I'm sorry but this is a bogus statement. I can't stand when people say this, it's an empty statement, it's like saying "anyone could have founded Amazon". Yeah maybe that's technically true but it didn't happen and the chances of it happening to anyone else were extremely small. The basic facts are this:
- most people are not ever going to become miners, anyone launching a cryptocurrency knows this full well
- bitcoin was designed to make mining harder and harder over time, making it much easier for early adopters to mine
- bitcoin was designed to be deflationary
Combine those things, and you get a system where the founders and early adopters are practically guaranteed to gain more wealth than everyone else, like to the point of ridiculous imbalance. And if you have an unpopular token in the beginning it's the same thing as a premine. I don't think this is exactly controversial to point out that bitcoin was designed to multiply the wealth of the HODLers, that's the only reason anyone still cares about it.
It's true. The software was freely available. Anyone could have run it at the start. Back then, you didn't need specialised hardware. That's a far cry from founding and running a company, I don't understand how this even compares to Amazon (and anyway, Amazon does useful things!)
Now, there's a huge world of difference between saying anyone could have mined bitcoin at the beginning, and everyone could have mined bitcoin at the beginning. As I said, and you seem to agree with, the economics hugely favour the early adopters.
> Yeah maybe that's technically true but it didn't happen and the chances of it happening to anyone else were extremely small.
It's not a question of chance, it was simply a matter of running some software, and being there first.
> you get a system where the founders and early adopters are practically guaranteed to gain more wealth than everyone else, like to the point of ridiculous imbalance
We're in complete agreement here. But back then, no-one seriously thought bitcoins would be valued in the thousands of dollars. I doubt Satoshi released bitcoin and sat back thinking "now I'll become a billionaire".
Now, everyone is into cryptocoins for the money (hence all the identikit coins out there)
I wonder how bitcoin would have fared had it not been released with the deflationary logic built in. I suspect it would have been pretty similar. Ethereum has no cap on coins, other than a built-in 'difficulty bomb' that the developers repeatedly keep delaying...
And yet many people were still not there, because you have to be a super nerd to even care about this stuff to begin with, never mind go through the bother of:
- Figuring out what "mining" actually is and why you should care
- Correctly running some random unproven open source code to do it
- Manage the wallet and figure out how to actually trade with somebody else
- Follow all the other super nerds who are doing this to make sure you're not doing it wrong
It goes on and on here, none of this stuff is obvious to people who weren't already familiar with what was going on here and had enough obscure cryptography knowledge to understand what anybody was even talking about. And it's still not obvious, most people "investing" in crypto still have no idea about any of this stuff. I'm not particularly interested in commenting on the founder's intent because it doesn't matter much here. The outcome is still going to be the same.
>I wonder how bitcoin would have fared had it not been released with the deflationary logic built in. I suspect it would have been pretty similar.
Well yes, because basically every other cryptocurrency including ETH still favors the HODLers for a lot of other reasons.
No they couldn't? At bare minimum: A lot of people were babies or were not even born yet when Amazon was founded. A lot of people were not in the financial position to go do a startup in the 90s. A lot of people did not have computer science or business skills at that time (and still don't). A lot of people just did not ever care about buying and selling books online. I'm sure you can think of a lot more examples here.
And if Amazon was trying to push a new AmazonBucks cryptocurrency as the new global currency with Jeff Bezos holding a large percentage of them, then yes I would probably call it a scam. Remember when Facebook basically tried to do that a few years ago?
By designing half of all bitcoins to be emitted in just the first 4 years, they ensured that early miners like Satoshi would end up with a large slice of the pie.
Those who came relatively shortly after that... Yeah, I saw enough those who were there to be the next plutocracy...
Now, the end effect is still similar: the early adopters got the lion's share of the coins and the 'cult of bitcoin' is trying to lure in greater fools so that they can cash out, but I think that Satoshi's motives weren't greed. They had a clever idea (however flawed the economics were) and implemented it. Everything snowballed from there.
Perhaps Satoshi was appalled by what they had created, and that's why they've disappeared?