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

[myuser]

If you want it more spread about, I hear Freicoin is lovely this time of year.

[thoughtfan]

If you want it more spread about, I hear Freicoin is lovely this time of year.

From reading the OP one would guess Freicoin would be a nice compromise between something that has a reasonable chance of working/succeeding and the impractical ideals expressed in the OP shared by others who hold a similar concept of 'fairness'.  However although I for one mentioned Freicoin a good while back in this thread it appears by now despite the efforts of many who understand and explain these things pretty admirably the OP is more interested in bitching about Bitcoin and coming up with the obviously-fairest-system-that-nobody-has-already-thought-of coin than in learning what's out there and how and why it works as it does.

[CyanSlowly]

 

[Beepbop]

The work is invented on purpose... Key word is PURPOSE rather then "for the lulz".

Smoke and mirrors also have their purpose. Actually I would value a financial instrument backed by lulz (comedy gold) higher than an instrument that essentially represents humiliation, jobloss and wasted electricty (actually to more mean spirited people that would represent lulz). The only rational actor I can think of who would actually invest in it long term, would be the power companies in markets with many miners, or hardware manufacturers, if they could use it as a instrument of electricity waste and hardware futures.

Note that I'm talking about bitcoin as an investment here - I'm not knocking it as a transfer system for quick payments. Only intraday stability matters for that.

The "invented" work is also known as cryptography and its purpose is to stop anyone from printing infinite coins as well as to ensure the system is unadulterated by fakes.

The why is to prevent fraud

Fraud is rampant though.

More importantly, once the security is high enough that the computational difficulty to break it would need much of the output of the sun, throwing more computation at it is useless. It might as well be backed by proof of jumping up and down in your living room.

It just becomes a game of chicken where those who can keep mining going for the longest can try to keep the value up, but then the last guys get stuck holding fantastically secure tokens that nobody else cares about, specialty hardware, and an electric grid connection that's ready for Vehicle-to-grid or starting their own mini power plant. Hopefully they didn't spend too much fiat in propping up the value of BTC to make their mining investment profitable.

Its bad enough when the government is printing infiniate money, give that power to every citizen and you got a worthless "currency".

Isn't that what Bitcoin initially tried to do? If every computer owner in the world could easily process transactions, without having to invest in specialty hardware, I'd imagine that the system would be more robust than one that encourages consolidation of "mining" power.

Can you come up with a way to ensure every living person only has 1 wallet? (answer: no... unless you are the government and institute some strict biometrics)

Even if governments get involved in some capacity, that doesn't mean that we give the control to ONE government or ONE corporation. The free market would still exist, and devalue the real value of a currency if they think there is a lack of transparency, or fraud.

Even if you distribute the issuing rights to entities that are unlikely to be influenced, there is no way to guarantee that these rights won't in time consolidate in the States' hands.

You could make it illegal to control more than one issuing authority. Besides, the problem of over-consolidation also exists with the current Bitcoin protocol.

[Peter Lambert]

IF Bitcoins was shared equally then everybody would have them.  Then what would be it's value?  

About 420 000 usd per btc, or 2.4 uBTC per usd.

(Taking a rough estimate by pulling numbers out of the air: currently 30 usd per btc with (wild guess) 500000 users, multiply that value per user ratio by world population of 7 billion)

[nikb]

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.

Yes... that would be "fair". 

[vdragon]

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.

 Thats were comunism failed. We are not all created equal, some people have ideas, some dont. Some have seen future in this project, rest didnt care. So the one who were early adopters should be rewarded because they made it available for others.

[memvola]

Even if you distribute the issuing rights to entities that are unlikely to be influenced, there is no way to guarantee that these rights won't in time consolidate in the States' hands.

You could make it illegal to control more than one issuing authority. Besides, the problem of over-consolidation also exists with the current Bitcoin protocol.

That, you can't do with a decentralized protocol.

Bitcoin can become anything of course, the system itself depends on some assumptions about society. However, at that point you need to give practical details about the proposed protocol so that we can compare the assumptions that we need to make for the systems to function. Bitcoin does not assume a lot of things most of the proposed systems that I've examined do, and that is its main strength.

[JoelKatz]

You could make it illegal to control more than one issuing authority.

There's all kinds of cool things you can do if people put you in charge and gave you a gun. But you have to take people's freedom away to do it, and that's an awfully high a price to pay. The challenge is to come up with ways to make people's lives better than don't require people to threaten each other into going along with the scheme. Ideally, this time no one would have to get nailed to anything.

[nikb]

You could make it illegal to control more than one issuing authority.

There's all kinds of cool things you can do if people put you in charge and gave you a gun. But you have to take people's freedom away to do it, and that's an awfully high a price to pay. The challenge is to come up with ways to make people's lives better than don't require people to threaten each other into going along with the scheme. Ideally, this time no one would have to get nailed to anything.

Can we at least agree that whoever ends up with a gun and in charge take the Kardashians out back and shoot them?

[MoonShadow]

You could make it illegal to control more than one issuing authority.

There's all kinds of cool things you can do if people put you in charge and gave you a gun. But you have to take people's freedom away to do it, and that's an awfully high a price to pay. The challenge is to come up with ways to make people's lives better than don't require people to threaten each other into going along with the scheme. Ideally, this time no one would have to get nailed to anything.

Can we at least agree that whoever ends up with a gun and in charge take the Kardashians out back and shoot them?

No. Stupidity is not a crime.

[Mike Christ]

You could make it illegal to control more than one issuing authority.

