Bitcoin Forum

Cause they were all like "omg early adopters bought tons of btc for a so low price! This is not fair!"

Well, did you buy them at 6$ now? What? You didn't? Guess what? I expected that.

Why? Cause omg price is low, crash, fail, blabla? But but but that's exactly what early adopters faced, an almost unknown currency at very low price, they risked a LOT and won (BTC price then increased). While you are only good at whining  ;D


BTC at 6$ was a chance to buy them at a low price even in august 2011, if you whined about early adopters AND you missed that then you are just a whiner  ::)

Why i open that thread? Cause i'm tired of reading about ppl who is good only to whine about early adopters and of course can't be bothered to risk when price is low.

+1

I approve this message.

This also applies to those who sold below 10$ (or 1000$). Wanna be seen as an early adopter, than hold on to most of your bitcoin until 2015 or something.

Nobody remembers those who bought some BRK/A shares at 10$ and sold at 11$. Those who bought than and still owns a few percent of those are entirely different matter.

+1!!!!!!  The term "early adopter" should be changed to "wild risk taker". I think a lot of people just want to be given a bunch of valuable stuff, and have no risk attached :)

I don't have a problem with early adopters being rewarded.  I DO have a problem with any single person holding more than 0.5% of the currency available.

This.

And comparing buying BTC at $0.001 each (or mining them with hundreds per week) or at $6 each is kinda idiotic.

If your so worried about it why not just mine IXcoin? You can be an early adopter right now!

ixcoin.org

...

Seriously what do you want?

In hindsight maybe a slower curve or earlier hype would have been better for economic stability, but at this point I feel like changing the rules would do more harm than good. A new fork wouldn't gain acceptance before the Bitcoin early adopters all sell out and the problem solves itself. It's not like they don't "deserve" it, so what's the big deal?

What's the big deal?

The big deal is, no one will accept Bitcoins to replace any major currency once they realize how much the early adopters hold.

Right now, the world's richest man holds what, 60 or 70 billion USD?  The 1.5 million BTC that Satoshi holds now would effectively become at least one TRILLION dollars if BTC replaced the USD.  That's just too much to be acceptable by any reasonable person.  WAY too much.

Agreed. It can be a problem for stability.

Also, what people here are forgetting is that early adopters usually have CPU mined their wealth. Running a CPU consuming app for a few weeks is neither risky or wild. That’s something people even do for free to help a cause, like folding@home.

Putting your money in Bitcoin or today’s mining hardware is certainly risky though.

Even if you bought at $9 two days ago and sold today for $11, bitcoin would outperform your stocks for the entire year. 
And I agree with the OP. Don't hate just because you can't pull the trigger.

The OP creates a false dichotomy between early adopters, who "risked a LOT and won" (OP's emphasis), and late adopters who "are only good at whining".

Here's a counterexample of an early adopter who is a "whiner" and also feels differently about the level of risk he took:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=10755.0

But that's just an aside.  As far as I can tell, Satoshi either didn't consider the consequences of having no relationship between block difficulty and block reward, or he/she purposefully wanted no relationship.  This poor design will hinder wider adoption of Bitcoin because it simply doesn't make sense to newcomers that the same rewards are given regardless of how much security is being provided for the block chain.

But maybe the bigger problem is that this _makes_ sense to people who aren't newcomers.

Or maybe it's just me.  Can someone please explain the lack of relationship I mentioned above, without resorting to "Satoshi designed the system so he/she deserves those coins," or, "whiners be hatin'," or, "RALLY!!!, etc."?  In fact let's make it really clean by leaving miners/investors out completely-- I just want to know why Bitcoin is designed this way.

This is actually a very simple question to answer. This design allowed to solve bootstrap problem, also known as catch 22 or chicken and egg problem.

i.e. it is not a bug it is a feature as are many other properties of bitcoin.

+1 agreed! did just put that in my sig!

Hmmm maybe I'm just weird, but this seems like the biggest non-issue of all the non-issues. Those who "adopted" earliest represented the greatest initial thrust behind the project. Bitcoin was a "silly nothing" when the early adopters got involved... and without them it would've forever remained as such. I sincerely hope those early adopters make a fortune, and I care not at all what "proportion" of Bitcoins any single person owns.

