Only allowing people who hold coins to vote about the future of the coin could be argued to be unfair to those who didn't yet discover the coin. But how else do we make it fair? There are billions of people who didn't discover the coin.
The way to make if fair between current and future participants is by
not making changes the the fundamental economic structure at all. That creates an equivalence between people who are involved now and people who are involved in the future in that
neither get to vote. This in turn avoids future participants feeling disadvantaged (and thus discouraged from participating) because they weren't around when important economic decisions are made. It also avoids people not wanting to invest as small participants because they risk getting screwed over by larger participants voting their own interests.
As you point out, you
can't make it fair by allowing
both current and future participants to vote, so you make it fair by allowing
neither to vote.
The sensible way to address not liking something about the fundamental economic design a coin is to create a new coin. Use the claim method to preserve the existing distribution if you think the existing distribution is a good starting point. That has the same economic effect as forking the chain except that you avoid having transactions that confirm on either or both chains, leading to chaos.
This, BTW, includes the idea of whether changes can be made by voting. If you want a coin where the design states that coin holders vote by balance on future changes then create one, but put that in the design from the start, so again everyone is entering on equal terms.
So we have two main camps here. Exaggerating the positions, we have:
Camp A: wants to leave everything how it is so it's fair for future diggers. It's not OK to cancel their free CLAMs. The stakeholders knew massive digging was a risk and accepted it. They hoped it wouldn't happen but it did. Suck it up.
Camp B: bought into CLAM and saw the price drop. To fix this, let's ban digging. Then the price can recover and we can all get rich.
Sure there are shades of grey between these extremes, involving halvenings and such like, but let's ignore those for now.
You're proposing a third camp:
Camp C: It's not fair to change the CLAM rules, but it's OK to make a new coin, let's call it doogcoin. We use a variant of the CLAM distribution method: everyone who held non-distribution CLAM outputs at lunchtime yesterday can use their CLAM private key to claim their doogcoins. Just-Dice stops using CLAM and starts using doogcoin. The CLAM rules are unchanged, everyone can keep digging their CLAM, so everyone's happy, right?
Anyone who wants digging to stop switches to doogcoin. Presumably JD switches to doogcoin too. I guess most CLAM holders dump their CLAM to buy more doogcoin. CLAM price goes to 0, doogcoin price goes to the moon. Is that the correct outcome? Is that what you're proposing?
What do people think of this "Camp C" option?
It seems like would satisfy both Camp A (since we're not changing the rules of CLAM, like they want) and Camp B (since it gives them a way of holding their value without being diluted by future diggers). Did I miss anything?