So basically, casascius's point is that a small minority of future potential bitcoin population has grabbed significant share of total bitcoin wealth and this is portrayed as bitcoins disadvantage and unfairness.
Proposed solution is to somehow change rules of the game now so that "jonny's come late" get bigger piece of the pie without taking much risks.
What disregarded is amount of risk early adopters took allocating significant part of their resources, be it time or money, to a high risk venture while protecting initially vulnerable bitcoin network.
Now it is proposed to change the rules of the game to redistribute wealth away from early adopters to jonny come laters or else jonny come laters will revolt and start their own currency.
Right, this is perfectly understandable, it sounds like you feel we
deserve to be enriched at others' expense because of all the risk we took. (Which was what, exactly, by the way?)
Bernanke probably feels the same way... After all, printing money is tiring and risky and at the end of the day, he and all his buddies deserve to be compensated for that lavishly with the fruits of others' labor.
The thing about Bitcoin is that "jonny come late" has free access to the kitchen. If "jonny come late" doesn't like that only 1% of the pie is on the table but that he must pay for the whole pie, he might just start some cookin.
You seem to be saying that Bitcoin early adopters have taken little risk, yet you present the case that any one of those participants could manipulate the market in a way which would put the newfound 'wealth' of their cohorts at risk by dumping BTC on the market. You can't have it both ways.
Perhaps I misunderstood, and you really mean to say that the early adopters assumed less risk than later adopters do, because the early adopters can manipulate the market. If that is the case, let's say an early adopter crashes Mt. Gox by 50%, let's say this happens repeatedly... The only thing that would happen is that BTC would be available at a lower price, allowing these late comers an opportunity to by in at prices that were once only available several months before they ever heard of Bitcoin... It would also most likely cause Difficulty to fall as well, creating an opportunity for new miners, etc. From a game-theory perspective this does not seem like such a bad thing. I think it would be the healthiest thing for Bitcoin if this happened earlier, because it would likely result in such actions becoming progressively more difficult as the economy matures.
Yes, Bitcoin is a self-balancing system. Well thought out.
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