I would be much more impressed if people who raised this point also suggested a fairer way of distributing the coins.
It is difficult to tell if they think the fundamental concept of bitcoin is bad or if they just have sour grapes because they aren't an early adopter.
But while we are at it, why shouldn't early adopters profit?, they took a risk early on.
And actually if you ask me I think the minting system is pretty good, mining costs electricity, while many miners are surely hoarding and speculating they all have to pay their electricity bill on a fairly regular basis.
This ensures there is always someone somewhere selling bitcoins and increases the liquidity of the market.
If bitcoins came from a central authority and were available at fixed exchange rates, relative either to an existing currency (dollars, euros) or commodity (gold, oil) that would be a lot more fair. But then they wouldn't be bitcoins.
Ideally early adopters should not need to be rewarded for taking a risk because there would be negligible risk.
This would cause inflation, because miners would be able to print money by throwing hardware at the problem.
The ideal system/algorithm would exactly match the amount of Bitcoin in circulation to the growth of the economy, which would keep prices stable. Bitcoin pioneered most of what you'd need to create such an algorithm in a new system, but what does "growth of an economy" look like in terms of transactions between anonymous addresses? You'd need some concept of identity to determine the number of unique players, and the value flowing between them.
A system that solves this problem at scale is the economic holy grail.
It is difficult to tell if they think the fundamental concept of bitcoin is bad or if they just have sour grapes because they aren't an early adopter.
But while we are at it, why shouldn't early adopters profit?, they took a risk early on.
And actually if you ask me I think the minting system is pretty good, mining costs electricity, while many miners are surely hoarding and speculating they all have to pay their electricity bill on a fairly regular basis.
This ensures there is always someone somewhere selling bitcoins and increases the liquidity of the market.