I've been studying about Bitcoin for the past few days. I've been wanting to get my feet wet all week but just buying a few mBTC with $20 or $30 USD, but after reading about all these stories of complications, delayed transactions, hacking scams going on BTCe, Mtgox, Coinbase, I'm really afraid to try now.

One thing that strikes me as strange is the whole start of Bitcoin by the person/group Satoshi Nakamoto; so Bitcoin was programmed so that there can only be 21 Million total, only a few diehard computer geeks knew about it in the beginning, mined a disproportionately large bulk when it was unknown and worthless, and then Bitcoin went semi-mainstream. The only problem is, with a so many people attempting to mine a fixed number of Bitcoins, everyone gets a smaller share, and only those who can afford large, commercial-grade mining setups can accrue decent amounts.

Why didn't the creators of Bitcoin just give everyone in the world 10 free BTC at the very start? They were worthless in the beginning, so it would have cost nothing. Why couldn't they set the max number of total BTC to maybe 50 or 100 Billion and just send 10 free BTC to every email or IP address in the world and let people decide if they wanted to keep them, throw them away, give them to someone else, trade them for something and so forth?