I've been musing about this a bit lately.
It does seem that a currency with an extraordinarily high JINI may be at a dis-advantage in terms of it's appeal to the masses vs. one without. It also may have more and more difficulty capturing the passion of the most talented technical folks. Both could be increasingly stubborn problems for Bitcoin as we march forward I fear.
It also strikes me that with an inflationary currency, value can be siphoned off in fees but new money is created and distributed among the economic participants. A deflationary currency with such siphoning will almost certainly develop a high JINI quite rapidly. Miners and exchange operators can buy only so many massages and so much blow, and the rest will probably go where all wealthy people's funds go...into a hoard which is hoped to be bigger than anyone elses.
I'm not sure that there is a whole lot which can (or should) be done about the JINI issue. It's basically a pretty understandable phenomenon in the real world. It tends to be resolved with pitchforks, but one of the niceties of Bitcoin-style crypto-currencies is that there is the potential for the resolution to be somewhat less bloody.
One way or another, the future will be quite interesting to watch unfold.
Yes pretty much spot on....particularly the alienation of talented people, who just never heard about it at the right time...now this is one of the things that plague any economic system to date.
I agree with the hard limit of coins, but is has to be a large number just so people feel like they can get whole coins (though different issue).
Perhaps one way is to have say 100 coins x population. By Escrow - Premine 50% (a term I have coined), and the rest up for grabs in usual way. The shear weight of the pre mine would act as a buffer to the other 50%
the premine is randomly distributed over time to wallets, or IP's or something, and once it has gone to that wallet or IP then thats it not again to there. The premine would be in an escrow feature that would then auto distribute...over time.
any way just thought in the wind....but there is a problem that results in a lesser market penetration because of alienation.
The Omni-penetration coin may rise to the same value as BTC by virtue of it appeal, It gets 50% market rather that 5% or 1%, and thus has more attraction