If bitcoin becomes a currency and not a commodity, it will matter to a lot of people. Wheat and molybdenum are not currencies or used as currencies (certainly not at any large scale) so speaking of their "economies" is a nonsensical statement.

> Aren't economies usually located in actual places?

We have a global economy, and bitcoin advocates seem (or used to) interested in establishing BTC as a global currency with its own markets for buying and selling a variety of goods.

The reason it sounds strange to talk about 'the Gini coefficient of the Bitcoin economy' is that the Gini coefficient is usually used as a measure of income (or sometimes wealth) distribution among a _population_.

As your comment suggests, those populations are usually defined by being located 'in actual places'. However, they could equally be defined by some demographic factor. You could look at the Gini coefficient of income for people with blue eyes.

However, I don't see the sense in singling out just a single asset or asset class, and looking at its distribution among the whole human population of the earth UNLESS the total value of that asset is some large %%% of the total assets in the world.

You could imagine it's a thing, but it'd be nigh-impossible to measure for Bitcoin, because addresses!=people. When BTC-E consolidated 97k btc onto a single address, how many peoples' claims did that represent? Heck if we know, but if you naively assume '1 person has 97k btc!' you're going to get a pretty distorted Gini...

Gini coefficient is applicable because bitcoin is a currency (or aspires to be one anyway). Sometimes commodities become money-ish, for a short time period, but they don't generally aspire to permanent status as currency.

Yes, it is theoretically possible to calculate a Gini coefficient for Bitcoin (it's actually a simple calculation). However, we have no actual idea what the Gini coefficient is, or if it's getting worse, or better. Ask anyone who is saying different for a source.