Bitcoin Forum

I've always discarded the wealthy early adopter issue as irrelevant as they would have used most of the bitcoins to trade around already and would have spread out to some extend for a cheap price back  in the days.
However, as it seems now, there are a few hands holding incredible amounts of bitcoins.

Satoshi is believed to have 1~2mln
knight has a small 0.4mln
2 other users here have round 0.5mln

Thats almost half of all the wealth in this market in the hands of 4 people...

Now, i don't mind early adopters of a revolutionary currency getting rich over it, after all, they brought us this revolution. But this seems a bit overkill to me and money=power, too much money=too much power.

Do you guys still think this is a non-issue?

I do, as long as all the big holders are responsible about the way they cash out. Life isn't fair - early adopters in almost every aspect get unfair benefits. Is it fair that the first people to rush westward in the USA got "free land" for nothing?

Having said that, it's becoming increasingly apparent to me that the "fuck you, I got mine" mentality is going to keep causing periodic price turbulence until all the early adopters have cashed out completely, the funds being redistributed to people who have a reasonable investment in them. This problem being compounded by the massive deflation we're due for if the currency actually takes off worldwide on any measurable scale (because if it goes from $15 to $1500 in ten years, there's no difference between someone who's sitting on 100,000 BTC today, and someone sitting on 1000BTC in ten years).

Hopefully the markets improve by virtue of more people participating, and it's able to bear these completely fucktarded sell-offs, but I really don't know what's going to happen in the future.

TL;DR: Bitcoin is what it is - you know the rules going into it, and if you didn't and you bought in anyway, well...

That's exactly why I believe that bubbles are good:
http://thebitcoinsun.com/post/2011/06/22/The-Bitcoin-Burst-A-Good-Thing

A few more bubbles and the wealth should be distributed a bit more fairly.

If you had 500,000BTC, it would have been really stupid to not sell at least some part of it at above 20$ each. I would have probably sold something like 10%, aka 1 million $.

yes - i agree with posts 2 & 3.

additionally, i don't even think it matters if some early adopter with a metric crapton of BTC cashes out stupid and gorgles the market for a week or two.

the point is:  it takes care of itself.  distribution occurs as incentive increases.

and the truth is - if the goal is an effective international and uncontrollable (by governments and banks) currency, it just ain't gonna happen until a certain amount of homogeneity has evened out the wealth structure.  everybody has a price they'll sell at - and the lower the cost of entry, the lower that price is.