In particular, I think it is unfair to keep hundreds of thousands of whatever-coins for yourself, and it is unwise to think that a bitcoin variation that is "almost exactly like bitcoin, only different because... well, just because" will ever have anything more than speculative value.
How do you respond to the idea that you started this new blockchain with the primary purpose being to make you an early adopter so you can get rich quick, especially considering you made 250'000 ixcoins for your personal use (not bounties) before even announcing your project? Many people on this forum including me think just that.
The day following Ixcoin's introduction, I bought several thousand Ixcoins at 0.00006 BTC from miners. At that rate, that equates to ~17BTC for 250K Ixcoins - less than what we spent on hosting/domains/related, not counting our time. Nothing was stopping you or others from purchasing large holdings of Ixcoins at these prices.
Miners are now sitting on 1 million Ixcoins. Some early miners managed to mine 150K Ixcoins. Should they be scolded for being early adopters?
There were several motivations why we introduced Ixcoins. To name a few:
1/ Before investing in Bitcoin we were a bit uneasy about the prospect of early-adopters with massive BTC holdings possibly tanking the value of our investments by flooding the markets. I eventually dismissed this feeling, but several experienced investors we mentioned Bitcoin to kept bringing up that point. I don't have anything against early adopters profiting, because without them we wouldn't have the wonderful Bitcoin ecosystem we have today. It's just that I would prefer the value of my investment to not be dependent on a handful of early adopters with millions of BTCs. I prefer to spread my risk. We saw a trial-run of such a scenario with the MTGox episode.
The current Ixcoin distribution is somewhat clearer which I hope might reassure potential new investors. The 2/3 of the total 1.5M IXC in existence belong to miners. Close to half of the remaining 1/3 is set aside for bounties. The rest will be used to fund future development and some for ourselves. Omitting the initial difficulty ramp-up, I'm betting IXC will be evenly distributed since the mining community is mature and competition is fierce. Setting a high difficulty right from the start would have avoided the difficulty ramp-up phase, but we believe would also have prevented the general excitement and very rapid uptake from the Bitcoin community.
2/ Waiting until 2033-2050 for all 21 million BTCs to be generated sounded a bit distant. We wanted a shorter maturation period to reinforce the scarcity aspect of Bitcoin. By 2015 when hopefully the masses start using Bitcoin/Ixcoin (due to current Bitcoin dev trends and imploding fiat currencies) and when all Ixcoins have been generated, it'll be refreshing for people to use the strictly non-inflating Ixcoin currency (and also avoid explaining the complex inflation and mining techno-babble), whilst still reassuring them that there is not just a handful of Ixcoin holders but that it is spread over many thousands of miners.
3/ Fun and (currently limited) profit. We made multiple orders of magnitude more on bitcoin trading but this is way more fun!
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