Bitcoins are not supposed to redistribute wealth evenly nor are they designed for a communist regime.
I like how this thread has so many posters who neither understood the OP or read the rest of the thread. It's
not about
redistribution. It's about
initial distribution, and how Bitcoin looks like a premine to every potential new adopter.
It would be very similar to Bitcoin actually, replace mining with buying others' fair money.
It might have been more similar if mining didn't turn into a race to the bottom. As it is, it would be very different from Bitcoin.
Why wouldn't you adopt if someone is willing to give you something for it?
Precisely. But to treat that sentence as not a rhetorical question: "Because it's too difficult and time consuming to do so." If you know that you can get 10 USD by claiming some cryptocurrency that was equally distributed to the Earth's population, but it takes several days of work to do so, some might not bother and just leave it in their "account" until it becomes easier to do and the value rises.
As I said earlier, the distribution would become heterogeneous very rapidly.
The higher the value rises, the more people would join the system. You'd stilll have people who are more interested in holding than selling, but as the system grows I actually think the heterogeneity would lower over time. As the value rises, there would be less incentive in the system for the new adopters to sell their coins cheaply to a handful of hoarders.
I think this sort of heterogeneity is a requirement for adoption anyway, otherwise no one would have enough incentive to develop services for it.
On the other hand if it becomes too heterogeneous - i.e. too few people hold the coins without using them for anything useful (hoarding) - it leads to failure.
You could try making it legal tender instead, but since it doesn't have any value,
Being legal tender is enough to give a currency value, since you are guaranteed to be able to use it for paying off debts and taxes. Of course, if you let that currency hyperinflate it would still be a low value, but since the "lifecoins/fair coins" are in limited supply you'd avoid that problem.
If you start out with one king making all the coins, requiring taxes paid in coins, and paying for public works and public servants in coins, you sort of have the extreme case of heterogenous holding. This still works since the king rules that the coins are the legal tender of the land, and there's not an infite number of rival kings issuing their own coins.
stronger hands will still accumulate them until they have enough to work on making it useful. It will be completely "unfair", as these people will make a huge profit out of it by selling these back to the people they bought from.
If the coins end up on the hands of just a few people who offer services to increase the value of their coins, they have effectively become a sort of voucher for their services. It wouldn't be unfair to the non-holders, since the non-holders would buy coins to pay for the services offered in the coin economy.
1. A ("strong hand") buys funnycoins from B ("weak hand") for USD.
2. A provides goods and services for funnycoins
3. A sells funnycouns to B for USD.
4. B buys goods and service from A for funnycoins.
Even if coin/USD rate has risen from step 1 to step 3, what has effectively happened is that B bought goods and services from A at market rates. So the "strong hand" here is the one that actually provides something that the market will exchange something of value for, at competitive rates. If, however, A fails to provide that, this happens instead:
1. A ("strong hand") buys funnycoins from B ("weak hand") for USD.
2. A provides goods and services for funnycoins.
3. B uses the USD from step 1 to buy goods and services from C
What has happened here, is that the "strong hand" is left holding the bag and effectively paid B to shop from C.
