Wouldn't it be more fair if the bitcoins were shared equally?

[ronenfe]

Sharing all bitcoins initially is a very hard (impossible) thing to do. Think about it.

The current method, maybe not perfect, but it *works*. Better something imperfect that works, than some idealistic notion that can never actually be implemented in the real world.

Also consider the nature of bitcoin being peer to peer. You cannot simply "give" everybody a bitcoin. Who's to decide who gets a bitcoin and who doesn't? How is that decision made? The Pope decides? Then it's no longer peer to peer and is controlled or influenced by some person or authority.

I don't think you understand how technically difficult "sharing coins equally" would be. That's the key here: not that everyone would be against the idea, but that it's technically hard/impossible to implement what you suggest in a method that is actually "fair". ("fair" also being subject to opinion)

As it is, it works much like investing in a startup company. It's like we're investing in Apple or Google or something in the early days.

Also you have to understand that the possibility of the early adopters earning a return is a great part of why Bitcoin is now successful. It's successful *because* it allowed early speculators to earn money; they drove its adoption and popularised it. If that had not been so, maybe they wouldn't have bothered so much and bitcoin would have failed or just been a niche curiosity.

The most important thing to know though is that this method is technically simple, very transparent (read: even if it's not considered "fair" by you, at least it's *HONEST* and everyone knows precisely how it occurs, and can easily make the decision whether to use it or not), and also roughly parallel to investing and speculating in something which is widely accepted as a fairly honest method of wealth gaining or creation.

I'm not saying i know well how bitcoins work or convert it to my suggested system. I'm saying a different system should be used where there is an authority maybe, something like paypal,  with the proper monitoring to prevent cheating, this has to be thought and invented. each one can open an account and get the coin.
State currencies also not perfect but work. So we are replacing one flawed system with another flawed one?
The bitcoins system looks to me far more complicated to think about and invent than implementing my suggested system.
I think it a new method can be popular anyway even without the early speculators motivation because people should know how bad the current real money system is and will want a fair alternative, and it can be more popular than bitcoins because more people will join if they think they are not discriminated between them and the early joiners.

So, you admit you don't understand how bitcoin works, and you don't think it's a good system, and you don't want to use it.

So.....why are you here, exactly? GTFO, socialist.

I read about it, but still didn't know how it works completely, because it's too complicated system. But I read enough to make my decision, after I saw that some people got a lot of coins , which discouraged me from using this system , so I asked and said that I think it should have been distributed equally.

And people who use uncivilized words like you and some others here should be the ones to GTFO.

[Walter Rothbard]

You should have read my part about the central authority above.

When no actual economic activity took place, no it did not need doing.

It needs to be done, no matter what.
If I want to transfer some coins from my account to yours, our transaction has to be stored somewhere,
either this storing is done in a central database, run by a central authority.
or it's done in a distributed database run by everyone.

We chose the latter, the distributed database and we call that database "the blockchain".
To create that database, THAT is what mining does, it creates the blocks that build the blockchain and which store all transactions.
Mining is not about creating coins, it's about creating storage-space.
If we don't create that database, we have no space to store any transactions at all and all coins (no matter how they are created or distributed in the first place) would be worth- and useless.

Without the work done by miners (rather call them block-creators), we have not only no coins, we also have no payment system, we wouldn't be able to transfer anything to anyone.

Excellent post.  This needs to be repeated by people explaining the system to newcomers.

[Walter Rothbard]

Think for a moment that there are millions of different ideas all over the place, all of which are made readily available to you. Some are the next big ideas that will change the world. Some are not so much but might make you wealthy. Huge majority are worthless. The way society deals with this problem is, reward people who pick the right ones. Why are you so against this?

I love this paragraph.

[Walter Rothbard]

Well, some aspects of socialism aren't "bad" in and of themselves, but too often socialism is equated with communism, which sparks the democracy fire in us western-culture children. :-)

Socialism and/or communism are bad insomuch as they are implemented with the initiation of force.  If you implement them without force, they are fine.  In other words, if you give people the right to opt out (analogous to the way Bitcoin doesn't force anybody to use Bitcoin), then there's nothing wrong.  Most families practice socialism internally to some extent, for example, but families typically don't force people to be members, at least after a certain age.

