One interesting feature of the Bitcoin system (website, wikipedia) is the amount of advantage it gives to its founders.
The system hands out bitcoins at a pre-programmed rate, distributing them to participants in proportion to the CPU power they contribute to the maintenance of the system. It was started at the beginning of 2009 and the Google trend for "bitcoin" starts in mid 2010, so for a year and a half, the founders had the system more or less to themselves. It would have distributed some 4 million bitcoins among them in that time.
Current value roughly 4 million dollars.
The effect is worse than that, though, as the rate at which bitcoins are generated is set to decrease over time, so that the total number of bitcoins ever generated will be 21 million. The actual maximum amount in the system is likely to be smaller, as bitcoins can be destroyed or fail to circulate (and there is no mechanism to reclaim destroyed bitcoins).
4 million bitcoins is 19% of 21 million, almost a fifth.
There doesn't seem to be any reason for reducing the rate, either; no justification is offered on the website, or the associated wiki (which has a page specifically about this topic). It would be equally possible to keep it constant, or to increase it in a pre-programmed way. Conceivably the rate could be based on other things. Yet it's set to decrease, quite rapidly, strongly favouring the founders and early adopters.
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8 March 2011, 10:46 UTCcomment by noagendamarket
21 million is the total of the coins but they are almost infinitely divisible. You could run an entire economy on one bitcoin.
8 June 2011, 20:00 UTCcomment by tootoo
bitcoin is a giant pyramid scheme. Either that or its the greatest thing ever.
