A serious discussion regarding the ethics of crypto currencies.

[Diplomacy]

If one looks up at the distribution of bitcoin somewhere around 3% of the addresses hold ~96% of the wealth, 10% of addresses have more than 99% of all bitcoin wealth.

Combine this and the inherently deflationary nature of the block chain it raises a few issues.

First, founders and early adopters becoming excessively wealthy at the expenses of everyone else, not that society is much different in distribution in real life, but it raises of the question of *who* is going to gain such wealth and whether it is a good idea for the rest of us to go along with it.

In addition, there is a very real chance that "Satoshi" is a group of tech companies fueled and funded by the same people who have been suppressing the very technologies that this group is working diligently on bringing to the light.

Using any crypto-currency involving a blockchain utilizes this underlying technology.

Regardless of who created bitcoin the blockchain itself poses a moral hazard.

If one examines the blockchain it is one of the most powerful tracking tools every devised by mankind.

The claim that bitcoin is anonymous are obviously false, it is trivial for governments to take web data, not to mention the multi-billion dollar private data industry that google and facebook are the poster children of.

There may be no personal information needed to merely make a wallet, but every transaction in every wallet is tracked and the block chain is a matter of permanent public record and statistical analysis + web browsing habits would make it very simple to track every bit sent if someone cared to do it, the block chain is public and permanent and miners always have incentive to mine more for transaction fees so these databases would only grow over time with adoption.

Many governments and central banks would find this state of affairs quite useful.

I am a fan of new technology that could make life easier, but I think this is one of the biggest cons ever pulled on humanity.

Not trying to hurl anything at Aaron for Teslacoin in particular, just wanting to start a discussion on the underlying technology.

All are welcome to comment, even if to mock me for being a no-coiner; my old roommate from college has been mining them since they were $.50, he has worked for multiple tech companies on the west coast, I told him these were a scam back then just as I hold to now. I have never had a crypto-wallet and would sooner go back to the land than ever sign up for something to similar to what John warned us of in the Revelation.

[Aaron]

Bitcoin downfalls

You're right, Bitcoin is not anonymous. But that is only the first coin with its own blockchain nature with many spinoffs. If you look at many new coins coming with their ICO's (Initial Coin Offerings) to raise money for projects, etc... the founders take up to maybe 30% max and the rest of the coin is sold off and with some, whatever coin doesn't sell by launch time - it gets destroyed. So you do make some good points about Bitcoin, but it hasn't represented what Cryptocurrency is all about for a long time now - so much has changed.

Coins based on Cryptonote are completely anonymous and the transactions cannot be tracked - these coins include Bytecoin, Monero and others. One thing about these particular coins is that they are egalitarian based - so in this context it means that they are ASIC resistant. With Bitcoin, ASIC mining technology advances, gets expensive and those without serious money can no longer mine it. With the Cryptonote coins, they will always be able to be mined with CPUs and GPUs - therefore, mining them can still be in the range of the lower income population. It is way too expensive to create dedicated mining rigs based on the CPU and GPU technology. So if not wanting to be tracked is one of your primary concerns, then coins based on the Cryptonote methodology are for you.

Coins based on ERC20, which is Ethereum are contract driven to maintain integrity between buyers and sellers.

Coins based on Ripple have virtually instantaneous transaction times. This is why the banks are going to use Ripple for international transfers - faster and cheaper. There are maybe 4-5 other coins based on the Ripple backbone. Some Bitcoin transactions can take hours to complete, some other coins like Litecoin can take a few minutes, etc.

So each of these coin technologies are based on very specific goals to address the downfalls of Bitcoin so the rest of the world is pretty much on the same page as you are in terms of what is wrong with Bitcoin. The first of any kind of game-changing, disruptive technology, will usually have a lot of things that need improvement.