It would be great if MIT Tech Review dropped its political agenda and just, you know, reported on technology.<p>These "rich-getting-richer" addresses may actually be held by businesses, and the reason they are gaining more links and BTC is because more people are storing their BTC with that business.<p>The study doesn't provide nearly enough evidence or context to justify MIT Tech Review's politically-loaded rhetoric. There are ways to report on the Bitcoin network without mucking it up with divisive classist rhetoric.
There are actually two halves of Matthew's law: the rich get richer & the poor get poorer. I wonder why they didn't say anything about the other half? I suppose you might think it was entailed in the first, but I'm not sure how valid reasoning that would be if it's not zero sum.
Of course this makes sense for Bitcoin. Early adopters had a much easier time accumulating currency, and likely ensured a way for them to keep control of a good amount of currency in the future.
This article has already been disputed. As bitcoin has grown businesses like Bitpay are starting to handle payments for merchants, and exchanges and other businesses are beginning to coalesce bitcoins into wallets. That is why bitcoins are starting to become more concentrated, not because some individuals are earning more.<p>It's actually very difficult to make bitcoins with bitcoin investment, there's only risky bets and day trading right now. There are no reliable interest-bearing instruments.
Another way of saying this: When it rains, it pours.<p>And of course this is true. For any given node in an example network, the number of incoming links to it is the same as the number of people who have already 'vouched' for that person. Obviously, more links are given to those who already have higher credibility in virtue of being vouched for. In a social network this is true and in an economy this is true. The more incoming links you have, the stronger your 'brand,' the more incoming links you have.<p>More than just a currency, what BitCoin offers is the most complete data on any economy. In no other economy is a complete record of every transaction, and every amount of every transaction, available. I wouldn't be surprised if BitCoin's economy becomes an extremely popular laboratory for academic economists to study actual, real-life economic effects with great precision.
From my reading, this simply has nothing to do with the Matthew Effect. They are measuring volume of transactions, not necessarily value and certainly not wealth accumulation.<p>Naturally, those who engage in many transactions initially are likely to engage in even more transactions in the future (ex. a new exchange starts with many transactions and gets even more over time). This has no correlation with actual wealth.<p>If we were to apply this logic to the real world, one would reach the startling conclusion that delis are wealthier than high fashion boutiques.
This is complete garbage. A bitcoin account in no way represents the wealth of a person. If you look at the graph, you will see that bitcoin accounts typically change in their "wealth" by orders of magnitude over the period of a month.<p>So if this is some way represented the real economy, it would be saying that in a given month, some people get 1000 times richer, some get 1000 times poorer, but in some average sense, the rich tend to get slightly richer.<p>The whole article has the feel of researchers taking the data that exists and is easy to analyze, doing some simple computations that are completely meaningless, and then pretending these computations have some implications for society.<p>EDIT: I was mis-reading that graph, but the point remains that bitcoin accounts are no a meaningful quantity (if we are interested in the wealth of individuals). In particular that figure (and their observations that the rate of growth is higher for higher balances) only applies to the subset of accounts whose balance increases. When you look at the accounts whose balance decreases, almost all of the time the balance goes to zero.