Do you believe the market will accept 70 shareholders? He could easily waited and gotten 700 shareholders, Heck, he could wait and get 7000. I've done my reasearch
The "anyone could sign up for it" argument falls too short. ...and waited, and waited, and waited until someone issues the same concept coin before him. In these days every minute counts, look how many coins are appearing everyday. That's the paradox of a new technology: to make an ideal distribution you must invite a lot of stakeholders on the list. To invite a lot of stakeholders, so no one complains in the end (but there still be someone, believe me) you must have time... but technology never waits and you risk losing your innovative position.
Yeah everyone bitches about not being in on the first level.
If you'd read all of BCNext's posts (which I did) you'd see that lots of people wanted to give him more coins, and not just one at the most, which he put the cap on. But he wasn't motivated by that he just wanted to get the coin out there, he could have taken alot more of people's money, hell if I hadn't have come late to the party I would have jumped on in there and taken a punt on him. But he actually only wanted 21 BTC's so that it mirrored satoshi's 21 million BTC's! He's kinda of kooky and probably a bit of a genius (used lightly). But I liked his enthusiasm and paranoid personality. (He got a call on Skype from someone saying that they were the police and then stopped posting).
And a lot of those initial shareholders are now running NXT sites. And have put a lot of work in to it all. So I kinda think they deserve it. Graviton who runs dgex.com and nextcoin.org probably hasn't had much sleep in the last month or so.
And yes I do believe the market will accept 70 shareholders because it's a good product. Everything only needs just a few shareholders to start it off. If the whole world was in it from the beginning who you gonna sell to?