Those who hold the most coins have the greatest incentive to see them succeed, and if they decide to "dump" them, then all the complainers will get a great opportunity to buy for cheap!  I really don't see the concern here... but it seems just like jealousy and a misunderstanding of how prices and markets work.

I'm not jealous.  I just know that when the world looks at Satoshi and a few others as owning a large percentage of the currency (and thus having a large amount of power with regards to money supply, inflation/deflation, pricing, political movements, etc), the world is going to have a problem with it.  It's one big roadblock to Bitcoins replacing any fiat currency.

You yourself may not have a problem with it, but it should at least concern you, from the perspective of having more people adopt and use bitcoin.

Where is that number coming from? It simply isn't true.
This. It was needed in order to make Bitcoin irresistible to people early on. Without it, we wouldn't have nearly as many people today, ESPECIALLY MINERS. Thanks to an ever-increasing difficulty, it applied the very important "BUY(mine) NOW!!!" rule of advertising. If you knew that you could make the same tomorrow as you could today, would you be in that much of a hurry to secure the Bitcoin network? Even if the only thing we wouldn't have had much of today was miners, we'd be screwed. Bitcoin was officially attacked a few months ago. If it wasn't for the inflated security of the Blockchain that was caused by keeping the block reward the same, Bitcoin would have been successfully destroyed, instead of a few Bitcoin-related sites.

Maged - I don't know what the exact number is, but since you said it isn't true, you must know?

you are weird. it simply can't be good for the market if anyone is holding too much of the currency.
they are over rewarded, i have no problem with them getting insanely rich. 0.5% is way too much. 0.005% is much more fair. yes its only  1050. and you can't buy much with that now. but lets seen in 5-10 years, i think they will be insanely rich, and i will too, even if i only have 35 btc.

The fed, which is a single institution, can print as much USD as they want. So they print them self a much larger percentage than Satoshi will ever have. Is it a roadblock to use USD? Apparently no. So Satoshi could end up as a tiny little mini-fed, sort of a small regulative to the bitcoin world, if he even cares

When it was at 0.001$ bitcoin was an almost unknown thing. Spend thousands of $ on something unkonwn? Risky... When it was at 6$ some days ago it was clearly an undervalued price. Who bought them ended with a 100% profit in few days, and that's a LOT

So, did you RISK?  ::)

Also i have heard ixcoin or namecoin are cheap, did you buy them?

And there you have it. Those complaining about ownership distribution have a fundamental aversion to "some people having more than others." Fairness? Why is .005% fair, but .05% or .5% is unfair? This is arbitrary silliness.

SgtSpike's point about the world not wanting to be part of Bitcoin because some might have lots of it... I think that's a myth. Maybe if someone owned greater than 10% of the currency it would be an issue for stability? But really, this is such a short-term problem. Early adopters will sell coins over time and their ratio will fall. If they don't sell, then there's no problem for market price. If they sell all at once, then it's a fantastic buying opportunity for any who aren't tricked by short-term market prices. The fact that such a sale could disrupt the market is but a temporary blip, and in a free market there is insurance and hedging which keeps such fluctuation from harming those with big positions.

Again, it's a non-issue.It's "fair" for anyone to have as much BTC as they've bought, mined, or traded for.

But the government is GIVEN the power by the people, and the people, for the most part, trust the government.  They trust that even though the government is printing money, they aren't going to be stupid about how they manipulate the market with it.  They trust that even though the government may not always make the best decisions, it is at least TRYING to make the best decisions for the people.

Having a random individual (or set of a few individuals) have the same power as the government with regards to money supply IS a problem.  You can't trust that Satoshi, or any of the others, have the best interests of the people at heart.  There's no checks and balances to any activities they can do.  The number of people they could pay off to do things in their interests if bitcoin ever did come to be widely used is incalculable.

Satoshi and the other early miners didn't risk much.  Running a single CPU (or a few) 24/7 would amount to a handful of dollars more on the electric bill.  Some of the later early adopters did take large risks by dumping thousands of dollars into buying coins too, I'll agree with you there.

Regardless, I don't mind them making a profit because they took a risk.  I don't even mind them making an insane profit because they took a risk.  That's not what this is about.  It is the fact that they currently hold so much power over the future of the currency that I have a problem with, and that many other people will have a problem with when they hear about bitcoin and think about what it would mean to have it replace a national currency.

