What is Wealth?

Wealth is a societal agreement of your rank in the ownership of all available goods and services.

To explore concepts, I like to test the extremes. Think of the extreme of world dominating wealth for a moment. The type that would leave everyone else impoverished. How can this sort of wealth be achieved?

If land and goods were accumulated, you would need an army to defend it.

If money was accumulated instead (something of agreed value, a language of value), initially you would need no army – society agrees to your wealth because they agree to the value communicated by money. But the impoverished could decide to not value that money. To prevent that, you would have to use force/violence again. Even gold, which has value for reasons other than money, can be abandoned as money and lose the majority of its value.

You might be beginning to see that to accumulate extreme wealth, you need violence, because ultimately wealth is the claim to value of goods or other people’s time. If your claim is too great, a rebellion is possible.

For Bitcoin to become money, it needs acceptance as money. It doesn’t need an alternative use. There is no alternative use that could maintain immense wealth if society rebelled against accumulation and chose another money. The best chance for bitcoin to survive is if it’s ownership is distributed. As time goes on, it gets more and more distributed, as opposed to fiat money which gets more and more concentrated – sowing the seeds for rebellion and opting for another money: Bitcoin.