It sounds like you would disagree with ZH's post below then, correct? Also, in which ways are people from the community starting to act and think like dictators and how is that comment related to this thread?
I'd like to refine the notion in the OP of "most efficient coin distribution," why Bitcoin has something vastly closer to it and why other coins can't hope to catch up anytime soon.
I think the answer requires a clear understanding of the crucial role investors play in society, so here I will attempt to explain that for those who've never considered it:
Simply put, a good investor can predict the future better than other people can. If, for example, you're a good investor and you predict a water shortage in a few years you can buy water rights now and have a good chance of selling them later for a profit. However, as a side effect, you bid up the price of water for everyone else, which incentivizes people to conserve water, incentivizes water producers to invest more into water production, motivates new companies to get into the water business, prompts more people to major in related fields in college, etc. The water shortage you correctly predicted will be mitigated by these actions. In this way, "greedy speculators" can even save lives.
As a good investor, you would likely sell when the water production infrastructure has become too big and society would benefit more from some of the resources/manpower being diverted elsewhere, and by pushing down the price you create exactly the right incentive structure for that. Being as most people aren't good at predicting the future and you are, you help society manage resources more efficiently than it would without you.
Not only do you help society manage resources more efficiently, even to the point of saving lives, but
the better you are at that the more power you will gain to do it on a larger and larger scale since you keep getting wealthier and have more power to move markets. Think of how many lives Jim Rogers has probably saved in Africa by being such a successful and large-scale commodities investor! Conversely, if you're bad at predicting the future like most people are, you will tend to lose money and damage society - in the case of water by aggravating the shortages and bankrolling the oversupply gluts - but your ability to affect society will diminish as you lose your wealth and thereby effectively lose the "right" to divert resources in society.
In this way, the freer the market, the more it optimizes toward moving the ability to direct resources into the most capable hands: the most highly skilled investors (future prediction specialists) and the best entrepreneurs - and these people are exactly the people we want getting rich. Without them, we'd all be a lot less rich ourselves, or maybe even dead or never born because the resources for our parents to raise us weren't sufficient due to systemic mismanagement. Notice this is not centralized government management; every argument for "why we need central planners" is answered in the concepts touched on above: there is a
huge distributed network of specialists at predicting the future and putting resources to the most efficient known uses. These are your planners, bringing all the benefits of having experts plan stuff, but not
central planners in government offices.
Over time (not immediately), this process vests greater control over the societal ledger with those people who benefit society the most with their skills, and of course these skilled people are also motivated to do this because it directly benefits them by making them rich.
Note that even short-term speculators and day traders - if they are good - also play a valuable role: they dampen short-term and even intraday volatility by buying the dips and selling the peaks. It's the
unskilled speculators that create the volatility, but those people tend to lose their shirts pretty fast. That's a major reason why there's less volatility as a market matures, with the unskilled and therefore volatility-increasing speculators getting smaller and smaller while the skilled and therefore volatility-reducing speculators get bigger and bigger, thereby making the market ever smoother. (Note, however, that even though the Bitcoin market is maturing, it is not getting that much less volatile, simply because the market expands exponentially, so that the immature portion of it is always bigger than the older mature portion.)
Now Bitcoin investment is a little more abstract than water investments. We cannot say that investing in Bitcoin before it got scarce helped society avert a water shortage. However, it incentivized miners to get in and secure the network to a level commensurate with the market cap, it motivated people like Tony Gallippi to divert his talents and time toward starting BitPay, and it generally created the incentive structure to support many other similar infrastructural buildouts. Of course it also attracted media and other much-needed public attention, as well as that of academics and of course investors.
It is obvious from reading the speculation forum (and reddit) that only those with the conviction to hodl actually hodl, and those strongly tend to be people who both understand Bitcoin at a deep level (aren't spooked by FUD) and understand the necessary aspects of investing (aren't spooked by volatility because they understand the dynamics of the binary bet and exponential growth). When bitcoin went from under a dollar to over $30, then down to $2 over the course of a single year, the market was shaking out the weak hands - the poor speculators - in a spectacularly violent fashion. But what is this volatility optimizing for - that is, who's this market making rich? Here are some obvious ones:
1) Good hodlers, people who deeply grok Bitcoin and its investment aspects, who will likely
dishoard in an organized fashion at peaks, dampening the bubbles and not contributing to the panic knifedowns nor to the FUD-based selloffs
2) Good traders who see the big picture, thereby decreasing the volatility
3) Perhaps warranting their own category are the people who have extremely deep or highly technical understanding of Bitcoin, to the level of what would almost seem to others like "insider information" (though there's nothing bad about this; in fact it's a good thing, if you follow the reasoning outlined above)
The main point is, besides some people who got lucky, the Bitcoin ledger is held mainly by people who most strongly believe in and most intimately understand Bitcoin (and understood it early!) and the relevant investing principles, or those who have actually contributed materially to the ecosystem. These people are far more likely than others to know where resources should be diverted to in the economy for maximum benefit to the community, and the maturity of the Bitcoin ledger ensures that they actually have the ability to command such resources (i.e., they have accumulated a lot of bitcoins to invest in infrastructure, and they have relatively little competition from unskilled investors who fund dead-end projects that waste dev time, etc.).
TL;DR: While the debate over whether the Bitcoin ledger is more or less "fair" than some other distribution may never be settled to everyone's satisfaction, we can clearly see that it is in a very useful sense the most efficient distribution for the general benefit of the community, thanks to the eminently helpful role that skilled investors play in society and how the extreme volatility over the years has continually shaken out the unskilled investors who would waste the community's resources. If we imagine even a new amazing coin that is magically perfectly distributed to everyone, 100 coins for every person in the world, we can easily see that the initial investment decisions will be terribly skewed since all sorts of unskilled people will be throwing their coins at things and diverting resources and labor into useless, go-nowhere projects. Also, volatility would be way worse, and panic sell-offs due to FUD/misunderstandings would be horrendous. A ledger needs to grow organically through a market process, or else it will face challenges that it would only be ready to face some years later when the market is more solidified in strong hands by the above process.
By the way, are there any other things the Bitcoin ledger has optimized for (any other type of person the history of Bitcoin price movements has made especially rich (or especially shaken out))?
