Are Cryptocurrencies Really The Answer To Wealth Inequality?

Some people in the crypto space have put forward the idea that cryptocurrency will completement or rather completely replace the existing financial system and help bring about greater wealth equality by creating opportunities for those not included or disadvantaged by the legacy system. Proponents of crypto often point out the fragility of fiat money systems and their vulnerability to hyperinflation should sovereign debt levels force central banks to loosen up monetary policy sufficiently. All that sounds plausible particularly now that oddities like negative interest rates are on the table to ensure liquidity. Debt levels are mounting, which is forcing central banks to keep interest rates at an abnormally low level as well as engage in open market operations to bolster asset valuations to keep the house of cards that the derivatives market is from collapsing and taking everything else down with it.

But assuming that things go south everywhere like in Argentina in the coming years and that cryptocurrency adoption skyrockets when alternatives are urgently needed. Bitcoin goes interstellar as it finds use as a global safe haven and a reserve currency. Security tokens start cropping up like crazy when a bartering system must be set up so that individuals, corporations and governments can continue to transact even in the absence of a functioning official currency.

Will this situation be the great equalizing event giving power back to the little guy? That question is hard to give a simple answer to but I doubt it considering that the ownership of Bitcoin is extremely centralized with 96% of the addresses owing 3.5% of all Bitcoin. Security tokens will change nothing in terms of ownership because they're about just putting the proof of ownership of a security onto a blockchain. It will make all kinds of securities more liquid but ownership of the underlying assets will not change with the tokenization of said assets.

The best hope for new wealth built using crypto will be in the network effect creating value when new networks are created. Any cryptocurrency is a network and the value of a network follows Metcalfe's law by which the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of its nodes. Again, most of the benefits will go to early adopters. Relatively high inflation coins such as Steem where an ongoing distribution is constantly taking place according to value perceived by stakeholders are something of an exception in the sense that the final distribution of even the base token, STEEM, is far from done. The SMT protocol will further increase the total inflation rate of all tokens accounted for by the blockchain.

Bitcoin maximalism is not conducive to a more equitable distribution of wealth. In fact, if the world started to rely on the Bitcoin protocol as a monetary standard, that would only serve to radically worsen the already top heavy global wealth distribution.

I would much rather see a world filled with hundreds of widely used blockchain protocols and thousands of tokens created for the purposes of a diverse set of communities. Seamless interoperability is key. Bitcoin has its place as global a store and measure of value but a world in which one protocol ruled would only make the inequality problem worse.