Well - they did have to take the "risk" of not selling all their coins when the price went to 0.01 USD for the first time, or 0.10 USD,... That risk is often neglected when discussing this issue.

True, the hardware cost was lower because there weren't many miners, but thats not Satoshi's fault - to quote Gavin in a recent post to point out the difference to the "creator" of the ixcoin "fork":


There were about 1.6 million as of yet unspent coins mined before difficulty went up from 1 for the first time at the end of 2009. Since at least Hal Finney speculated about the great potential gain from mining Bitcoin immediately after Satoshi's announcement , we can safely assume that Satoshi wasn't alone during the first year. Lets assume there were on average about 8 miners during 2009, so each one might have made 200k BTC. If anybody has more reliable data/estimations, please tell us.

A handful of Bitcoin USD-millionaires are certainly no problem today in terms of market manipulation. Even a puny little hedge-fund could cause more disruption but I don't see anybody really complaining about that.

As for the future: who knows, but if Bitcoin really becomes widely adopted then we will definitely see a lot of huge booms and busts along the way - no wealthy early adopter needed for that. The market will simply have to learn to cope with that or it will never grow very large in the first place.