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Adele_L comments on Less Wrong used to like Bitcoin before it was cool. Time for a revisit? - Less Wrong
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The mining system provides the block chain that verifies transactions; yes. And eventually the payoff to miners becomes dominated by transaction fees rather than by payouts for finding blocks.
One of my concerns with Bitcoin is that today, on the margin, choosing to accept BTC in exchange for goods means agreeing to give lots of goods, on demand, to the people who currently are sitting on a lot of BTC — who have not (on the whole) done anything particularly useful to earn that wealth. Even a merchant who thinks a Bitcoin-like system is a good idea may be reluctant to agree to participate in making a bunch of nerds with video cards very, very rich.
Doesn't regular money have this same problem?
Sure, in a sense; but merchants don't really have a meaningful choice of whether to accept it. BTC is new.
Well the problem is arguably worse with regular money since the number of bitcoins that will ever exist is limited, whereas with regular money governments can, and sometimes do, print arbitrarily large quantities.