That's why bitcoin replacing a national currency will never happen.  And if you don't have a problem with that, then I guess you never had much hope for bitcoin in the first place.

Need I remind my American friends that something like 90% of our wealth is in the hands of the top 2%. Why doesn't that piss you off?

Satoshi, if he does indeed have the rumored 1.5 million coins, would hold 7%.  That is a HUGE amount of the total currency to be able to "play the market" with.  Or do whatever the heck he wants.  Again, it's not jealousy, it's my concern for the power that that would give him to manipulate the currency and the people.

You can think it's a myth all you want, but when people already feel that $60B is too much, I can't imagine what they would think about a single person owning $1T.

Because 2% is still 6 million people.

fairness! no its not "some people having more than others.", its simply people with too much power/money can't handle the responsibility.
if they just put anything over 0.005% in the faucet, when they think the price was high enough so they could live their live with out even moving a finger. it would be fine with me.
i have absolutely no problem with some one having more then me.
but it seems that you have some problem, with understanding our opinion.

no think thats true, why would anyone buy something, that some early adopter, could just crash, if they felt it could be fun?
 
short-term problem. maybe, i don't know. but its a huge problem.
 
buy with what? the btc that we own? when the whole world are using bitcoin in every day life, and a early adopter decides to cash out then there will be mass panic.

true, but not if the world didn't know about it.

I was not talking about the government. I was talking about the fed. The fed is a private owned bank, that prints USD generated out of thin air. You really think the fed gives anything about the people? They only care to secure and increase the wealth of their very owners.

Wrong, that would currently be more than 21%. It will take a long time until it is diluted substantially.

But yeah, no problem at all, because FREE MARKET. Having an anonymous individual with a percentage that large is no problem at all, it’s absolutely not like he could just drastically decrease the value of everyone’s Bitcoin savings by throwing a bit of his Bitcoins on the market.

Everyone who says something else is just jealous/communist and doesn’t understand how the free market works!

What's all this talk about early adopters taking "risk?" If anything, people nowadays are taking more of a risk with current prices of bitcoins.

Early adopter wants 10,000 coins a year ago? he sells someone a pizza.

A bitcoiner these days wants 10,000 coins? he sells his house.

Mining coins was a hell of a lot easier during the early-adopter stage, a lot cheaper too. It didn't require you to go out and buy thousands upon thousands of dollars worth of hardware in order to make 5 bitcoins in a day. Hell, most people would set-up their miners, leave their computer running all night (like most people do here regardless if their mining or not) and probably not even notice that their electricity usage went up.

The stage we're at now is risky. Businesses are popping up every day, people are investing in coins to hold, hardware is being purchased at a value worth tens of thousands of dollars by the sum of all miners, etc. etc. You can't honestly believe that the early adopters took any real risk...

+1,000,000 to smokeandmirrors couldnt put it any better  :)

I think anyone arguing in favour are simply trying to protect their "investment" but the fact stands that if there are peeps holding 10's, 100's of thousands of bitcoin then recent days show they can bring the system crashing down... who knows in a few years those of us with a few 10's of bitcoins could cause the same should 1btc be worth 100,000 dollars so just imagine the damage someone could do with thousands.... this will always be a risk to potential investors and the 21 million limit is the factor that causes btc to grow in its infancy but also to pose the risk?!?

Thanks, I agree with this notion.

CPU mining for a few weeks was not taking a risk in any real sense, so please, let’s stop with this myth.

The more time in the Bitcoin world passed, the riskier everything got, due to Bitcoin’s value increasing, of course. Bitcoin viruses, MtGox, MyBitcoin etc. never were issues in the past, but newcomers see themselves confronted with infrastructure that is insufficient (and also the Bitcoin client), and they may not be aware of it.

The people who take risks are those who are using the infrastructure, investing fiat, buying rigs, building businesses etc.

Satoshi is like a gold miner who goes mining without a pickaxe and then bringing 5% of all gold ever to be in existence home with him. Crazy to think about it, but the complete inelasticity of the inflation rate makes it possible – tens of thousands of people are now competing for the same supply Satoshi and early miners had.

Just to be clear, Satoshi's paper just says that block rewards solve the bootstrapping problem (under heading #6).  It says nothing more on the subject.   However, Satoshi also wrote the initial code for the client, so I suppose there's no need for me to be cautious-- I'm quite happy calling it a feature.  That's fine, and completely irrelevant, because it's still poor design.  Please read carefully: I'm asking why there is _zero_ relationship between block reward and block difficulty, which is clearly not the only way to solve the bootstrapping problem.

