Whatever slice the free market determines. And any "slice" that anyone gets is constantly changing, since money is exchanged constantly. So thinking of a fixed supply of money (or even a non-fixed supply of money) as having some fixed allocation among everyone is simply wrong. That's not how it works.

(Note that common descriptions of the wealth of wealthy people, say Bill Gates, are misleading since they always give a dollar figure--Gates is worth $50 billion, let's say. But the vast majority of that $50 billion is not money. It's assets like stocks, bonds, real estate, etc., and the $50 billion figure is just an estimate of the sum of the prices all those assets would fetch if Gates sold them on the market. It is certainly not a measure of money that Gates has stuffed under his mattress or is otherwise hoarding.)

Who needs to incentivize it? People already have an incentive to produce goods and services, because people want and need things in order to live whatever life they want to live (food, clothing, and shelter at a minimum, but of course there are lots of other things people want), so they have to either produce those things themselves or produce something that can be traded for them. Of course the latter is the most common alternative since much more wealth can be created by specialization and trade than by everyone producing only for themselves. So the natural state is for people to be doing specialization and trade in a free market. That is what you get when nobody tries to "incentivize" anything.

> Your view seems fairly communist

Not at all, it's the opposite of communist, since it involves no central planning (which doesn't work).

> Your contention is people hodl bitcoin because the supply of btc is not fixed?

My contention is that since the supply of Bitcoin is not fixed, Bitcoin is irrelevant to the discussion we are having, which is about the case where the supply of money is fixed.

As far as why people hold Bitcoin instead of spending it, obviously that is because they expect its value in terms of other things they want to go up. I have made no claim about why that is. All I am saying is that it can't be because the supply of Bitcoin is fixed, since it isn't.

Also note that the people who are holding Bitcoin are still spending money to get things they want, which means they are still having to earn money to get things they want. So the fact that they are holding Bitcoin does not mean they are holding money. They are not treating Bitcoin as money. They are treating it as an investment asset like stocks or bonds. So again their behavior regarding Bitcoin is irrelevant to a discussion of how people behave with money.

Indeed. So will Bitcoin become relevant to this discussion in 2140 when new issuance ends? I’m not sure there’s much difference between then and now in practice as 95% it all Bitcoin possible is already live on the chain.

Central planning is a feature of state capitalism, not communism.

(It’s true that regimes–universally of the Leninist bent which adapted Marxism in the hopes of getting it to work in situations where the prerequisites did not exist–claiming to be Communist in ideological orientation almost invariably got stuck in state capitalist phase, but even by their own description that was a step on the road to communism, not communism.)

Of course, yes, I recognize that people using “communist” as a pejorative would probably also not make that distinction.

While I agree that "state capitalism" is a fair description of the current system in the US and other Western countries, I don't think it's a fair description of the Soviet Union, or of Pol Pot's Cambodia, or of the People's Republic of China under Mao (to give some examples of states that are usually called "communist"). It might be a fair description of the PRC today (even though the PRC still calls itself "communist").

I would agree, though, that all of those regimes are examples of central planning.

Yeah in communist theory, “communism" as a thing is an ultimate goal (and in many schools of communist thought, a relatively distant one).

> and never will exist, since any country that tries it will get stuck at what you are calling "state capitalism".

No, only the Leninist-derived approaches that try to bypass private capitalism get stuck in state capitalism (or migrate from that toward a system that looks a lot like fascist corporatism, as in the PRC.)

The displacement of the system Marx originally described as “capitalism” with what has been described as “mixed economies” is closer to what you might expect if Marxist (not Leninist) Communists tried to implement their program of moving toward communism in the conditions Marx saw as necessary to begin that transition.

> While I agree that "state capitalism" is a fair description of the current system in the US and other Western countries

It is not, it is a description Lenin made of a deliberate choice made by the USSR as a transitional step, which doesn't resemble anything done in the US very closely.

> I don't think it's a fair description of the Soviet Union, or of Pol Pot's Cambodia, or of the People's Republic of China under Mao (to give some examples of states that are usually called "communist").

All of those involved the state acting in the role of a major or sole legally tolerated capitalist. It's possible to imagine, I suppose, central planning in a decentralized, cooperative, voluntary way without that feature, but no actual regime has done that (though subsidies and incentives that fall short of coercive directive commands in mixed economies are, at least, something vaguely in that direction compared both to the absence of central planning in pure [private] capitalism and the authoritarian central planning in “communist” state capitalism.)

To be fair that did mostly work in the 1800s. The gold standard probably did have a significant negative impact on growth but to be fair I can't really think of a different system that might have worked back then considering how thoroughly corrupt and unstable pretty much all governments were back then.