Agreed on crypto not having the physical limitations and on the trend of fiat to inflate. I just can't agree on the other points.
Here are some good starting points:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2jAZ0x9H0bQFY6wIbQfnrnIl... (listen to at least the first 7 episodes - absolutely fascinating - the most interesting lectures I ever heard. Prepare to have your mind slowly blown)
https://www.onceinaspecies.com/p/bitcoins-full-potential-val...
https://youtu.be/CoGxakp1_3I - tip: watch this at at least 1.5x speed ;)
I wish I could upvote this more. If enough people understood that this is the root problem, we might have a chance of actually fixing it.