If Joe and I go to work in the fields picking peppers at $5 a bushel, and I bust my ass and pick 40 bushels of peppers, while Joe fucks the dog all day and only picks 10 bushels of peppers, yet at the end of the day, the bossman averages it out and pays us each for 25 bushels of peppers, how is that fair? I did $200 worth of work, while Joe only did $50 worth of work, yet we end up each being paid $125?

That's still fair because it's the bossman's peppers and he can do whatever he wants with them, and you can go work somewhere else.

[RodeoX]

The distribution method used in bitcoin is an attempt to address this problem. Basically miming profits are payment for the work of hashing. Anyone can participate, and in the beginning you could mine with a basic computer in any country. Even now anyone can get into the game. The bar is higher, but still achievable. For the price of a car you can buy mining equipment and start.

I started buying at $0.74. If that seems unfair then consider the risk I took. Back then there was no reason to be sure that bitcoin would be anything but electronic Monopoly money. Today they are $29.00 because they are much more established, used, and understood. That's a fair system.

[Aahzman]

Well, some aspects of socialism aren't "bad" in and of themselves, but too often socialism is equated with communism, which sparks the democracy fire in us western-culture children. :-)

Socialism and/or communism are bad insomuch as they are implemented with the initiation of force.  If you implement them without force, they are fine.  In other words, if you give people the right to opt out (analogous to the way Bitcoin doesn't force anybody to use Bitcoin), then there's nothing wrong.  Most families practice socialism internally to some extent, for example, but families typically don't force people to be members, at least after a certain age.

If Joe and I go to work in the fields picking peppers at $5 a bushel, and I bust my ass and pick 40 bushels of peppers, while Joe fucks the dog all day and only picks 10 bushels of peppers, yet at the end of the day, the bossman averages it out and pays us each for 25 bushels of peppers, how is that fair? I did $200 worth of work, while Joe only did $50 worth of work, yet we end up each being paid $125?

That's still fair because it's the bossman's peppers and he can do whatever he wants with them, and you can go work somewhere else.

LoL. Well, I suppose that's one way to look at it. In a real socialist paradise, Joe and the bossman would both end up on the bad side of an icepick in the ear some dark and stormy night.

[Timo Y]

between all the people?
I don't see the reason why a few people who were the first could gain a big share of the coins and people who want to buy coins now have to pay for them. and why would people will cooperate with such system.
I mean I only heard about this today, I would participate earlier if I knew about it.

Between all the people on Earth?

Who would administer such a bureaucratic nightmare? Who would pay for it? How would you prevent fraud and corruption (eg. people creating multiple identities in order to claim multiple shares)? How would you achieve this without a central authority? How would deliver the bitcoins to the 1.4 Billion people on Earth who don't have electricity, let alone an internet connection?

Even if this mammoth project was ever achieved, the "equal" distribution wouldn't last long.  

A similar idea has been attempted after the fall of the Soviet Union.  It terms of achieving a sustained equality, it failed miserably.  See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatization_in_Russia

The aim of bitcoin isn't "fairness", the aim is a resilient decentralized payment system. Whoever contributes to security gets rewarded, simple as that.

 

[markm]

Here is a much much simpler system.

Instead of trying to "be fair" by divvying up one cryptocurrency among all people regardless of the wishes of those who started that currency up in the first place, lets give anyone who wants one an entire cryptocurrency of their own!

Anyone and everyone can have their own personal cryptocoins!

Luckily for this grand plan RIpple.com migiht let me say "the IOUs you issue on Ripple are those personal cryptocoins!" otherwise I might have to face objections about four bytes of connection handshake magic bytes or four bytes of port number space isn't enough to sufficiently differentiation each and every person's blockchain-based personal currency to keep them from colliding when connecting...

So go ahead, start your own cryptocurrency! Issue them as fairly or unfairly as you wish!

It is unfair, however, to insist that others should distribute theirs according to your preference rather than their own...

-MarkM-

[xDan]

I read about it, but still didn't know how it works completely, because it's too complicated system. But I read enough to make my decision, after I saw that some people got a lot of coins , which discouraged me from using this system , so I asked and said that I think it should have been distributed equally.

Do you avoid Apple products because some people got in early and made a mint in Apple shares?

