@Dayfall people who mined or bought coins early helped BitCoin stay alive when nobody knew if it would succeed. Like most investments that increase in value, their reward comes from some combination of luck and foresight. If it had been obvious from the beginning that bitcoins would be as successful as they are now, then the price would have shot to 7$ right away (and the difficulty to 400000). Instead, it took two years to get there, because that outcome wasn't at all obvious until it actually happened. Looking back it might seem like free money, but at the time they had just as much risk of losing everything they put in.
When I first heard about BitCoin there wasn't much information available, they were trading at only a couple cents a bitcoin, and I didn't think it would amount to anything. It wasn't until the end of 2010 when someone referred me to
BitcoinMe.com that I ended up digging into the details and realising that the technology could really work. By then the community had grown larger, the value had risen, and people were finally starting to accept bitcoins for business, so I bought some bitcoins, started using them, started accepting them for my business, and also started processing transactions for the network. But if I had invested the same amount of time and money when I first heard about it, I would have made thousands of dollars. The reason other people did instead of me is that they understood, believed, and/or risked when I didn't. So I think that's fair. Without them, things never would have gotten to the point where I believed BitCoin would work. And without people like me, things wouldn't have gotten to the point that they're at now. Money needs to be widely used before it's useful for anything, so early adopters are serving a very critical role. And don't forget that less than a third of the total bitcoins have entered circulation--there's still plenty of time to be an early adopter!
I made a suggestion before that this point should be discussed in the OP, but it was so far ignored.
The OP currently says "People who have made money off of buying and/or selling bitcoins are either lucky or have correctly predicted an increase in demand for them." I think that talking more about people who have made money would detract from the "BitCoin is not designed as an investment" message that people are supposed to take away. But as noted I do plan an expansion of the "free money" idea in general under a new thread. One of the reasons work is going more slowly is that's it's unclear to me if the community considers these threads a priority. Lately, for example, I've been getting more tips from regular posts than from the
New to BitCoin? thread (1 tip) and this one (0); so work on these threads tends to sit a little bit lower in
my very large stack than it might if I had a more solid indication that people find these threads important. If there aren't 20 people who can put .05 btc toward saying "please do more of this" then this is really nothing more than a pet project of mine. Whereas if the community is really behind me I would be willing to put in more than just spare time here and there.
