Maybe it's unfair, I don't know. But, I don't see any perverse incentives.

It is difficult to tell if they think the fundamental concept of bitcoin is bad or if they just have sour grapes because they aren't an early adopter.

But while we are at it, why shouldn't early adopters profit?, they took a risk early on.

And actually if you ask me I think the minting system is pretty good, mining costs electricity, while many miners are surely hoarding and speculating they all have to pay their electricity bill on a fairly regular basis.

This ensures there is always someone somewhere selling bitcoins and increases the liquidity of the market.

Ideally early adopters should not need to be rewarded for taking a risk because there would be negligible risk.

The ideal system/algorithm would exactly match the amount of Bitcoin in circulation to the growth of the economy, which would keep prices stable. Bitcoin pioneered most of what you'd need to create such an algorithm in a new system, but what does "growth of an economy" look like in terms of transactions between anonymous addresses? You'd need some concept of identity to determine the number of unique players, and the value flowing between them.

A system that solves this problem at scale is the economic holy grail.

Machine rights and slavery are being ignored as people blindly treat the work done by machine slaves as if it was done by "owners". Some publicly act as if slavery of machines or other humans should not be the basis for a currency, yet we still have slaves. The slavery still around isn't just about mining the materials for the capacitors in your tech toys. And it wasn't just a part of past colonies.

http://www.thenational.ae/news/worldwide/middle-east/men-sho...

How many hours of CPU work, or how many bitcoins does a slave cost? If some do decide or admit that slavery is acceptable, or just a fact of life, would the value of a slave be a more stable value for the basis of a currency? (measured in prime adult slave-years perhaps). Perhaps one should have to be a slave for a time to obtain bitcoins. However if one is born into debt, it might take some time to have a positive balance.

Does being born into a society where there is public debt associated with a national currency amount to defacto slavery?

The computation power secures the network from double-spending. Do security guards also produce nothing of lasting value?

If FooCorp started trying to convince people to do all their buying and selling using FooCorp shares - of which the FooCorp owners naturally have a great many - then yes, obviously, it would be a scam intended primarily to enrich the FooCorp owners.

As a stock, FooCorp might be a perfectly fine investment.

Remind me again what the fundamentals for bitcoins are? What are their same store sales for last quarter?

And I don't think anyone is really trying to convince people to do all their buying and selling using Bitcoin. However it may be useful to do some of your buying and selling with Bitcoin.

If FooCorp's stock was stable and easily transferrable enough to use as a currency, why would it be a scam to advocate its use as currency? If your answer is only 'because holders profit' then I guess I'll agree to disagree.

Kind of like how all monetary systems work? The closer you are to the source of the money the more it is worth because you can control the velocity.