The part I’ve never liked is that Satoshi Nakamoto only mined for 10 days and got ~1M bitcoins. Today, if I mine for 10 days I’ll probably get 0.001 bitcoins. Even if you adjust for increased computing power, why are my hash calculations valued a billion times less than his? Why can’t I get 1M bitcoins for a similar effort? From a market value standpoint, his computing effort is worth $18B. If, today, I put the same computing effort in as he did, I only get enough for a nice lunch.

I understand the technical reasons why due to the 21M bitcoin limit, hashrate difficulty increasing, etc. It just seems like a rigged system with the people “on top” getting huge rewards for very little work whereas the people lower down who do many orders of magnitude more work are getting very little reward. From that perspective, it has the scent of MLM, if you will.

Could you design a secure PoW scheme that doesn't suffer form this flaw? I don't think you can

He would have had to mine for 139 days to get ~1M bitcoins (50BTC every 10 min). More if other people are mining too.

Wikipedia says he mined “at genesis and for 10 days afterwards”. Regardless of 10 or 139 (perhaps “genesis” includes several years of development), it doesn’t change the point.

> The part I’ve never liked is that Satoshi Nakamoto only mined for 10 days

He took the risk initially so he gets to enjoy the spoils.

Creation of bitcoin aside, what risk is involved in an early adopter letting their computer crunch numbers for a few weeks? If you were the third person ever to mine bitcoin, about the only risk I can think of is a bit of time & effort plus a slightly higher electric bill.

The risk of being starting the whole thing. If you think starting your own coin is easy, go ahead and start mining, the hard part is convincing others to adopt your coin.

That's not what makes MLM a "pyramid". Residuals are part of lots of legitimate business. What makes most MLM a pyramid scheme is the fact that growth is predicated on bringing new members into the scheme, rather than existing members growing their business.

Not growth, but revenues.

All asset appreciation is predicated on increases in demand for an asset. Asset appreciation isn’t a pyramid.

Pyramids have no source of value - even an ephemeral asset - just dues of new members being channeled into revenue for preceding members.

They key thing about pyramids/MLM is that the growth is based entirely on getting more investors i.e. people who are putting money in with the intention of getting money out later (this also included MLM sellers who have to buy product upfront). Whereas a non-pyramid grows because it has more non-investor users, or some other source of revenue from people who don't plan to take that money out later.

I'd say it's more like a ponzi because the market volume is so far from accurate due to the chameleon hoardsters. They will dumptruck eventually, so anything gleaned from looking at current market stats is really just a facade. Wait till the whales start selling...And no disrespect to Satoshi who is most likely Finney but if he or his children ever decide to dump their share that most appraisers tend to consider "missing for good," you can bet the price will take a monstrous hit. Thats why I consider BTC a ponzi. The current dynamics are an ill reflection of the actual level of buyers and sellers. And there is no real way to assess number of hoarders due to not knowing how many BTC are lost or simply forgot about.