Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Ethereum and Bitcoin mining work like this:

Take a freshly baked pie, and give half of it away for a suggested donation of $1 USD to the first 10 people who show up.

Now split the last half of the pie into smaller chunks and slowly give out bread crumbs to new "miners" with the requirement they spend large amounts of capital on exceedingly inefficient number guessing machines in order to win the lottery of "mining" more crumbs.

  Satoshi Nakamoto
  Thu Jan 8 14:27:40 EST 2009
  I made the proof-of-work difficulty ridiculously easy to 
  start with, so for a little while in the beginning a 
  typical PC will be able to generate coins in just a few 
  hours. It'll get a lot harder when competition makes the 
  automatic adjustment drive up the difficulty.

  first 4 years: 10,500,000 coins
  next 4 years: 5,250,000 coins
  next 4 years: 2,625,000 coins
  next 4 years: 1,312,500 coins
The 10,000 BTC pizza is a case study in how Satoshi designed the supply to rapidly dump very cheaply before other users were able to discover the network, by that time and later new users not only need to spend more to mine but less coins are produced for a correct lottery number.

  In economics, the Gini coefficient is the standard measure 
  of how inequitable a society is. This is tricky to 
  determine for Bitcoin, as it's not quiet a "society" in 
  the Gini sense, one person may have multiple addresses and 
  many addresses have been used only once or a few times. 
  (The commonly-cited figure of 0.88 is based on one small 
  exchange in 2011.) However, a Citigroup analysis from 
  early 2014 notes: "47 individuals hold about 30 percent, 
  another 900 a further 20 percent, the next 10,000 about 
  25% and another million about 20%"; and distribution 
  "looks much like the distribution of wealth in North Korea 
  and makes China's and even the US' wealth distribution 
  look like that of a workers' paradise

  Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir found in a 2012 study that only 
  22% of then-existing Bitcoins were in circulation at all, 
  there were a total of 75 active users or businesses with 
  any kind of volume, one (unidentified) user owned a 
  quarter of all Bitcoins in existence, and one large owner 
  was trying to hide their pile by moving it around in 
  thousands of smaller transactions. (Shamir is one of the 
  most renowned cryptographers in the world and the "S" in 
  "RSA encryption")"



Ethereum:

  Presale ICO / Premine ( max cost $0.50 USD per ETH  )
  = 72,009,990 ETH
  
  Total Supply today (Feb 23rd 2018)
   = 97,800,000 ETH

  Source:
  https://etherscan.io/stat/supply



Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: