On 12/22/2013 10:59 PM, Amir Taaki wrote:
>
> Bitcoin is not going to bring equality to the world. If anything it will
> bring *more* inequality.

This is highly debatable. The internet created enormous wealth for a
few, but it's difficult to argue that it increased the overall
inequality level. At the same time as the internet's rise, we had
globalisation, which was a more important force economically, and which,
paradoxically, simultaneously raised the standards of living for
hundreds of millions in poor countries while increasing the level of
inequality in exactly those same countries. China's GINI coefficient
rose above 50, which only a couple of decades ago was a level reserved
for basket-cases.
The key to it all is [de]centralization. The reason that this explosion
of economic productivity did not ameliorate inequality is because the
hierarchical power structures remained intact. Efficiencies were
leveraged by the power structure.
Now the internet had given birth to decentralised messaging and a
decentralised asset ledger, everything changes. Earlier forms of
revolution were always a failure because many-many communication
bandwidth was not sufficient to tranmit real meaning. Storming
barricades or winter palaces was all very well but the mob could only
transmit raw emotion easily, and so societies reorganised into new
hierarchies as tyrannical or more than the previous ones.
Even 20 years after the mainstreaming of the internet, society is still
almost entirely hierarchical, because information is only power if
guarded, but openness is built into the internet's design. The
difference with Bitcoin is we can now transfer power as easily as
information.

And finally I got to the point :) - when society no longer needs
hierarchies, the level of inequality is inevitably going to reduce.