Some basic answers to bitcoin questions.
~
Question Is bitcoin more fairly distributed than most currencies?
Answer No, on November 28, 2012 bitcoin’s block reward was reduced from 50 to 25. So 50% of all bitcoin that will ever exist were distributed to the people who knew about it before then, a small group of mostly coders and cryptographers. Distribution is a key metric in any currency and bitcoin was never fairly distributed. The person who created bitcoin ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ has roughly 500,000 to 1,000,000 bitcoin. Well over 50% of all bitcoin went to him and people who were in his ‘clique’. Most early bitcoins, well over 50%, are owned by people in the U.S. who will sell mainly through Coinbase https://news.bitcoin.com/research-proves-recent-transfers-of-8000-ten-year-old-forgotten-bitcoins-were-sold-to-coinbase/
~
Question But now, many years later, has distribution become more fair?
Answer If anything it has gotten much worse. Bitcoin started as a classic pump and dump, it distributed most of its supply early to pumpers who make a fortune off people who want to believe whatever the pumpers are saying is true. It passed through that initial pump phase without ever having been exposed publicly, and now it has entered a corporate phase. The early pumpers, including ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ were smart with economics, but the corporate crowd is much smarter. Corporate entities currently have probably between 5% and 80% of the bitcoin supply, depending how you define a corporate entity. https://bitcointreasuries.org/ They will work collaboratively to draw wealth away from people who are not as sharp as them. It is exactly the same game as the regular corporate economy, except the bitcoin scam involves pretending that bitcoin causes ‘Liberty’ or some other silliness.
~
Question Isn’t bitcoin a commodity though, like foods and metals? So even if it is a ‘pump and dump’ people are getting a commodity for their money, so it is a fair trade, right?
Answer Bitcoin is not actually a real commodity. It has the ‘commodity like quality’ of having a fixed supply and limited production, so in terms of supply it is very similar to a commodity, but one important quality of real commodities is that they can be consumed or used by a person and that use is not dependent on whether a group of people believe the use exists. Even if somebody says ‘oranges don’t exist’, you can still eat an orange. Enough people know that oranges are a real commodity that there is a commodity market for them. Bitcoin is on the other side of that equation. It does not actually have any commodity usage, it is not a real commodity, but enough people believe it is that there is a market for it despite it’s complete lack of any real value.
One component of any commodity's value is the potential for scarcity. Bitcoin can be cloned by literally anybody, and has dozens of clones. If any group wants their own 'Bitcoin' with the original bitcoin genesis block they can fork the chain and there will be literally no difference in the legitimacy of the fork, no difference in its origin.
~
Question But how are people tricked so easily into accepting a false commodity if that is true?
Answer
For centuries countries have industrialized by herding their rural populations, people who instinctively respect the value of real commodities, into urban centers where they could be trained to serve industrialization. This herding was a step removed from marching people at gunpoint. Instead of using guns to herd populations, melting pots used ‘commodity control’ which included mandatory belief that local government money was a commodity. So anybody who has been long enough in an industrialized melting pot ‘believes’ or ‘feels’ that it is group force which defines whether a commodity is real. We, industrialized people, are thoroughly trained to accept whatever the most powerful group in our environment says. For a lot of bitcoiners the click phrase was some variation of ‘bitcoin frees you from government intrusiveness and it is a real commodity’. But the truth is that bitcoin is vapor ware, just like dollars. There are math and science coins that do produce a real commodity i.e., scientific data, but they do not have a pump crew and there is little interest in them.
~
Question Does that mean bitcoin will crash and go to zero? Is it a bad investment?
Answer
Anything can be a good or bad investment over a specific period of time. If you buy anything cheaper than you sell it then it was a profitable investment. In order to know whether bitcoin is a good investment at a particular moment you have to gauge public knowledge about it. Once a critical mass of people are aware of its real details it will become a bad investment. At the moment it is being heavily pumped by corporate and government types, so a person should also try to figure out their corresponding motives in order to estimate whether it is a good investment at this specific moment. If their goal is to pump it high, draw in as many people as possible, then collapse it, with the objective of removing funds from young progressives, then a person has to time their exit. If the goal of those with ‘power’ is simply to educate the public about digital money then a person would want to exit bitcoin once its replacement was visible.
~
Question
Answer
~