How important is the fairness of the initial coin distribution for new coins?
Which of the coins now, in your opinion, are distributed fairly?
It is important if you want to make a successful project.
Coins with bad distro don't go very high because smart people (the ones with the money) don't buy it. Litecoin wouldn't be where it is now if it wasn't fairly distributed.
How about NXT? Or Ripple? Or Darkcoin/DASH which was supposedly instamined? These coins still have very high market caps.
From all the coins i have been looking at i see these as failry distributed: Litecoin, Unobtanium, Vertcoin - that's it. Maybe doge, maybe digibyte, maybe megacoin, maybe clams (but these all go with a questionmark) Bitcoin wasn't fairly distributed (stealth, private premine, ninja launch)
Is there any proof that Bitcoin was actually premined? Didn't Satoshi insert the message "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks" into the genesis block to prove that he didn't mine a ton of coins before it was released?
It might be accurate to say that Bitcoin was ninjamined because Satoshi and Hal Finney were the only ones who were mining it during its early days, however this was almost certainly unintentional and beyond Satoshi's control. Back then, very few people knew about cryptocurrencies and most of those who did realize the potential of decentralized blockchain-based currencies were the same people who Satoshi directly took inspiration from to create Bitcoin. Also, it was announced on a public mailing list from the very beginning.
Well, the distribution certainly affects market sentiment a lot a long time into the future.
I agree with this.
What about ripple?
Man, ripple is not even a real cryptocurrency. The company still holds a large premine. I don't think ripple can ever claim to be fairly distributed. What ripple did right was drawing in gullible people and some bigger investors with their shilling. I don't think ripple will ever go mainsteam.
What about NXT? Well, it was open to the public to buy in the beginning and possibly one could call it fair but it isn't a wide distribution. NXT was fair but not good (wide) distributed. It did go places however. But in both cases ripple and nxt some technical innovation justified their marketcap. DRK same story. In cases of great first mover innovation large cap can be aquired without good distro but these coins always need to fear the copycat that is better distributed. NEM cuts into the demand for NXT, several anon coins cut into the demand for DRK and Stellar cuts into the demand for XRP. So these coins all gave room for competition thanks to their bad distro in the beginning.
About bitcoin: Back when it was created and had highest blockrewards people were mining it on their Laptop CPUs. The community in the early years was very small so the distribution is sub optimal and this fact to this day affects market sentiment (satoshi wallet for example will always be a topic and will prevent many people from putting any real money into BTC). Of course it was beyond satoshis control but he could have given away a large amount of these coins too but he didn't.
Today more people know about crypto and i think many of the alts of today have a much better distro than bitcoin had when it was their age.
If you know the coin is very good distributed you can catch a falling knife where this means higher risk on less good distributed coins.