There's all kinds of cool things you can do if people put you in charge and gave you a gun. But you have to take people's freedom away to do it, and that's an awfully high a price to pay. The challenge is to come up with ways to make people's lives better than don't require people to threaten each other into going along with the scheme. Ideally, this time no one would have to get nailed to anything.

Can we at least agree that whoever ends up with a gun and in charge take the Kardashians out back and shoot them?

No. Stupidity is not a crime.

True.  It's too great an asset to the nation's leaders to ever be illegal.

[nikb]

You could make it illegal to control more than one issuing authority.

There's all kinds of cool things you can do if people put you in charge and gave you a gun. But you have to take people's freedom away to do it, and that's an awfully high a price to pay. The challenge is to come up with ways to make people's lives better than don't require people to threaten each other into going along with the scheme. Ideally, this time no one would have to get nailed to anything.

Can we at least agree that whoever ends up with a gun and in charge take the Kardashians out back and shoot them?

No. Stupidity is not a crime.

It's got nothing to do we them being stupid (clearly, they're not - they are very savvy and good businesswomen). They're just odious ;P

[Beepbop]

That, you can't do with a decentralized protocol.

Why not? If you break that law, you can send those who break that law to prison or make them sell it, like anti-monopoly laws already do if one person gets too much control. Or the market rejects it. Even if the protocol doesn't know who owns each node, if it's transparent it is a matter of public knowledge and either governments or the free market can see that undesired centralization is going on, and react accordingly. It doesn't matter to the protocol if it's hosted in Soviet Russia or Ayn Rand Planet.

This is a social and political thing that an amoral protocol doesn't care about. The legal and political context will decide whether the protocol is successful though. A perfect technical solution to a non-existent problem will still fail to be accepted. Likewise a bad protocol, even if supported by all the guns in the world, will also fall apart and fail.

[memvola]

That, you can't do with a decentralized protocol.

Why not? If you break that law, you can send those who break that law to prison or make them sell it, like anti-monopoly laws already do if one person gets too much control. Or the market rejects it. Even if the protocol doesn't know who owns each node, if it's transparent it is a matter of public knowledge and either governments or the free market can see that undesired centralization is going on, and react accordingly. It doesn't matter to the protocol if it's hosted in Soviet Russia or Ayn Rand Planet.

This is a social and political thing that an amoral protocol doesn't care about. The legal and political context will decide whether the protocol is successful though. A perfect technical solution to a non-existent problem will still fail to be accepted. Likewise a bad protocol, even if supported by all the guns in the world, will also fall apart and fail.

I'm sorry, I thought you meant subject to miner votes or something by the word "illegal". You are really talking about using State power to enforce legality? How is it not centralized? How are 10 entities threatened and dictated by one entity different from a single entity?

[Beepbop]

I'm talking about that even without government control, the market will vote with their feet and abandon the currency en masse, and choose an alternative that's more worthy of trust.

An untrustworthy* central entity holding all the identity power is just as bad as one untrustworthy central entity owning all the coins.

* If you can trust the central entity, then they can back the currency by fiat anyway.

[RodeoX]

I'm talking about that even without government control, the market will vote with their feet and abandon the currency en masse, and choose an alternative that's more worthy of trust.

An untrustworthy* central entity holding all the identity power is just as bad as one untrustworthy central entity owning all the coins.

* If you can trust the central entity, then they can back the currency by fiat anyway.

I also have zero interest in any system that requires trust. If a centralization of BTC took place I would liquidate and look elsewhere, as bitcoin would be dead.

[taltamir]

If someone wants a centralized currency...
Dollar, Euro, Won, Yen, etc etc...
The whole goal of bitcoin isn't crypto... crypto is the MEANS via which the goal is achieved.
The goal is to decentralize it.

[Beepbop]

I also have zero interest in any system that requires trust.

Or you have to trust the system itself, so you can't use any system. Even if it's just the hardware and software involved, you can't inspect every CPU gate and line of source code. And you trust the infrastructure to be there for you.

I prefer to use a risk-based approach to trust: Only trust something as much as you have to, and if the disparity between risk and required trust becomes too great, use various strategies to mitigate or reduce the risk. (For example, escrow, audits, security guards, two separate keys, etc.)

If a centralization of BTC took place I would liquidate and look elsewhere, as bitcoin would be dead.

Well now you know how the thread starter feels. He sees the current incarnation of BTC as centralized on the hands of a few people, and with no compulsion to reward them for being "reticuled by family, fired from their jobs and alienated by friends for constantly talking about Bitcoins and posting Youtube videos." as Luno put it.

[nikb]

I also have zero interest in any system that requires trust.

Or you have to trust the system itself, so you can't use any system. Even if it's just the hardware and software involved, you can't inspect every CPU gate and line of source code. And you trust the infrastructure to be there for you.

I prefer to use a risk-based approach to trust: Only trust something as much as you have to, and if the disparity between risk and required trust becomes too great, use various strategies to mitigate or reduce the risk. (For example, escrow, audits, security guards, two separate keys, etc.)

If a centralization of BTC took place I would liquidate and look elsewhere, as bitcoin would be dead.

Well now you know how the thread starter feels. He sees the current incarnation of BTC as centralized on the hands of a few people, and with no compulsion to reward them for being "reticuled by family, fired from their jobs and alienated by friends for constantly talking about Bitcoins and posting Youtube videos." as Luno put it.

He may see it that way, but that doesn't mean it is that way...