Just two things came to my mind reading (most) this.
1. There can not be equal distribution. Because we are not the same (may i say equal), and if any coin represents economic value, the economic activity made through it will instantly "unbalance" the equal distribution of itself by the users, based on the different skill levels they can contribute to other people's needs. See, same reason why communism can not work.
Agreed. When I write "fair distribution", I do not mean uniform distribution. Uniform distribution is some idealistic nonsense that doesn't even exist in socialism or communism either.
Fair distribution means a level playing field of a free market as per what I quoted upthread:
I already described the parameters of the market:
1. Competitive, i.e. the price not set by the insiders.
2. Insiders can't via deception amass large proportion of the tokens.
I should add a third:
3. Does not require tying the mining to centralization indefinitely, e.g. Zcash's plan to have the miners pay 10% to its foundation indefinitely (does theirs decline to 1% tail, I've forgotten?).
I will add a 4th requirement:
4. The distributed (mined or paid for) tokens are freely tradable instantly (
newly mined coins typically aren't spendable unitl after some block confirmations for security reasons). No lockups and holdbacks. In a free market, no one should delay your money and hold it from you.
2. I do support PoW, because it is secure. You have to burn those Mgwatts, and spend the TIME. Mining has to provide security on a technical level - NOT minting coins -, and big datacenters with low electricity cost are the most economic, you can not avoid this, ever, with any "ideal solution"*. Forking, or "evil miners do evil plots" scenarios can not be solved by any technical/software/genious invention solution, because, they are social problems (which means they derive from human action, which is always subjective, non-deterministic, and can not be expressed in 1s and 0s).
Also, that is why miners will not do anything against the network, ever. The moment they do, their own reward (coins) value collapses, and the network just fork, and we can again mine on laptops for a short while :-)
*if you can evade economic scaling (like CPU-only mining) that means it is highly vulnerable to anyone, who wants to destroy the network regardless of cost(!), which is what ASIC PoW protect us against. It is the lesser evil so to speak.
I have solutions to all of these, even including the excessive power consumption problem. You may think it is impossible. Just like everyone thought decentralized electronic currency was impossible (even Chaum's ECash had been tried and failed), yet Satoshi surprised everyone. Even Gregory Maxwell and Adam Back were surprised by Satoshi's solution.
And I am preparing to surprise all of you.
I disagree and encourage users to consider any & all ICO coins as "100% premined"
What is the difference between paying for electricity to mine Bitcoin or Monero, and paying for coins directly?
The only relevant differences are
when the latter creates a non-free market. Otherwise they are equivalent.
Thus not all paid for coins are necessarily a premine, otherwise mining would be premining by your incorrect conceptualization.