Satoshi MINED a million coins at a very low difficulty rate and spent very little money to acquire those.
And you could too if you wanted to. It was publicly released.
What I am trying to say is what difference is there of a developer premining a few thousand coins for himself in a few days versus Satoshi mining hundreds of thousands in a matter of weeks when only he and a few dozen other people even knew what Bitcoin was?
What difference? One way allows a developer to stockpile a bunch of bitcoins before anybody else has a fair chance at participating. The other way equally allows everyone the exact same opportunity.
Either way it is still the developer taking advantage of knowing his own creation in advance before the general public catches on.
No. One is a developer helping to support their creation without any knowledge about whether it will catch on or not. The other is a developer locking anybody out of participating while they run a printing press for themselves for a while.
Satoshi took very little risk to acquire all those coins, did he go out and spend tens of thousands of dollars on equipment and run up seveal thousands of dollars in electric bills like the later guys? No.
The coins were worthless at the time. They were imaginary internet points. If you look at the ratio of value spent vs. value received at the time of the mining, he was spending WAY too much money. The later guys are getting actual value received for the value they are spending. If they are doing it right, they are getting more value received than what they spent.
You seem to talk in philosophy, I am talking in dollars and cents. Either way it is the creator of a coin gaining future speculative wealth for what was a very small investment.
Except that one leads to a trustworthy system of exchange, and the other is a pump&dump coin of the day.