Then they have mining... seems to me that this is the soft underbelly and that by the time ETH arrives mining will be a thing of the past.
Right, every curreny should be 100 percent premined and sold to a small group of early adopters... 
(Premined is kind of a misnomer for a system that will never use mining.)
What is the difference between purchasing and mining? Either way there is a cost. That cost in either case will reflect the market value, and I'd expect it to be nearly equivalent. Mining for coins/shares doesn't magically make them cheaper, easier to get, or more fairly distributed. If anything the reliance on mining increases the cost, introduces waist and inefficiencies, makes it more difficult to acquire, and is available to a much smaller group because it requires some special technical knowledge.
If mining isn't necessary to secure a network. I don't see that it serves any purpose at all, except revenue for mining manufactures and electric companies.
If a slow controlled release of supply is the goal, there are better ways to do this than mining.
If you're talking about mining with ASICs then there are up front costs. It's a business to mine.
On the other hand if you're mining with the CPU as we would ideally want it to be then everyone can mine.
The problem is the hashing algorithm doesn't change and there isn't enough random variances. I think the Ethereum team can make mining something everyone with a general purpose computer can take part in.
It will not be completely fair but it would be more fair than asking for money. More people have access to computers than have money. I could for sure find a homeless person or person in a developing country somewhere who has a smart phone or even a laptop to mine with but I don't think they'll have money to buy something they probably don't fully understand.
At the end I don't think mining alone stays fair for long and it attracts only the technical or intellectual elite. This is kinda cool for us because we are among them but it's not going to be so cool for people who don't understand what hashing, or what the difference between SHA-256 and MD5 is. The learning curve is becoming steeper and steeper which excludes people who lack the specialized knowledge.
Mining as a serious game has a shelf life. It's purpose is to attract people like ourselves to these communities. Gamers, programmers, engineers, scientists, (the sort of people likely to have access to computer labs or home computers with powerful CPUs). After a certain point though you have to figure out how to get other demographics interested in this technology.
Statistics reveal certain facts that the majority of people involved with Bitcoin are highly educated white males with an average age in the early to mid 30s. Bitcoin is not going to take over the world if the only people using it are the same demographic because eventually that well is going to run dry.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/28/bitcoin-user-demographics-libertarian-men_n_4874727.htmlHow do you bring the other demographics in? You have to find other ways to distribute stakes which aren't mining or asking people to purchase shares. You do have to make sure the people who receive stakes prove that they really want it that proof doesn't have to come from money or from mining.
Topic: Ethereum crowd sale is live (Read 14376 times)
