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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday January 16 2018, @12:05PM   Printer-friendly
from the faces-of-dogecoin dept.

Everyone Is Getting Hilariously Rich and You're Not

Recently the founder of something called Ripple briefly became richer than Mark Zuckerberg. Another day an anonymous donor set up an $86 million Bitcoin-fortune charity called the Pineapple Fund. A Tesla was spotted with a BLOCKHN license plate. There's a surge in people looking to buy Bitcoin on their credit cards. After the Long Island Iced Tea company announced it would pivot to blockchain, its stock rose 500 percent in a day.

In 2017, the cryptocurrency Bitcoin went from $830 to $19,300, and now quivers around $14,000. Ether, its main rival, started the year at less than $10, closing out 2017 at $715. Now it's over $1,100. The wealth is intoxicating news, feverish because it seems so random. Investors trying to grok the landscape compare it to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, when valuations soared and it was hard to separate the Amazons and Googles from the Pets.coms and eToys.

The cryptocurrency community is centered around a tightknit group of friends — developers, libertarians, Redditors and cypherpunks — who have known each other for years through meet-ups, an endless circuit of crypto conferences and internet message boards. Over long hours in anonymous group chats, San Francisco bars and Settlers of Catan game nights, they talk about how cryptocurrency will decentralize power and wealth, changing the world order. The goal may be decentralization, but the money is extremely concentrated. Coinbase has more than 13 million accounts that own cryptocurrencies. Data suggests that about 94 percent of the Bitcoin wealth is held by men [archive], and some estimate that 95 percent of the wealth is held by 4 percent of the owners.

There are only a few winners here, and, unless they lose it all, their impact going forward will be outsize.

They also remember who laughed at them and when.

Related: 1600 Vine Street (similar story, we'll see if it makes you just as mad)

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 16 2018, @08:11PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 16 2018, @08:11PM (#623271)

    Remember, however, that in Enterprise they did show a freighter in at least one episode. Life didn't look quite so nice there.

    Enterprise was set before replicators were a thing (early on, they explicitly pointed out that the ship had a cook/chef). It is therefore logical to assume that Enterprise is set during a pre-post-scarcity period, so can't really be used as example.