rpietila, thanks for your clarifications and explanations. Apologies for the overly aggressive wording "mining the shit out of it". What I am trying to get at there is that if some people will shill very aggressively that the only equitable way to do initial distribution to investors is via PoW, then another group can retort that front loading the emission curve is essentially the same outcome as an ICO (he who has capital and insight gets some shares) except for the differences:
One of the key reasons a typical PoW coin needs to do initial distribution via PoW is the threat of 51% attack and the need to rapidly scale up network security.
On the issue of volunteerism vs. collectivization of ICO funds with a leader, there are tradeoffs. The former is very difficult to incentivize radical innovation and also nearly impossible to seed fund deeply into the ecosystem, but is actually superior at the refinement stage as it doesn't overcommit to egregious error, i.e. it is more anti-fragile. The latter loads trust into a system that is aiming to be trustless, thus although expedient it is anti-fragile and can't scale well, but it can be very effective at making key investments of scale that couldn't be accomplished with the same efficiency (communication overload trying to organize and convince the politics, etc). In other words, the former has a trajectory that can't be altered (e.g. Monero and Bitcoin) and the latter is agile (e.g. NXT) but can diverge (e.g. Ethereum).
My thought it is possible to combine the best of both. One is better at the refinement stage and the other is better at the seed stage if the leader can demonstrate the ability.
Edit: I am surprised rpietila replied so quickly. I didn't know he was lurking. There was no coordination nor premeditation.
Subsidies are great if you want to get applicants who qualify, It should be called a subsidiary not a reward for good reason, the problem is there are developers who feel the economics are wrong and Bitcoin needs to be fixed, I may not be able to express why but to my understanding the mechanism seems well balanced and considered in my view, the onus is on the people who have a problem with how Bitcoin works to prove its broken, and build a better mousetrap not change this one.
My position is that it would be great if we could have started Bitcoin up without a block subsidy, but since the currency has to be issued via some method, and since the only way to produce a truly optimal initial distribution would require an entity that was both omnipotent and omniscient, issuing the currency via block subsidy spread out over time is the least terrible way to do it.
Other than the wealth effect, much of the real capital (at least initially until the NWO-directed ecosystem was bootstrapped) went to the utility, hardware, and usury industry to which miners are beholden. If that was the optimum way to bootstrap an ecosystem, then it was correct.
In my view, it was the only way to build a global ecosystem amongst conflicting interests because it is
unassailable until it scales to the point where it becomes distributed but centralized, then at that point it can only be assailed by the TPTB.
One would prefer a completely decentralized process (thus in theory no politics) such that we didn't have to rely on some individuals holding the private keys for proceeds derived from the ICO. But as Monero and Bitcoin have demonstrated, a decentralized process lacks leadership and unless you are entirely done and all is on auto-pilot, then the lack of leadership leads to paralysis, fragmentation, dearth of innovation, etc.. Thus I see no other way to proceed to build an anonymous, bearer-style (a.k.a. permission-less autonomy) ecosystem other than to concentrate some investment from the ICO and then redistribute it with leadership.
The problem is who will do that leadership and the resultant vulnerabilities and pitfalls.
Ethereum made the huge mistake of having too many managers. And choosing a problem set that is arguably intractable (Turing complete on a replicated verification).
Blockstream is ostensibly much more well focused; they've delivered alpha code at breakneck speed.
Thus it is cleverly designed (seemingly with military precision of forethought) to disrupt the existing financial disorder (entropy) and converge it to one NWO controlled morass at the end game. I couldn't have designed it better for that purpose.
Whereas, if you want to create an alternative ecosystem, such as
the Knowledge Age that I argue is replacing the dying Industrial Age NWO-directed, establishment system, then the coins must be distributed to the targeted ecosystem.
I hope this post is not lost in the shuffle because it may be one of the most poignant, salient, and critically important insights I have shared...