It's really not that hard to start a panic. A well placed story with a small sell off can start a run especially in Bitcoin. See, that's where you're understanding fails. There's nothing respectable or to be respected in being an early adopter. I know a few of them and have met them in person, face to face. Some of them are clowns and dumbasses. One of them is nothing more than a drug addict. But all of them share one thing in common. They acquired Bitcoin early on. That has everything to do with luck of the draw and nothing to do with respect but you don't understand that. Very few people mined them with a CPU. You should call them founders not early adopters. Your talking about people with an in-depth understanding of cryptography, mathematics, economics and coding that allowed them to see the value of something that was worth nothing at the time.
Well, I sort of agree with you that there may be nothing in being an early adopter to be respected for, but people still tend to respect people with money, even if the money they have got was no more than luck alone or was obtained illegally. Of course, not all people are like this, but in general people would certainly prefer to be friends of those dudes than their enemies. Do the people you described still possess the bitcoins which they acquired early on?
Ok, you get it. I agree average individuals respect people with money. For some reason they believe the acquisition of wealth equals intelligence and understanding on a level beyond their abilities. You're right, they absolutely do want to be friends with wealthy people which is inexplicable to me. Every wealthy person I've ever known has been a raging asshole that believes the world owes them something. Maybe they feel some of that understanding will pass to them or maybe they are simply looking for a handout, I don't know.
It's impossible to know exactly how many early miners are still holding their bitcoins. I suspect that more than a million btc mined by Satoshi are lost because they have never moved. There has been plenty of bubble spikes that would be awfully tempting to someone with that many btc. At any point he could have cashed out some and bought himself a nice island to retire on. He needed to mine to keep the currency going but perhaps he chose to destroy those early coins believing his invention (his baby) could be killed by a saboteur if they fell into the wrong hands. We could live the rest of our lives only to see those coins never move and not know why.
I have spoken to people like Ray Dillinger (original tester of Bitcoin with Hal Finney), BitcoinFX (still active on this forum) and many others that say they spent and didn't keep large quantities of the early mined Bitcoin believing it would never be valued as high as it is now. To many of them it was "magic internet money" that they spent buying a 20,000 btc pizza and donating to faucets to bring new users on board. I still have 20 or so btc that I got from faucets. Can you believe they used to just give whole bitcoins away at faucets? Crazy right? Are the founders of Bitcoin lying and sitting on masses of btc? I don't think so. If you parse the blockchain you will see lots of movement of early coins after the Satoshi coins were mined. That means whoever mined those coins sent them somewhere but was it to another wallet under their control? The truth is we will never really know for sure how much they are holding.
I just thought of one other example of how little Bitcoin meant to people back then. Did you know that to become a VIP member of this forum you had to donate 50 btc? At the ATH of Bitcoin that amounts to a $60,000 donation to be a VIP member of an obscure little forum. If that doesn't tell you how stupid rich people are nothing will. ROFL
