Quote from: tiberiandusk on May 31, 2011, 02:53:33 PM

Sounds like sour grapes. Should we confiscate the money people who invested early in Apple have made in the time since then? People that were mining back when bitcoin started could have ended up with a bunch of worthless coins or a bunch of highly valuable coins depending on if bitcoin took off. Their early support of the project has been rewarded but even if someone has 100,000 coins there is no way they could sell them all without the price plummeting. Plus this whole thing could collapse in 5 years. Who knows? I can't see the future and neither can you. Bitcoins are a high risk right now so the reward should be equally as high. Also why would you want to sell them all when you can just buy stuff using bitcoins directly? Coins from mining are a reward for supporting the network. The point of the network is an easy way of sending value to someone else without a central point of failure or control. Stop thinking oh I could have made $1,000,000 already. You have a certain amount of bitcoins which means you have a certain amount of value. If you want more bitcoins buy some or do something worth people paying you in bitcoins and quit trying to figure out how to start the game over again. You were late. Deal with it.

I have no sour grapes about anything. I am just wondering how far bitcoin needs to be entrenched in world adoption before similar competing systems start changing the game. As for early adopters with a horde of bitcoins now and then sharp (scary) slumps in value will filter down from the top. What i'm talking about is bitcoin needs to be overwhelmingly adopted as a medium of exchange, not only as a store of value if it is to work. Otherwise some CEO with a distaste for open source could easily adopt the concept.