We had that before. It was called feudalism and it was terrible. One day, the people got pissed off enough to cut off a few heads. A golden age ensued for a couple hundred years.

That is an ongoing process, but it looks much different from what you imagine. Even now, a large part of the economy is working for the top 10 percent, producing luxury goods and services. Wealthy customers provide the biggest margins for companies.

“Regular” customers are getting more irrelevant every day. There was a time when your role as a consumer was important for the economy. This role gave you power and influence because companies were competing for your money. This era is slowly coming to an end, something most people haven’t realized yet.

What do you mean “if”?

The majority population falls into progressively more desperate poverty. Work hours are extended for less and less personal gain and greater risk of injury, disease, and disability. Recreation, autonomy, and actualization become ever more out of reach.

I recommend the episode of Recess where they use monstickers as currency. In this episode, TJ finds ways to amass all the monstickers and make everyone else destitute. It occurred to me while watching the episode that all the other kids have to do is stop requiring each other to pay for stuff with monstickers, since nobody has them anymore. And then it occurred to me, why can’t we do that in real life? Why can’t society just collectively realize this whole money thing doesn’t work if a few people are hoarding it all and just come up with a new system? Instead people are being deprived of basic needs because of this stupid imaginary system

It started in 1971 and it’s still running its course. So, look around I guess. If we don’t do anything in another 20 years it won’t be possible to own a home for anybody. We will all be severely restricted on what we can eat and how we can travel. Everything you buy will be disposable garbage that makes you sick and needs replacement often.

It basically already did

They let us borrow some so that we can buy their products and pay them back more. We have to trade our labor to make up the difference between our passive income and current expenses, but they’ll only give us just enough to sustain a population of laborers.

Some take a risk and borrow wayyyy more than they can really pay back with their own labor and use that money to buy assets that they hope will be successful in integrating with the loop of money. If it’s successful, their assets buy the labor of others to generate income so they pay back the loan and do it all over again.

we all rot as they continue eating steak

this is what people mean when they talk about the contradictions of capitalism.

Elysium happens.

This is why I think they are all into crypto, because they see it as the next big currency and want to be the person controlling it

Bold of you to assume they could think that far. To be honest, they don’t think us at all. The more people are starving to death, the better for them. I’m sure they think like “eat the poor”. This world is doomed with capitalism and we should do something about it now, before it’s too late.

money represents power and whoever has power will have the money.

i think you’re looking at this from a very “everyday” perspective - you think of money as something that is passed around and goes from A to B. the system at large does not work that way. just like the earth is flat if you look at any small patch of it but is round when you look at it globally, the economy works very differently whether you look at it at an everyday scale or at a global scale.

on a global scale, things are determined by geopolitical considerations, not by whatever companies or buyers/sellers do. like, that china exports so-and-so many tons of steel and imports so-and-so many tons of pork meat has very little to do with companies working hard to produce these products. it’s mostly some globalist philosophy to determine what happens on a global scale. for example, tariffs might completely change the game, if only there is the political will for that. as do free-trade agreements.

again, the same is true for any big country. “money” on a country-level is a fiction. it was invented by banks for complex reasons (mostly to simplify trade) and can be modified as long as it’s meaningful to the state’s politics. like, the state can just print more money through the federal reserve bank. in fact, it does that all the time. that cannot be explained by simple “trade transactions” as you’re imagining them rn. there’s abstract and complex and completely non-trivial maths involved in this game. “what happens when the billionaires own everything” only makes sense as a question when you consider that the concept of “owning” stuff is fundamental - which it is not. “Ownership” is a legal construct because the state deems it useful. with a different philosophy, the very concept of “ownership” might lose traction and become meaningless. The question therefore is: What is the political will at a state level?

I would imagine at some point government will start becoming creative to tax the billionaires or the corporations. Though the masses becomes entertainment for the billionaires to keep money valuable else like you said if they all have the money then it’s worthless. The government by this point would be so weak since rampant corruption would be so ingrained that any idea of taxing the billionaires would be incredibly hard to pass. So I think what likely will happen is a societal collapse. If this were to happen globally end of our current civilization.