Do you avoid gold, because its price fluctuates sometimes? Do you despise people who bought gold when the price was low, and do you vow never to buy or handle any objects made of gold because of that?

If some rival businessperson has the foresight to invest in some new technology and their business gains more custom than yours as a result, is that unfair? When you finally realise that the new tech has merit, should you be retroactively compensated?

If you don't agree with all those things: How is this any different?

Also:

Say your magical FairCoins were given one to every person on the earth. Maybe they start with zero value, maybe they start with a certain value, that doesn't matter. However the point at which you decide to sell a product or a service for FairCoin, and you receive another FairCoin from somebody else, you are giving more value to a FairCoin. (Previously you could buy X different things with FairCoin, now you can buy X+1! To everybody that desires your particular product, FairCoin's subjective value has increased). So the people that trade early in FairCoin will likely be able to command a higher amount of FairCoin for their products than those who come later. (Just like Bitcoin!)

Or maybe the FairCoin will go bust, and drop in value. Either way, the value *CHANGES* and doesn't stay the same; either the early adopters will win and the FairCoin will increase in value, or it will fail and everyone will lose. (The early adopters more so, since they sold actual products for it and are now left with worthless FairCoin).

So I think it's entirely possible that FairCoin would have the same "problem" that Bitcoin does. Maybe not quite to the same extent, but you would never know, because you can't control or predict these things. You would have a new hindsight and be trying to re-invent FairCoin. And again and again, each experiment giving a different result...

[ronenfe]

Ok, I want to ask a question, suppose you and 99 other men are living in a different planet, until now you trade things.
Suddenly you come with the idea it will be easier to use money instead of trading, everybody agree with you.
You all decide to create 1000 coins, now you want to share the coins between all of you. how many coins each one will get and why?

[ronenfe]

I read about it, but still didn't know how it works completely, because it's too complicated system. But I read enough to make my decision, after I saw that some people got a lot of coins , which discouraged me from using this system , so I asked and said that I think it should have been distributed equally.

Do you avoid Apple products because some people got in early and made a mint in Apple shares?

Do you avoid gold, because its price fluctuates sometimes? Do you despise people who bought gold when the price was low, and do you vow never to buy or handle any objects made of gold because of that?

If some rival businessperson has the foresight to invest in some new technology and their business gains more custom than yours as a result, is that unfair? When you finally realise that the new tech has merit, should you be retroactively compensated?

If you don't agree with all those things: How is this any different?

Also:

Say your magical FairCoins were given one to every person on the earth. Maybe they start with zero value, maybe they start with a certain value, that doesn't matter. However the point at which you decide to sell a product or a service for FairCoin, and you receive another FairCoin from somebody else, you are giving more value to a FairCoin. (Previously you could buy X different things with FairCoin, now you can buy X+1! To everybody that desires your particular product, FairCoin's subjective value has increased). So the people that trade early in FairCoin will likely be able to command a higher amount of FairCoin for their products than those who come later. (Just like Bitcoin!)

Or maybe the FairCoin will go bust, and drop in value. Either way, the value *CHANGES* and doesn't stay the same; either the early adopters will win and the FairCoin will increase in value, or it will fail and everyone will lose. (The early adopters more so, since they sold actual products for it and are now left with worthless FairCoin).

So I think it's entirely possible that FairCoin would have the same "problem" that Bitcoin does. Maybe not quite to the same extent, but you would never know, because you can't control or predict these things. You would have a new hindsight and be trying to re-invent FairCoin. And again and again, each experiment giving a different result...

It's not the same, I don't mind people buy things that get higher value in the future. This is not the case here, Money doesn't have a value on it's on, it's the ability to get things from it, that give it a value. This is about a currency system that wants to replace the current one, now people can decide if they want to cooperate with it or keep using the current one, and if people feel that the system made in such a way that some people will be richer than the others only because they invented it or were the first to join, people won't want to join it, and if people won't join it this system can't live, and the people also know they can harm the system by not joining it.

It's not the same if the value of the coin changes in the future, because each one has the right to keep the coin or use it later, but they all started with the same point, and anyway it's not clear if the early users lose or win, it depends on how the coin value will stabilize, in any case the difference won't be that high as now.
Think about it, half of the coins in the world are already mined, they are held by how many people? 0.00000001 percent of the world population? Do you think people can accept that? If I use my example of the other planet, it means just for demonstration that 2 people of the 100 will get 450 coins each and the rest get 1 coin.

