________________________________ From: coderman <coderman@gmail.com> To: David Vorick <david.vorick@gmail.com> Cc: "cypherpunks@cpunks.org" <cypherpunks@cpunks.org> Sent: Monday, November 25, 2013 5:54 PM Subject: Re: bitcoin as a global medium of exchange (was Re: Interesting take on Sanjuro's Assassination Market) On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 5:43 PM, David Vorick <david.vorick@gmail.com> wrote:
... How do you prevent the early adopters from becoming stupid wealthy if the currency takes off? high risk, high reward. why should early adoption with high risk not pay more than late adoption with significantly less risk?
I certainly agree with 'high risk, high reward'. But that begs the question of, 'how much risk v. how much reward?'. I've already said that I fully agree that Satoshi should get $1 billion for what he's done. (More, if BTC fully enables a system like Sanjuro's 'AM'). But, he's getting close to that level now, and everything I understand about bitcoin is that he isn't going to sell his BTC's, so he will get far more than that over the next few years. _THAT_ level of 'reward' is absolutely uncalled-for, and I think when the public learns of that, there will be a great deal of anger. If such a payoff were absolutely necessary to launch bitcoin, and there were no alternatives, I'd grudgingly say "yes". But, I can imagine a digital currency with far-less early-adopter bias. This is particularly true today: We all know that the world needs something like BTC. At this point, how much real 'risk' would there be in a new digital currency? Far less than BTC. Jim Bell