I feel like I'm wasting my time explaining, but it might be useful to others reading so here goes.
Your early incentives point makes no sense. What you fail at understanding in your reasoning is that the so called early incentives were not as big of a deal as you make them out to be. Bitcoin would've survived and slowly grown regardless - for the same reason people compete in Angry Birds and its market cap is as big as bitcoin's, or the reason they spend money on powerups in various pointless games - mining was fun.
Bitcoin was never pegged at a price, this is precisely what price discovery does, on top of this only miners were rewarded with coins and it was ALWAYS proportional to their contribution to the security of the network. Do you get it yet? these guys were PAID to run the Bitcoin network. There was never a free lunch and never a monopolistic clique that planned it. Nor was if for "fun", it was a job, and these guys got compensated for their hard work, hardware, and electricity. The software was released January 2009, free, available to all. If they got paid more than the latecomers, it's because they propped it up long enough and well enough so that others could get on board and help bear the weight, we should be worshipping these people, KnightMB is a hero in my books, he accrued over 300k in Bitcoins, because he used a cluster of CPUs he borrowed from Amazon (a guy you'd probably deride as an opportunist etc. etc.) and he also was instrumental in helping fix early problems that Bitcoin had
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.9524, he claims he already spent much of it but I sincerely hope he has a spare 50k lying around because he fucking deserves it.
A huge majority couldn't have known that they would eventually trade for actual dollars - proof stands in all the coins lost in the early days. And if they did, as early adopters they would've still had amassed a lot more coins than the late adopters. Logic.
Actually we did know, and most of us are still here. The "proof" is because you're pissy that a vast number of early adopters are "endangering" the value of the coins you own because they hold too many. Logic. Funny, it was never marketed as anything less than a digital cash payment system, they weren't marketed as "internet points", and the second I discovered Bitcoin I was treating it like a cash system too, because like everyone else I had to mine to get them and that meant work, when CPUs were only just still fashionable I actually went and BOUGHT a computer just for mining because I wanted Bitcoins, they certainly weren't passing them out like flyers at a store, I knew I was getting something of value that was difficult to get. So did a lot of other people like Hal Finney,
http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg09975.html.
A more gradual build up of wealth, rather than majority controlling stakes from the get-go would've helped tremendously in stabilizing the market.
You want gradual buildup, go to litecoin, theres your out, use it. Liquidate your BTC into LTC and bask in the market stability such a system bestows upon it's users.
Price discovery and adoption will stabilise the market, not manipulation of the supply. How would that work exactly? Does the system know when the market is stable and when it is volatile so it can spit out the "right" amount of coins. Which markets? which currencies are more influential than others? Should we prioritise currencies based on their political stability? Adoption follows sentiment, and sentiment can only be gauged by price discovery, not some trickle that will slowly turn into a damn flood. Even Satoshi saw that distributing most of the coins quickly was better than any other option
, and 4 years is hardly a short amount of time I might add.
In "Satoshi's Grand Design" the transaction fees were supposed to be 0.01 not 0.0005.
This would've made each block generate an additional ~12BTC in fees at current volume and probably more going forward, which would've offset some of the problems of the curve. Sure, 0.01 would've been noncompetitive for transactions lower than say 1 coin - so perhaps we're not using the coin as originally intended, and it was never meant to be used for micropayments in its current design. The official website even states: "Bitcoin is an experimental new digital currency that enables instant payments to anyone, anywhere in the world."
"[Bitcoins will] be distributed to network nodes when they make blocks, with the amount cut in half every 4 years. [...] When that runs out, the system can support transaction fees if
needed. It's based on open market competition, and there will probably always be nodes willing to process transactions for free."
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=21312004When you speak of "Satoshi's Grand Design" you quote the source, otherwise you look like a fool.
What I'm trying to promote here is putting some thought into all this, think about what we can learn from it. Try coming up with valid points so we can have a meaningful debate rather than defending early miners' ridiculous rewards - which make no economic sense.
"Meaningful" hu? All I've heard from you is the sound of a baby having a fit. Miners from two years ago ARE your betters that ensured Bitcoin survived long enough so you could enjoy it. I'm incredibly grateful, and I also hope Satoshi has a sizable portion of Bitcoins because he damned well deserved every one of them. So did the early developers that got on board, and the early testers, and the ones that helped stimulate the economy by beginning the first exchanges, and the ones that jumped in on mining with their CPUs, GPUs, etc. so that the network remained secure. They ALL deserved every skerrick of value that their Bitcoins now derive.
Not trying to diss Bitcoin in any way, I'd really love to see it succeed and I have significant stakes in it - but the fact that people with as few as 10000 coins (0.9% of total coins) can swing the BTCUSD price up and down by more than 10% could scare away the companies getting into it. 10000 is not that much, SatoshiDice makes more than that in profit each month, and someone holding that amount and selling easily triggers a crash and can then buy more than 10000 in the aftermath before it recovers.
Price discovery and greater adoption will spread more coins into more hands. Stop having kittens over the price, sounds to me you've overreached in your investment in Bitcoin so cash out to something that will allow you to sleep at night.
This rollercoaster isn't good for credibility. How can we prevent it?
See above. We are embarking on a huge experiment full of pitfalls, immense possibilities and unexpected side-roads. Expect volatility or get out while you can.
