📌 Egalitarian Air Drops

Crypto has a wealth centralization problem. According to Jackson Palmer’s Are We Decentralized Yet?, 19% of Bitcoin’s supply and 35% of Ethereum’s supply is held by each coin’s respective top 100 accounts. Worse yet, 97% of Ripple’s supply is held by its top 100 accounts.

While there are some legitimate reasons as to why today’s cryptocurrencies have concentrated supplies, that doesn’t mean that coins in the future should follow the same path. I believe that cryptocurrencies ought to push the limits of egalitarianism and that the long-term winners will have supplies that test the limits of extreme distribution.

Naval Ravikant nails the vision here:

So how do we get there — to a future in which every human on the planet gets a coin? Spend a few minutes and think through how you would do this if you were conducting an airdrop to the entire human race. There are so many problems that it gets exhausting to think about for too long:

• You would need a way to identify every person on the planet
• Not everyone has access to the internet or even a cell phone
• You would need to guard against multiple types of fraud
• You would need to protect everyone’s identity
• …the list goes on

Reaching every human on the planet may be impossible to do elegantly. It will probably require software, but it will probably also require blood, sweat, tears, and boots on the ground. And, just like Bitcoin, it will need a near-perfect incentive structure to get everyone in the world to participate.

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