Ethereum and Bitcoin mining work like this:
Take a freshly baked pie, and give half of it away for a suggested donation of $1 USD to the first 10 people who show up.
Now split the last half of the pie into smaller chunks and slowly give out bread crumbs to new "miners" with the requirement they spend large amounts of capital on exceedingly inefficient number guessing machines in order to win the lottery of "mining" more crumbs.
Satoshi Nakamoto
Thu Jan 8 14:27:40 EST 2009
I made the proof-of-work difficulty ridiculously easy to
start with, so for a little while in the beginning a
typical PC will be able to generate coins in just a few
hours. It'll get a lot harder when competition makes the
automatic adjustment drive up the difficulty.
first 4 years: 10,500,000 coins
next 4 years: 5,250,000 coins
next 4 years: 2,625,000 coins
next 4 years: 1,312,500 coins
In economics, the Gini coefficient is the standard measure
of how inequitable a society is. This is tricky to
determine for Bitcoin, as it's not quiet a "society" in
the Gini sense, one person may have multiple addresses and
many addresses have been used only once or a few times.
(The commonly-cited figure of 0.88 is based on one small
exchange in 2011.) However, a Citigroup analysis from
early 2014 notes: "47 individuals hold about 30 percent,
another 900 a further 20 percent, the next 10,000 about
25% and another million about 20%"; and distribution
"looks much like the distribution of wealth in North Korea
and makes China's and even the US' wealth distribution
look like that of a workers' paradise
Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir found in a 2012 study that only
22% of then-existing Bitcoins were in circulation at all,
there were a total of 75 active users or businesses with
any kind of volume, one (unidentified) user owned a
quarter of all Bitcoins in existence, and one large owner
was trying to hide their pile by moving it around in
thousands of smaller transactions. (Shamir is one of the
most renowned cryptographers in the world and the "S" in
"RSA encryption")"
Presale ICO / Premine ( max cost $0.50 USD per ETH )
= 72,009,990 ETH
Total Supply today (Feb 23rd 2018)
= 97,800,000 ETH
Source:
https://etherscan.io/stat/supply