With Bitcoin, those who don't own coins can at any point vote to take away all the coins from those who do. That's exactly the same problem that the founders were worried about. There isn't any sort of fancy historical imagination that's needed.
The way the Bitcoin protocol works is that there is a worldwide vote every ten minutes or so to decide how much money everyone owns. So when people say they own 5 BTC or whatever, what they're really saying is that the political faction that's currently in power recognizes them as having that many Bitcoin. But if a different party wins control of Bitcoin, how much money they're seen as owning could change drastically overnight.
