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Comment by atmosx | Hacker News Reader

Well, early adopters do have an unfair advantage no matter how you links try to justify it.

Yeah, like every other economic system. That's life, that's nature. If you dumped 10% of your savings into BitCoin in 2010, you took a great risk and this is the reward. Had you been the angel investor dumping $100000 into Google when there was no business plan, the same applies or what about people who bought domain names for common words or phrases or < 3 letter domains in the early 90s, if that was you, you would have made a mint. The early bird catches the worm.

That's the game, and you and I didn't win this round.

More than the early adopters, I am more worried about the unfair advantage that the creators of Bitcoin enjoy. IIRC, just one individual already owns ~25% of all bitcoins that will ever be mined!

Even the creators are at the mercy of the mining collectives, though.

Once the Bitcoin generation rate falls to a level where the miners' primary incentive is transaction fees I expect we'll see an aggregation around a handful of big collectives, which will be the Bitcoin equivalent of Visa and Mastercard.

And what will they say?

Want your transaction processed? No matter if you're Satoshi himself, pay the fee.

It's not the unfair advantage as much as the risk that individuals controll enough of the currency to cause significant damage to the market.

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