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Comment by segmondy | Hacker News Reader

I hate to be the one, but the reason I can't embrace crypto? The wealth distribution is even worse than fiat currency. It's horrible.

it's no long about the 1% it's more about the .0001%.

How many women have crypto? How many colored folks have crypto? How many people in all of Africa have crypto?

I've had conversations where some don't believe this is a problem. I'm not convinced. You can come up with a new XYZ crypto and the issue is that the distribution never gets to be fair. The haves end up always having much more than the havenots.

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>How many colored folks have crypto?

I still can't believe the term colored people has made a comeback in both academic and colloquial circles. Are chinese people considered people of color? Seems like they are doing well at mining.

But remember, with fiat, the government just prints money [1] whenever it likes and gives it directly to its banker friends. With bitcoin that’s impossible (well unless 51% of the minors agree)

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing

You're simply trading one government for another more nebulous and less accountable one; the schism over block-size is a perfect example of this and that's peanuts compared to the types of issues that are to come.

There is absolutely zero guarantee that the mining cartels won't print more bitcoin; the final decision on whether or not to do so rests with them and it is in their direct financial interest to do so even if it may not be in their political interest. Even then, it is very possible that the impact of high fees might make the idea of printing more bitcoins politically palatable.

Either way, the bottom line is that it is a political issue, just like the current system.

Miners don't have the ability to 'print' more Bitcoin. They can release blocks with whatever transactions they like in but they will simply be rejected by the network.

The fact that there is 10,000 public bitcoin nodes (and probably x10 private ones) keeps the system honest.

You're right that the miners don't have unilateral authority to print more bitcoin, but ultimately they are the muscle behind the process. This is akin to saying "the military can't just print more money to pay for military spending". This is true, and it's unlikely that the military would turn their guns on the institutions in order to achieve this goal because it would threaten the stability of the entire system in which they thrive (like with the miners and bitcoin)... yet... somehow things always work out in such a way where they get their money. It never gets to the point where they have to turn their guns on anyone because their silent authority confers enough influence that the politicians making the decisions (i.e. developer cabals in the case of bitcoin) manage to find solutions that keep them fat and happy while delivering enough voluble rhetoric to ensure that the general population doesn't revolt.

Same thing will happen for the miners eventually.

I don't understand why this is a problem specifically with bitcoin. Is this not a problem with any other currency? I mean I appreciate the sentiment but how does it even matter in which currency the rich are rich and the poor are poor?

Re: women in crypto, I’m not sure what the solution could be. Both men and women had the same opportunity to buy Bitcoin when it was incredibly cheap. Unlike the gender divide in STEM jobs, there’s no hiring managers / gatekeepers with bias against women turning down potential BTC buyers. Women just didn’t buy crypto early on.

I’ve seen folks go so far as to accuse Bitcoin of being sexist. I just don’t understand how that’s a fair thing to say given that anyone with an internet connection and an appetite for risk could have bought BTC anytime since 2009

EOS had a so long ico phase that they are one of the most distributed coins.

Nano was distributed via captcha and went long under the radar.

Hence also pretty nice distributed.

Absolutely bizarre.

>How many women have crypto? How many colored folks have crypto? How many people in all of Africa have crypto?

CommunismCoin?

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