1 - Allow the development team to (heaven forbid) pre-mine some coins for themselves, they get paid when they make them worth something
I am also coming to the conclusion that is the only way to do it because
all other ways appear to be illegal. And that was my original plan in 2014, but was told by everyone that premine was horrible. Yet I've come to realize that every project was premined, even Bitcoin and Monero. There was always some limited number of people who were mining with huge resources at the very start when the difficulty was miniscule.
Seigniorage is inevitable when one creates a monetary asset. It is considered "unfair" and can harm, as such, the monetary belief in the system, but seigniorage will always happen.
With fiat, the seigniorage goes to the government ('s buddies), and people scream "THIEF", but it is just a tax like any other.
Yeah thanks, let's discuss about monetary theory.
The seigniorage is the price we-the-society pay for there being confidence in the currency. For
without confidence, money has no value. This is a critical point that most people under appreciate, so it is very important that readers click that link and understand more deeply the linked thread in all its detail.
The ability to get a large community to rally around one thing as money, is essential for money can't exist without confidence that it is a liquid and fairly universal unit-of-exchange.
So he who can create that confidence, gets the seigniorage.
With bitcoin, about the smartest anti-seigniorage system was thought of: you BURN it. Every coin that is created, has WASTED as much value as it was worth (apart from a small and fair "competitive" margin).
When a developer of a project works very hard to create the confidence, he BURNS his labor which is economically analogous to getting paid and buying mining equipment and paying electricity.
The argued benefit of PoW as a distribution mechanism is that is an OBJECTIVE (i.e. trustless) free market competition and it has unbounded, decentralized participation. So it is really the distribution mechanism of PoW that is its genius, not the BURNING.
Now if someone can design another form of distribution which has the same properties, then he will have a valid alternative to PoW. I am working on such an alternative system of trustless, objective, distribution.
But even with bitcoin, there is seigniorage: the first adopters could get their coins at a fraction of the value it has now. All this "unmerited" value transfer from certain people to other people because of an "unfair advantage" (the monopoly of the state, the knowledge of the devs and their buddies....).
Knowledge acquisition and social networking are competitive. At least in our ecosystem unlike in the nation-state model, no one has a monopoly on this competition.
It is inevitable. The only thing one should obtain, is that this advantage gets "washed out" over time. Seigniorage is worse with PoS than with PoW for instance, because initial stakes give you the final dominance over the coin distribution.
Agreed. An ongoing (i.e. perpetual "tail reward") PoW-like distribution is much better. But I intend to show that PoW isn't the only way, nor even the best way.
But why don't you consider a totally different way of distributing your coin ? Give yourself a fair premine,
I am.
and make the coin for the rest a *fork of bitcoin*.
Byteball did this. The problem is that when you give away coins for free to speculators, they are likely to sell them because they didn't decide to BURN anything (e.g. buy or do effort for it) for it, e.g. Auroracoin.
Also your suggestion only targets a very limited audience of Bitcoin holders.
So that anyone holding bitcoin at a specific date in the past holds your coins too (and you hold your premine on top of that). As such, you get immediately a distribution everyone considers now as "fair".
No, you don't because those who obtained coins had nothing invested.