Coinbase mafia shows how tight a circle holds sway over Bitcoin

A few things:

1. You mentioned loans, and I mentioned debts. Debts matter at least as much as taxes as a source of demand for fiat currency, since the government can "reassign" the ownership of property if debts are not repaid and the government will always determine debt payments in terms of its fiat currency.

2. Suppose the money is only distributed to citizens in the form of salaries. What do they do with it? Why does anyone they do business with -- merchants, landlords, whoever -- want it? One of the reasons why taxes and debt laws work well is that they are immediately relevant to almost everyone in a country (anyone who owns property owes property tax; anyone with a business loan must make their loan payments; etc.).

3. Suppose a country relies on resource wealth to stimulate demand for its currency. That country will compete in the global market for those resources and the demand for its currency, and thus the value of the currency, will fluctuate according to market forces. The price volatility would be a huge problem for the citizens of the country as they tried to use the currency in their daily lives.

So while in theory, under very particular circumstances, such a thing would be possible, in practice it would probably not last long. Volatility, weird distortions in demand, and other issues would render the currency hard to use and reduce its value in the local market.

If someone said "The remarkably small circle of mostly hair stylists who control bitcoin" would you have responded so many times? No, there's something about gender here that's got you incensed. I'm not trying to sound flippant, but I think there's more to this than genitals and the amount of relevance that genitals or gender has to the story.

First though, I think you're confusing what was said. The starting sentence of the article is:

> Coinbase Global Inc.’s filing to become a publicly-traded company provides a glimpse into the remarkably small circle of mostly men who command the incredibly lucrative digital landscape.

That's not a statement about "men own most bitcoins" it's saying that Coinbase Global is run mostly by men. This is easily proven. You can look right here - 5 out of 7 of their executive team are men and 7 out of 9 on their board are also men - https://www.coinbase.com/about

So someone responded about that first sentence saying 'Any article that uses the sentence "mostly men" in the first paragraph is highly likely not worth reading'. You agreed with that sentiment, pointing out why - you think mentioning gender is irrelevant and furthermore it is a "perversion" for someone to do so. (Would it be a perversion if they said "hair stylists"?)

Here's why I think you're wrong on that point though. You're strictly equating "gender" and "genitals" as if they're synonyms. They're not. If you think that's true, try an experiment: Ask random people the first thing that comes to their mind when you say the word "men" or the word "women" to them. I'll bet you money that the vast, vast majority of people will not just say "penises" or "vaginas". They'll say so many other things because those words convey so much more than just genitalia.

In the news they constantly mention the gender of people, especially if the group of people they're discussing are all or even mostly one gender. That's because it helps listeners picture what's happening in their mind. Moreover, reversed gender roles are absolutely interesting to people. For instance - most criminals are men [0], so if a group of women robbed a bank you can rest assured that the news would absolutely say "A group of women robbed a bank" and also that it would be so interesting to people that they'd make a movie about it. Even if men robbed the bank, they would say "a group of men" because if they said "a group of people robbed a bank" people would want to know - so if it's a mixed group the news will say "two men and a woman robbed a bank today."

Why are most men criminals though? It's probably because men are just generally more aggressive than women. That fact is just one of the many that will occur to people when they hear about a group of people doing something. Genitalia is the furthest thing from their mind.

In the end, I don't know exactly why Matthew Leising, the author of this article, even mentioned that it's mostly men that run Coinbase Global. I know for a fact that most people would not be bothered at all by this tidbit of information being mentioned though. I'm not. I don't even care about bitcoin and I'm not even sure why I bothered to read these comments. One thing I am concerned about though is how people are squaring up to fight over these types of things. Why do you have such a strong reaction to someone mentioning the possible/probable gender ratio of a group of people? Perhaps the subject of societies treatment and recognition of gender in general is something close to your heart? I don't know - but I don't want the world fighting over this too so I'd like to help if I can.

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=gender+percentage+of+crimina...

I disagree with this: there's a genuine difference between non-productive assets like bitcoin (and gold) and productive ones like companies.

> Today the world’s gold stock is about 170,000 metric tons. If all of this gold were melded together, it would form a cube of about 68 feet per side. (Picture it fitting comfortably within a baseball infield.) At $1,750 per ounce – gold’s price as I write this – its value would be $9.6 trillion. Call this cube pile A.

> Let’s now create a pile B costing an equal amount. For that, we could buy all U.S. cropland (400 million acres with output of about $200 billion annually), plus 16 Exxon Mobils (the world’s most profitable company, one earning more than $40 billion annually). After these purchases, we would have about $1 trillion left over for walking-around money (no sense feeling strapped after this buying binge). Can you imagine an investor with $9.6 trillion selecting pile A over pile B?

> ...

> A century from now the 400 million acres of farmland will have produced staggering amounts of corn, wheat, cotton, and other crops – and will continue to produce that valuable bounty, whatever the currency may be. Exxon Mobil will probably have delivered trillions of dollars in dividends to its owners and will also hold assets worth many more trillions (and, remember, you get 16 Exxons). The 170,000 tons of gold will be unchanged in size and still incapable of producing anything. You can fondle the cube, but it will not respond.

--Warren Buffett https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2011ltr.pdf

(emphasis added in the final paragraph)

I loved Mia.bet's pet hamster marble race concept but their website notes:

> The continuously high Ethereum gas fees cause betting fees and operation costs to skyrocket. Hence, we decided to postpone the next race until further notice. We're currently working on a 2nd-layer scaling solution.

A shame that Ethereum gas fees are limiting enough to stop such a fun project.

Farmland is a speculation that we won't completely degrade the topsoil that makes it useful for agriculture.

Exxon Mobile is a speculation that they'll be able to pivot their business out of carbon fuel long term. Even monster companies falter and fail. Exxon in particular is down 50% from its peak in 2014.

Income generating assets are fantastic, but owning them requires work to constantly re-assess the landscape that makes them capable of generating income. Some people like Buffett are really good at that game. Winners like him start to win even more when they have hundreds of billions of wealth to slosh around which gives them the power to create self fulfilling prophecies with their investments that you and I don't have individually.

This is why people have started using passive index funds as savings accounts, which seems to be starting to distort the market and has a lot of people worried that it will lead to a housing bubble like crash, especially with Boomers withdrawing their retirement savings from the market while Millennials and Gen X might not earn enough to outpace the withdrawals. A demographic bomb.

Do we really want a world where doctors feel compelled to waste valuable time and attention playing the stock market game because a savings account doesn't even pretend to protect your money from inflation anymore? People from all walks of life with money to protect are increasingly riddled with anxiety that the wealth they've worked hard to save is getting washed out from under them, and it's making us all a neurotic mess of a society.