seigniorage <---- Key concept here....that's the cheat!
But all bitcoin early holders are also profiting from delayed seigniorage. They obtained coins which were easy to mine (money that was easy to print) and it is now worth much more. All deflationary currencies bring delayed seigniorage to their early holders. In fact, almost all of bitcoin, and almost all of crypto, is living off the speculative effects of delayed seigniorage (cheaper printing than later market price).
There would have been a way in bitcoin to make seigniorage disappear: namely NOT INCREASE THE DIFFICULTY more than Moore's law, and keeping the block reward constant (tail emission). You would then have a coin of which the value would remain constant, and equal to the (economic) work spent on it. That is, if on average it would cost, say, 10 cents to mine a bitcoin in cost of proof of work, that would be about its market value, and would remain so, because if it increased, people would simply mine more of them, instead of paying more for them. All of its seigniorage would be burned by PoW. This is not the case in bitcoin, because as bitcoin's value is appreciating, the early mined coins were made with much less mining costs than their value, being similar to printed money in a way.
But bitcoin was not designed as an ideal money keeping its value almost constant, it was designed as a deflationary speculative asset, with delayed seigniorage, to profit early adopters, and blow a greater-fool bubble that way.
I follow what you are saying....However, I think that there is an underestimated, not well defined, and often overlooked value that is inherent in the decentralized distributed economies that is not being considered adequately. Specifically, the potential of networking and the innovations that monetizing its creation motivates are only recently being considered....After all, aren't the goods and services which a currency attracts what make that currency confidently revolve? Aren't some object's value greater then the sum of the value of their parts? Shouldn't some form of harmonic mean be applied, if so, what progression? Those are only a few of the many questions that are being evaluated while considering the potentials of big data and advanced analytics....Isn't the question much bigger? Are the true potentials of the decentralized distributed economies understood well enough to make quantitative judgements based on antiquated understandings?
It's exactly the kind of problematics i'm working on, and i wanted to answer also something along side this line
The problem in the bottom is confusion between decentralized authority and decentralized computational power / task.
The two are a very different problem.
The pow thing is supposed to distribute authority through a distributed proof of work, but most of the computational work done by node is actually very poorly decentralized / distributed ( aka scalable).
But the whole issue is obfuscated by this whole debate with block size who are supposed 'scale' the network, but it won't scale anything, most of the computational power is in fact centralized, and only the work of one node will actually be used in the actual blockchain.
But decentralized work aka distributed application can work also with centralized authority, but the two problematics are often confused and put together, ethereum also added to this confusion.
But it's exactly the kind of problematic i'm working on, to have decentralized system able to provide services via html5 application and http API.
But the way bitcoin node are programmed is not that good to really get to the next step, because it's very monolithic, and though as some sort of swiss army knife to solve everything in once, both the server 'full node' aspect, the rpc server aspect for web apps, and the wallet for standalone app, plus mining software etc, the economic interest switched weirdly not in favor of developping more the decentralized economy aspect, but more centralizing risk and profits on mining pools and via trading logic.
But there are clearly good things to be done with decentralized economy, with distribued application / services who can work with blockchain as a paiment system, or system to store distributed ledger of public data / reccord, which can be useful for many things, and can probbably create new economies
But i don't think bitcoin development is very oriented toward this for the moment, more on the debate with the block size and segwit and speculative market on alt coin etc =)