Computing power, or capital to buy the coins. But I don't think this level of "fairness" is productive to discuss. Every human being on the planet having the exact same amount of wealth is an impossibility.

I'll buy "undesirable", for the sake of the argument. But I'm really not clear why you think it is "impossible".

We have had repeated instances throughout history of groups of people practicing common ownership, and they do seem to work reasonably well. (I completely grant they aren't super-popular, but, again, I'm not advocating change, I'm trying to understand why you think this qualifies as "impossible")

What do you think prevents this on a planet-level scale?

There's a few reasons as to why I believe it to be practically impossible to implement.

If everybody has the exact same amount of wealth, it means you've decoupled wealth from anything that is variable, most importantly human individual qualities like risk taking, hard work, talent, brilliance, persistence.

In a world where you can't better yourself economically, most incentives to innovate or produce would cease to exist. To still get a functioning society, a deeply oppressive regime is the only likely answer. After all, why would anybody work?

I suppose you're right that it's not impossible in the short term, just not sustainable in the long term. If nothing matters at all and is pointless, societies' output will degrade over time until the point it is unbearable.

That said, this is current thinking. It's possible to imagine a different equal wealth world that is futuristic. If we get so advanced as to achieve technical abundance, any citizen on the planet would have a high living standard, say upper middle class. Which satisfies almost everybody. And the standard is guaranteed over time, there's no insecurity to it. And those wanting even more things, have everything at their finger tips. Usage based, not owning things.

In such a world, money becomes meaningless. It's no longer a way to reflect scarcity, a way to secure your personal future, or a differentiator of status. Everybody is materially equal at a high and lasting standard. Differentiation might then be found intellectually or in social status. But probably the robots have taken over by then.

> We have had repeated instances throughout history of groups of people practicing common ownership

We also have repeated instances throughout history of groups claiming to try to implement common ownership, and instead killing millions and installing tyrannical governments (see: most communist revolutions), of consistently larger scale (orders of magnitude) than the successes.

Historically, it's far more probable that such a common ownership experiment will result in death and tyranny (and not actual common ownership!) than a success - and, given the relative difference in scale between the successes and failures, there's a strong argument to be made that as the scale goes up, the probability of tyranny goes up.

This is one of the justifications for it being impossible in a practical sense (yeah, it's annoying that there's more than one definition for "impossible"). It's a fact that power attracts corruption, and it's also a fact that planet-level-scale common ownership would require more power to implement than any government has achieved so far. So, while not "impossible" in the hard-science sense, it's improbable (with a correspondingly large chance of a catastrophically bad alternative) to the point that it's not reasonable to attempt.

That said, your comment is a measured and thoughtful answer to a potentially-inflammatory topic, and I hope that my response is equally thoughtful.

I certainly consider it very thoughtful, and appreciate the time it takes to craft a considered message.

I do hear the "scale" concern, and it's interesting to think about it. I.e. for me, it immediately pops the question "why is scale a problem for common ownership, but not for individual ownership". I suspect - without having any proof - that scale is the thing that makes the transition impossible, not that it's an inherent problem for community property itself. Practically, the outcome is indeed the same - if you can't safely transition, the end state is impossible, even if it itself would be a stable state.

This also raises the question of democracy & unequal ownership as a possible stable state - Plato was certainly concerned enough about it, and history has done nothing to discourage that belief since then. There are plenty of rather deadly examples of failed non-communist states.

If nothing else, your comment (and the subthread in general) has lead me to a rather interesting paper: "Social instability and redistribution of income", by Josef Falkinger. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01762... (Yeah, as usual, paywalled. Elsevier)

It's a deliberate attempt at modelling outcomes based on income distribution - which I think attempts to get to the heart of the "impossible" issue. It only tackles income, not wealth, but there's a rich set of references :)