A few people here didn't read the whitepaper closely enough.
1.2 trillion ether will NOT be issued at launch. At a tentative price of 0.0001 BTC, X ether will be raised. The initial money supply will be 1.5X, of which founders get .25X, ethereum reserve pool .25X, and fundraiser (investors) participants 1.0X.
After 1 year, total money supply is at 2X, with the ratios:
Founders .25X / 2.0X = 12.5%
Fundraisers 1.0X / 2.0X = 50%
Reserve .25 X / 2.0X = 12.5%
Miners .5X / 2.0X = 25%
Every year miners are mining .5X, this is the inflation rate
So year 1 inflation is (1.5X increase to 2X) = 33%
Year 2 inflation is 2X to 2.5X , 25%
Year 3 inflation is 2.5X to 3X, 20%
Year 4 inflation is 3X to 3.5X, 16.66%
Year 5 inflation is 3.5X to 4X, 14.2%
I personally think the distribution model is a lot fairer than the way Nxt and mastercoin did theirs. I'm not knowledgeable enough about emunie or bitshares to comment on their model, but I think ethereum has more promise than any of these other coins PLUS a fairer distribution.
This type of distribution is less than ideal, in my opinion.
We only hit the case where the premine is 10% of the mined portion of the coin at
27 years. For MC2, I aimed for <1% at the same time. But I guess it's all based on what a person considers a "fair" distribution.
You can approximately reach this with linear mining inflation using these ratios (this is after one years time, with miner production held constant):
Founders 0.5X / 12.0X = 4.2%
Fundraisers 2.0X / 12.0X = 16.7%
Reserve 0.5X / 12.0X = 4.2%
Miners 9.0X / 12.0X = 75%
I have no idea how many coins Satoshi has, but I'd guess it's less than 1.05m (but I may be wrong, I know it's quite large).