/1 For anyone that thinks digital assets are a panacea for increasing income inequality, or a gateway of opportunity for early entrants to overcome entrenched interests, think again. I've long wondered why the investment community is so interested in the value proposition that is

/2 offered by Bitcoin & it's artificially programmed stock-to-flow ratio, held up as a moral virtue. The reality is that it offers the opportunity for immutable income inequality into perpetuity under the guise of a new computational consensus of an upper class. They don't trust

/3 Is Satoshi crying or laughing? Are the maximalists & first adopters ecstatic at the prospect of joining the 1% forever, securing the destiny of their genetic lineage? Now every new deflationary asset offers the same implicit promise for those being the first to hoard the most.

/4 Like moths to the flame, intelligent people flock to the proposition of digital assets as a literal rocket from which to escape the gravitational pull of unending & impending inequality, like an ever increasing gravity well pulling down on opportunity & robbing the future.

5/ It's no wonder that the crypto community of so-called "cypher-punks" is often comprised of libertarians w/ principles of economic self-empowerment. Freedom from the shackles of institutionalized control from pre-existing monetary & governmental powers. It started with currency

6/ it has since moved to disintermediation of all 3rd parties with the concept of smart contracts (a proxy for programmatic enforcement of consensus rules). All this reinforces the illusion that fairer processes & systems will ameliorate the gross inequalities of the world. NAY!

7/ I have some really sobering news, so stop reading if you want to stay in the cave of ignorance. Stay on if you want to engage in a discussion that hopes to shine a light on how we can break free from the endless cycles of our nature. I'm no prophet, I don't have the answers.

8/ The path can be built if we are brave enough to admit to ourselves the reality of the situation. So long as people believe they have a chance at being part of the 1% my words will fall on deaf ears. Realize, by definition, 99% will will be losers.

9/ Dwell on this thought & realize that incentive systems are designed to control behavior. The more clever, the more control. This would be fine if the end game were equity of opportunity, but what we see instead is an attempt to downright overtly dominate our fellow man. Reject

10/ I've long felt that the economy is a subset of ecology, & furthermore a subset of physical principles, which can be described via mathematics. Specifically, I've wondered why systems out of equilibrium tend towards certain states but I've lacked the tools & intelligence.

11/ I happened upon a subject of research today that I hope to convey so that others can lend their insights. I believe it to be of considerable value. The methodology is simple, but the conclusions profound. Allow me to explain.

12/ "The Affine Wealth Model - An Agent-Based Model of Asset Exchange That Allows for Negative-Wealth Agents & It's Empirical Validation."

For the highly technical:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.02370.pdf

Simple summary in the Nov. 2019 Scientific American (paywall).
https://www.scientificamerican.com/magazine/sa/2019/11-01/

13/ As long suspected by many, money begets money, capital concentrates & aggregates over time. This is well understand but it's never been atomically, explicitly, understood why as the assumptions underlying economics are incomplete.

14/ It starts w/ thinking that economic transactions are fair at the onset. Two rational actors trading value yield a no wealth xfer. In hindsight this is embarrassingly naive (I was a believer in this), but the reality is that every transaction yields more value to 1 vs. other.

15/ Even a tiny asymmetry in an economic transaction can compound over large numbers (which when you think about it is the ONLY possible scenario as nothing in nature can be exactly equal to the extent things are inherently stochastic).

16/ Economic transactions inevitably stem from a "mistake" of one actor accepting a "deal" in which the net value for them from the exchange is a net negative, often arising from risk aversion. Ask your average crypto trader to see the reality of this statement.

17/ This is all summarized in the article. Details here or in the references above. https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1184470132413759488?s=20
So what to do about this problem? Is Oligarchy our destiny for mankind, with the inevitable populism, anger, & conflict to re-equilibrate the economic conditions? Violence?

18/ Technological Innovation in the hands of mega-corporations accelerates the aggregation of capital into the hands of intellectual property owners. Productivity gains are therefore concentrated away from labor to capital (shareholders). Money trickles up.

19/ If the last 10 yrs. of economic expansion were not proof enough look at policy. Most favorable tax environment for corporatism worldwide, lowest interest rates in human history, un-ending asset value growth w/out improvements in the underlying earnings or GDP. Wages stagnant.

20/ In 2010, 388 individuals possessed as much wealth as the lower 50% of the world combined, 2019 it's down to 26. The best-performing 10th of the companies captured 80% of all the economic profit in 2014 - 2016, up 75% a decade earlier. The top 1% of the companies captured 36%.

21/ I offer the following proposals based on mitigating the "rates of change" that create the conditions for oligarchy. These proposals aren't solutions, simply attempts at buying time for the citizenry to enact policies that ameliorate the problems. Only society gets to decide.

22/ 1. Design policy to make anti-monopoly programmatic. For example, a market cap limit of 40% would trigger automatic split of the company into 2 new companies (w/ each starting w/ equal access to customer base, intellectual property, etc.)

23/ 2. Create policy with significantly shorter (non-linear) conversion of patents / IP to public domains / fair use so that the window for profiting from inventions is commensurate with a weighted formula of risk, sunk costs, & acceleration of aggregated income.

24/ 3. Allow for policies that create a "rider" tax on R&D funded from public taxation. For example, all of the wealth from the internet ultimately stems from ARPA-net & the resulting computer science. The tax would be programmatically dispersed to citizenry via CBDCs wallet.

25/ 4. Publicly fund the creation of Internet of Value, creating an interoperable web of value transfer that enables all human assets to be traded P2P (both physical & intellectual). Fund this development via a programmatic tax on every transaction. Eliminate capital gains tax.