Of course, there are truly poor people out there who can't have a dollar to spare, but it's mostly due to geography, corruption or war, not evil capitalists.
The people who are most able to take risks (in the investment sense) are those with the most. An exponential growth system such as this only widens the gap, voluntary or not.
Everyone can get in, but the benefit is unequal. You need money to make money. This does not solve any equality issues on the grand scale, and only elevates a few lucky ones. To expect people to educate themselves on cryptocurrencies and understand the market when half the people in tech don't know what's going on is not reasonable.
You're right, imperialism did cause problems, but the extreme poverty has been shrinking. And now we have the mechanisms for almost anybody to get out of it. I grew up very poor, as in barely enough money for basic food and new clothes once-twice a year. Now I'm in the top 3% of US earners (not counting Bitcoin).
I would argue they are very tied, but that is a much larger argument not needed here. To give the short and incomplete version, they are both derived from the idea of exploiting others for profit. The level of exploitation is just much less in capitalism and masked behind the guise of fairness, ignoring power dynamics, original capital, and exponential growth considerations, etc. Again, this argument is very incomplete as stated here, but they are not orthogonal concepts. How much of a connection they have is a very valid debate, one not needed here fully though.
> extreme poverty has been shrinking. And now we have the mechanisms for almost anybody to get out of it.
Getting better does not mean that everyone can get out of poverty. We also haven't gotten that better. Most of Africa is still being exploited and most living there do not have any realistic means to get out of it. The countries as a whole still struggle on a macroeconomic level to get out of poverty due to the exact exponential growth issue seen in Bitcoin but with general investment.
The US is not representative of the rest of the world, and also is still far from equal opportunity. While we're on that subject, good luck easily buying cryptocurrencies (accessible to a non-tech audience) while living outside the US. Even my Canadian friends struggle getting Coinbase to let them.
Bitcoin is only really accessible to the tech community, an already privileged community.
Because that would not solve the problem, and it's quite naive to think it would. This gets into lots of debates in ethics that are far from solved.
I do however donate regularly to groups that do economic development in African communities across the world though (more than the cost of a new iPhone annually), so no, I am not a hypocrite (fully at least).
In fact, if you want a great non-profit idea, make a company that translates bitcoin profits into economic development in those communities. My donations have recently been coming from said profits.
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Regardless of whether I am a hypocrite or not, it does not change the facts of the world and bitcoin. Just because my actions do not match perfectly does not mean they shouldn't. That's not a valid argument against my ideas, just against me personally.
> you're still typing into this tech forum
I didn't know using technology is immoral now if others are suffering injustices. Not to mention that there's plenty of utilitarian arguments about cascading effects of convincing others.
Let's look at an example of Bill Gates - if instead of investing any money or time in Microsoft, he gave away everything he could, he would not help as many people in the end. Again, you need money to make money. Of course you need to also consider the other effects of Microsoft in the calculation, which is no easy matter, but the general point is that investment by him eventually led to greater helping of those suffering injustices.
This does not consider that subsidizing someone's current lifestyle doesn't nearly have the impact of helping them develop economic means. It's a classic give a fish versus teach fishing.
And again, someone being hypocritical is not an argument against the logic. It just means that person is selfish and hypocritical. I don't claim that solving these problems is easy or not in direct conflict with human instincts.
There are also issues of fixing injustices justly. It's hard to give up x% of your wealth for a good cause when others are not. I would love to see something like a global 5% reparations tax (scaled by income, benefit from injustice, etc) that I would happily pay because it would be just for all. Of course, getting that to happen is kidding yourself at best.
All of your flawed arguments are still based on you assuming that I'm a hypocrite and no information that I gave you. I would call double BS on your reasoning for disagreement given that you had no knowledge of it when you took the position. Your argument neither had the knowledge nor logic to stand even with the knowledge present.
> but the extreme poverty has been shrinking
Indonesian 12 y.o. who makes Nike sneakers for 1$ a day will probably disagree. Humanity as a whole have made tremendous advancements in medicine, engineering and agriculture, technology as a whole have been advancing in giant leaps, yet benefits of those advancements are largely felt by 10-20 countries and 3-5% of the population. Even in the US some people cannot afford insulin and other types of basic healthcare. Workers's wages are stagnant for the past 50 years, while their productivity was steadily rising (https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/02/why-the...).
> And now we have the mechanisms for almost anybody to get out of it. I grew up very poor
Survivorship bias, "if I've made it, then anyone can".
Gambling's rarely been mandatory. If you were going to recommend your folks to have a punt, wouldn't a casino be better? You know the odds then.
I considered what would happen if something like bitcoin would become a global internet currency, and any way I sliced it, the upside was too huge not to try.
> I don't mind money being more concentrated among tech people, they are generally more rational and tend to spend on important things.
Yeah, I don't but that at all either. Even so, you are basically advocating for an oligarchy led by tech and removing autonomy from everyone else in the world. That's a terrible dystopia.