I'd be asking the same question if, say, the client were designed so that the block reward goes from 50btc directly to transaction-fees only, instead of periodically halving the block reward.  If that were the case we should agree it's a feature _and_ poorly thought out.

But I fear if that wouldn't be the case because the unfortunate fact of this forum is that a discussion of any bitcoin property is always met by a whole host of believers ready to defend their bitcoin property.

guys that is my point.... I cant knock anyone protecting their earnt bitcoin as I'd do the same, but the risk caused by those holding massive stashes is real, simple as, such as the guy who lost 25k to a worm.

I think when the block reward reaches a certain level (25 coins, who knows) then it should go no lower, at the very least it should cover replacing "lost" coins.... this could be calculated by a years worth of "spending" versus total number of minted coins..... thus if coins do not pass hands due to lost coins or massive hoarders then more are minted at a faster rate.... solves all problems really

I forgot to say the above I'd hope would encourage peeps to "spend" their earnt coins which can only be good for btc

Guess what, the discussion turned about early adopters.


My question is, who of these whiners bought bitcoins at 6$? So? You missed them at 0.01$ and so on, but you were HERE when bitcoins were at 6$, a cheap price. Since all your whine i am sure you invested a lot in buying bitcoins at 6$ am i right??

Or you are only good at whining omg pizza for 10.000 btc?

I did.  $6.01 actually.  Unfortunately I sold a little early at $10.49.  Hoping it falls back down to $8 so I can stock back up.

Good points made by OP.

I do agree with others though, that I hope that Satoshi and other early birds will spend some of their coins now.

I bought a bunch at 1$ and ~0.7$ a few months ago.

Hahahaha, is this the Bitcoin trickle-down theory?

Oh please, Satoshi, spend some of your Bitcoins so we can have an economy! And please set up some bounties! And bail out the MyBitcoin users! ;D

Whining about the whiners is just as bad as whining about the early adopters.

I'm pretty sure I wasn't complaining about the pizza scenario rather just stating a point. But if you saw it that way then it makes sense why you come up with such a thread crying over how everyone is crying.

Well - they did have to take the "risk" of not selling all their coins when the price went to 0.01 USD for the first time, or 0.10 USD,... That risk is often neglected when discussing this issue.

True, the hardware cost was lower because there weren't many miners, but thats not Satoshi's fault - to quote Gavin in a recent post to point out the difference to the "creator" of the ixcoin "fork":


There were about 1.6 million as of yet unspent coins mined before difficulty went up from 1 for the first time at the end of 2009. Since at least Hal Finney speculated about the great potential gain from mining Bitcoin immediately after Satoshi's announcement , we can safely assume that Satoshi wasn't alone during the first year. Lets assume there were on average about 8 miners during 2009, so each one might have made 200k BTC. If anybody has more reliable data/estimations, please tell us.

A handful of Bitcoin USD-millionaires are certainly no problem today in terms of market manipulation. Even a puny little hedge-fund could cause more disruption but I don't see anybody really complaining about that.

As for the future: who knows, but if Bitcoin really becomes widely adopted then we will definitely see a lot of huge booms and busts along the way - no wealthy early adopter needed for that. The market will simply have to learn to cope with that or it will never grow very large in the first place.

No, it was much more risky because it was much more likely that they would lose EVERYTHING they invested if bitcoin never took off, if an exchange that took USD was never created, if no-one actually setup a store.  And the likelyhood of any sort of actual real-world chance of bitcoin succeeding was much much lower.

Now it's more likely that someone starting a business or mining or investing might lose 50% of their money, maybe 75%, but it's much less likely that bitcoin will drop to 0 and they'll lose everything.  The flip side is it's much less likely that they'll make 100x or 1000x their investment.

You can argue that even if the early adopters lost everything, they didn't invest much to begin with.  But that's like saying that an Angel Investor who invested in Groupon (or faceboot or any other startup) when it was just one guy with an idea is risking much less than the people who buy into the IPO.

I'm not denying the problem. My claim is that over time these guys WILL sell their coins. It's a temporary problem which has been improving, and will continue to improve automatically from market forces. Bitcoin instantly replacing the USD just isn't going to happen.

