It just has to help bring in enough new suckers to allow the recipients of ethereum's huge pre-mine (now valued at about one quarter trillion dollars) to exit more of their positions without collapsing the price.
Participation was limited because US residents-- by far the largest population of cryptocurrency users-- were prohibited from participating (though of course some did). [Edit: A comment below claims otherwise, I don't actually see support for that in my source, and my own correspondence from the time states that it wasn't. I'm not sure if something changed around the launch, or if I'm somehow mistaken.]
I dunno anything about winklevoss speculation, people often include funds held in custody as if they're owned by the custodian and reach weird conclusions. It's easy to list ethereum accounts that hold >=1% of all ethereum: 0x281055afc982d96fab65b3a49cac8b878184cb16, 0x6f46cf5569aefa1acc1009290c8e043747172d89, 0x90e63c3d53e0ea496845b7a03ec7548b70014a91, 0x53d284357ec70ce289d6d64134dfac8e511c8a3d, 0xab7c74abc0c4d48d1bdad5dcb26153fc8780f83e, 0xfe9e8709d3215310075d67e3ed32a380ccf451c8; while the largest Bitcoin address is under 1%. (Of course, parties can have multiple addresses, and as mentioned some parties hold coins for many other people)
Moreover, regardless of the distribution Bitcoin had no premine: Everyone who has Bitcoin received it in a open process available to the whole world with no particular privilege other than knowing and caring about it when it was almost worthless before other people did. (well, I suppose except for those people who stole theirs :)).
We don't actually know how many Bitcoin Satoshi-- if he's still alive-- owns: there are guesses based on assuming various earlier miners might have been him, but they're guesses. The 1M claim specifically is flat out false: it comes from counting up every coin mined during the first year that was still on spent at the time the figure started circulating a few years ago. It includes many coins known to have been mined by other people, including likely myself.
https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/22/launching-the-ether-sal...
> For all you know they recycled received funds back out in their crowd sale and bought multiple times.
Actually we know that they didn’t and so do you, because the funds didn’t leave the multisig until the sale ended
I hope you can see why many people believed the US was prohibited.
There was serious concern that the Ethereum Foundation would get in trouble with the SEC if they sold in the US. They delayed the crowdsale for several months while they consulted lawyers, who finally signed off on a way to keep them out of SEC trouble. There was a lot of discussion about this in the community.
The presale was open for 42 days and very well known in the crypto community. Within the first few days it was clear that it was going to be one of the largest crowdsales to date, so it got regular media attention too.
https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/22/launching-the-ether-sal...
I.e. it was a crowdsale raising funds for development, much like projects on Indiegogo except that it was a nonprofit instead of a business.
Once they've finished selling their premine to the public would it be accurate to say it wasn't premined at all? Of course not. So it's not accurate to exclude the partially sold portion now.
This massive understatement of their premine is a well known example of the dishonesty of ethereums operators and advocates.
https://mobile.twitter.com/moo9000/status/138957146600232551...