[Mike Christ]

I believe the upside outweighs the head-start some users got.  Considering it's extremely difficult to spread the wealth of a decentralized currency, it's a lost cause to begin with.

[RodeoX]

People who wont use bitcoin because it's not fair that others have more, do not understand investing. With that logic I should never buy gold because I'll never get the deal my grandpa did in the 1940's. I also know people with way more money than I. Some of them received it in very unfair ways and even avoided taxes I had to pay. But the money I do have is still valuable to me, so I'm good.

[MoonShadow]

It's not the same, I don't mind people buy things that get higher value in the future. This is not the case here, Money doesn't have a value on it's on, it's the ability to get things from it, that give it a value. This is about a currency system that wants to replace the current one, now people can decide if they want to cooperate with it or keep using the current one, and if people feel that the system made in such a way that some people will be richer than the others only because they invented it or were the first to join, people won't want to join it, and if people won't join it this system can't live, and the people also know they can harm the system by not joining it.

Not only do you not understand Bitcoin, you don't even understand what money generally is.  What you want to do is literally impossible.  Yet, you are free to try it on your own.  We wouldn't try to stop you, although a great many of us are going to be quite amused at your attempts.  If you're right, you'd be a hero.

But you're not right.  Currencies are an amoral tool.  Nothing more, nothing less.  The fact that you disagree with how this one was designed makes no difference at all.  Are you going to claim that you do not use fiat currencies to live?  The nature of those currencies are far worse than anything that you imagine that Bitcoin may be.  That is what the alternative actually is.  What you would wish for is immaterial unless and until you, personally, make it happen.  Right now, what you want is not a choice, and no matter what you say on this forum, Bitcoin isn't going to change to suit your illusions.

[memvola]

Ok, I want to ask a question, suppose you and 99 other men are living in a different planet, until now you trade things.
Suddenly you come with the idea it will be easier to use money instead of trading, everybody agree with you.
You all decide to create 1000 coins, now you want to share the coins between all of you. how many coins each one will get and why?

From an agnostic standpoint, I would distribute it equally. What's the relevance to the subject? Have you read my post and at least pondered about the questions?

[taltamir]

Ok, I want to ask a question, suppose you and 99 other men are living in a different planet, until now you trade things.
Suddenly you come with the idea it will be easier to use money instead of trading, everybody agree with you.
You all decide to create 1000 coins, now you want to share the coins between all of you. how many coins each one will get and why?

Now suppose that the coins you decided to use had to be manufactured in an expensive process to prevent counterfeiting. When this became known 95 of the 100 people involved decided to not bother. As time passed more and more of them joined in and worked hard to create more and more coins.
Now some guy in the 20 who never bothered working for it decides it would be more fair if he gets a cut out of the work everyone else did "just because".

[Mike Christ]

Now suppose that the coins you decided to use had to be manufactured in an expensive process to prevent counterfeiting. When this became known 95 of the 100 people involved decided to not bother. As time passed more and more of them joined in and worked hard to create more and more coins.
Now some guy in the 20 who never bothered working for it decides it would be more fair if he gets a cut out of the work everyone else did "just because".

Right.  He wouldn't want it if it had no value, as he assumed prior.  Asking someone to give you wealth because you didn't know it would be worth something in the future is not fair at all.  The argument that nobody will adopt the coin because people are wealthy (and presumably not spreading any wealth, which obviously means no one is adopting the coin) is just his misguided observation.

[Walter Rothbard]

if people feel that the system made in such a way that some people will be richer than the others only because they invented it or were the first to join, people won't want to join it, and if people won't join it this system can't live

But people are joining.

[Domrada]

If you think you have a better way than Bitcoin, by all means, start your own coin and see how many people are willing to adopt it.  I for one, would not. But don't let that stop you!

[Mike Christ]

Not gonna lie, I'd rather have someone with enough insight to know Bitcoin could amount to something be on the top ladder in wealth, not someone who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, shipped to an ivy league school, and guaranteed a spot in power for future generations.