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Comment by jacoblyles | Hacker News Reader

There's nothing stopping you from devising a coin with a different mining schedule. I'm working on two proposals right now, one with constant growth over time and one with a slightly increasing growth. Both of them have an initial deflationary period to encourage adoption. Working title is "Friedman Coin".

This solves the problem of decreasing mining incentives and the possibility of a too-big windfall for early adopters. It's not unrealistic that Satoshi could own 2% or 3% of all the money that will ever be made. That's a problem.

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> It's not unrealistic that Satoshi could own 2% or 3% of all the money that will ever be made. That's a problem.

Not really. It might offend someone's sense of fairness, but it hardly has an impact on whether the currency will achieve adoption.

It's really only behavior on the margin that matters.

"I'm working on two proposals right now, one with constant growth over time and one with a slightly increasing growth."

Such a coin has been created. Freicoin is a bitcoin-variant that devalues at a constant rate. It hasn't caught on, probably because people prefer currency that doesn't lose its value.

"It's not unrealistic that Satoshi could own 2% or 3% of all the money that will ever be made. That's a problem."

He owns 2-3% of all the money at one point in time. He can only spend that money once. Money circulates, and can only give value to its user when they circulate it.

Given a given unit of money will circulate indefinitely, the relative economic power of a holder of a particular percentage of the money supply at a particular point of time will decrease over time as a percentage of total economic power exercised throughout the currency's existence.

You should really look into the history of altcoins because I'm positive one with a constant mining release schedule has been done. One issue with some of them has been premining but if it wasn't premined and was reasonably well-known at launch it probably stands as a good test of whether something like it will ever work. Funnily enough the altcoin that has done the best has changed very few parameters.

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