anyone with a penny can buy and use bitcoin. The price is completely irrelevant. If you own one dollar, you can buy one dollars worth of bitcoin. Same as when they were $0.06.
A too disproportional distribution of bitcoins may prevent a success on a mainstream scale. The bitcoin price can become very high without much use for ordinary transactions. Then bitcoin will remain largely an investment vehicle rather than being a general currency. That may be ok too if some other cryptocurrency can replace things like fiat credit/debit card payments. What I'm curious about is if bitcoin can become a general currency.
It will be a long time before 1 satoshi becomes too valuable for use in an ordinary transaction. Anyway, in order to get there, bitcoin will have to have gone mainstream already.
Yes, and for bitcoin to become mainstream it will need to be regulated by governments. And when regulations are in place then other cryptocurrencies will have the same opportunity. Yikes! Then the really big investors will launch their own cryptocurrency! Because they want to be the first investors before the price goes to the moon. They will not invest in bitcoin so late in the game.
But wouldn't that next currency backed buy really big investors have to have a fair distribution in order for the coin to compete and become better then Bitcoin. I think the real issue is that Bitcoin is better then the system we have now. Which is beyond poorly distributed and many people don't have access to it. Everyone may not be able to buy a whole Bitcoin but they can buy a portion of a coin and accumulate the amount of Bitcoin they hold. People that buy stocks at different places don't say it isn't fair when those before them bought the same stock for cheaper or they shouldn't IMO.
When people first heard about Bitcoin they paid it no attention for whatever reasons. The point I'm trying to make is that everyone has had a chance at cheap Bitcoin whether they realized it or not. This is early stages of Bitcoin's growth and like years back their is no reason not to invest into Bitcoin. If anything this is a sale price after the MTGOX debacle.