Because those hands produced the wealth. It is not "our" wealth... it belongs with the person who produces it. Unless he is a thief, the rich man got rich by enriching others with equal or greater value.

And you know what? Need I remind my global friends that something like 90% of our wealth is in the hands of the Americans? Why doesn't that piss you off? The poor man in America is a rich man in the world...

Don't confuse market prices with value. If an early adopter sells all his coins, he has stolen no value from anyone... though he has created an opportunity to acquire more value at a better price.

Mh... i have some doubts

I don’t understand this. Of course the perceived value mainly derives from market price, and of course your wealth in Bitcoins will be greatly diminished if Satoshi et al. ever decide to sell off part of their stash. Noone is magically going to appear and buy up all coins until they are worth as much as before.

Also, I think many people decide to invest and don’t even know how the distribution is (and yes, for reasons of a stable value this is important to know). Now, according to Libertarianism, it’s entirely their fault if they don’t do their due diligence and the market will punish them. Can’t argue with ideology.

Why someone should not buy CHEAPER bitcoins?

Whining in general will make your Bitcoin worth less.... GO BITCOIN GO!!!

You have it backwards... price is derived over time from perceived value. And one's wealth in any commodity or asset is "reduced" if someone else floods the market with that thing. It's not unique to Bitcoin. Supply and demand... it's like being upset with gravity.

And yes, if someone does not engage in their own due diligence, and take responsibility for himself, he cannot fault anyone else for the trouble that besets him. We are not children here, and indeed the Bitcoin marketplace is probably the most open and "knowable" marketplaces anywhere in the world. The entire thing is open-source, for crying out loud. Anyone upset that the consumer may "be in the dark" about some things should more appropriately direct their attention to the Federal Reserve. I can't tell you how many dollars are in existence, but I can figure out in 5 seconds the number of bitcoins down to single digits. Markets trade 24/7 in countries all around the world. Nobody has to jump through hoops or pass silly tests to participate - the responsibility is on the individual. Nobody is forced into Bitcoin, the same cannot be said for dollars.

It seems that 1.5 million might be accurate after all, if we assume that the rate Satoshi mined the first 10 blocks was representative of his total hashing power. What I find interesting, however, is that mining speeds slowly dropped from that initial speed during the first few months. I almost wonder if Satoshi pulled a Satoshi and foresaw this very issue. It's quite possible that he slowly pulled out of mining in order to spread the wealth.

Indeed, in principal it is the same non-issue with Bitcoin. What differs though is the scale of it, with one individual possibly holding over 20% of the current coins in existence. The market volumes are nothing in comparison. I know you don’t consider this scary or problematic, but many people do, for example if they want to use Bitcoin as a store of value.

Again, that’s a matter of ideology (individualism and responsibility) … I don’t think we can assume that people could ever be 100% rational actors with near-perfect information. Of course, that’s the reason profit exists at all in the free market.

Well, props to him if he did so on purpose!

Wow! Lot's of people crying about other people's money. If Satoshi does own that much BTC I think he is drastically underpaid. Bitcoin has the potential to bring more freedom and liberty to mankind than we have seen maybe in our lifetimes. Seriously, if you don't like bitcoin don't buy it. I don't care what Satoshi does with his money - it's none of my business. If he dumps it on the market I will buy as much as I can.

I think he does have at least a million coins, it's not hard to see how this may have happened. I'm sure some clever hedge fund manager bought like crazy at <$1 as well and probably owns a sizeable chunk.

But your premise that's it's somehow unacceptable for anyone to hold this large a proportion of the currency is based around the notion that Bitcoin will somehow replace all fiat currencies one day. I'm sorry to break your heart, but this won't happen in our lifetimes. The sovereign states will always retain fiat currency in some form, it's what keeps them in power.

In any case, they have to sell their coins sometime, and then the "problem" goes away.

At worst, Bitcoin will fade away in a few years time and people will move on to something else. At best, Bitcoin is going to become an established worldwide online alternate currency worth hundreds of billions. I suspect something in the middle will be the reality.

In the best-case scenario, Satoshi may yet be worth billions, but I'm ok with that. He's got to do a better job of it than the Rothchilds or any of the other slave owners from the 1800s who bought and sold the world, simply by being in the right place at the right time, hmm?