I would expect that if/when the Bitcoin project looks like it has much potential for traction, some wealthy person will snap up a pretty fair chunk of the total currency base for what amount to chump change.  And some of his buddies, most of the rest.

As I've mentioned before, I think that worrying to much about who actually 'has' bitcoin is not seeing the forest for the trees.  A much more critical line of thought revolves around what the owners of the currency 'do' with it, and why.

They are just angry peasants sans pitchforks and torches. Few people even have an inkling of what is wrong with the present economic and banking system. Bitcoin is way over even most professional economists heads. There is still not a good case made about why bitcoin should fail, but even so, most people don't realize that it will very likely succeed. So they dismiss bitcoin until it proves itself. The OWS folks may have a few more intelligent people in the crowd than any other protest group, so that makes it worthwhile to try to reach them.

I talked to the Occupy crowd here at my college a couple nights back, they seemed fairly interested...or maybe they were just humoring the drunk guy. I got a few of them to download the android wallet though.

Is Bitcoin any better at equal distribution? Once again, the people who "get in early" or start out with the means of production (video cards, FPGAs, etc) get access to the lion's share of the Bitcoins.


If Bitcoins are still "over most professional economists' heads", I doubt you can say it is 'very likely to succeed' in good faith. If professional economists can't see the merits of it, how on earth do you expect the average person to fare any better?

The genie is out of the bottle, so to speak. Bitcoin will survive and eventually thrive on its own merit. It is a newly discovered technology similar to the discovery of fractals. It took many years before the true power of fractals were discovered and the same will become of bitcoin technology and cryptography in general.

Fractals are not a technology, they are a part of mathematics.


Bitcoin is an invention, and one with a bit of an idealogical slant at that(non-inflationary currency)

They are wildly different things. Fractals are not something that is 'thriving' or was invented, they just exist. Cryptography, too, has a proven track record backed by mathematics. Bitcoin only has fanatics backing it who believe that their particular solution to currency and economics is correct, which is purely opinion.

Nice straw man. Honoring your namesake? The Treasury tells the Fed to make them some more money. The Fed then magics money into existence and provides it to the Treasury. Then the treasury spends it on projects for which the corporations and special interests lobbied. At first, this money buys the same amounts of goods and services as all the other money in existence. Eventually, it trickles down to you, the employee, and it can now has less purchasing power, as the market has taken into account this new money.

Fractional reserve banking works in a similar way, except debtors take the place of the government. It transfers wealth from those who save to those who go into debt.


Bullshit. I've never held any political power, and only once while I was still naive did I vote to support the use of political power. Don't lump me (or the many like me) in with the rest of you statists. We're the ones trying to show you why the world is so fucked up. But no, it's those horrible rich people, always building new factories for profit and... oh... jobs.

The government will assign them much like they do social security numbers.


It will be illegal to accept payment from an unregistered address.


There would be an initial grace period for you to consolidate your holdings, that is it.  After that you may only use your assigned address in legal commerce or face penalty.


Hardly, the system could practically be automated.  It's as simple as checking if transactions are between whitelisted addresses and blacklisting any addresses found to be involved in illegal activity. 


It's not a technological problem, black markets will be taken on with traditional law enforcement as they currently are, with the added bonus that any attempts to launder into legitimate currency will be far easier to uncover thanks to the transaction log and whitelist.

Very likely trolling.  I expected so from the first post on this thread due to the SA style avatar and the tone which was pretty obviously designed to reel in Libertarians.

As far as I am concerned it was a good troll in that it got people thinking about this and that.

All of the money from the budget/the Treasury comes from things like bonds and taxes, not straight from the Federal Reserve - that money is used for loans to make sure that the scale and value of the money supply roughly matches the scale of population and economy growth over time. Naturally these things cannot be perfectly pinned down, therefore you want the money supply to slightly outpace growth (inflation) to both make sure the needs of the growing economy are met but to also discourage the act of saving versus investing to ensure further growth



No, but you do vote, even though you somehow soak up all the bullshit the rich feed you about regulations being bad, about how they are the 'job creators', and how they aren't leeching disproportionately off the work of others and the 'risks' they take on. Nobody "creates jobs" just to make them, and sometimes the most profitable things to do is to squeeze your workers harder, lay them off entirely, replace them, or find a way to avoid paying taxes back to the society they 'earned' so much from.

You are directly supporting the stratification of power and wealth in this country by not being willing to put 'statist' limits on both businesses and government to reduce the influence the rich have over people.

I hope you can achieve your dream of being a serf someday. Don't think Bitcoin will help you either, a limited/deflationary monetary supply like Bitcoin only increases the relative wealth and influence of the wealthy compared to you as the economy grows but the available money stays the same.