>> Unfortunately, practically all cryptocurrencies subscribe to the notion that early miners must receive greater rewards, even when they often already enjoy lower difficulty.
This habit of disproportionately rewarding early adopters is a universal feature of our economy and doesn't only apply to cryptocurrencies.
The reason why it's like this is simply because it's extremely difficult to get any project or company off the ground; the risk of failure for an early adopter is ridiculously high so rewards also need to be ridiculously high to justify those risks.
This is because most economic activity today is focused on seeking rents and building moats; so this has made the environment extremely adverse for newcomers; it lowered their probability of success and forced early adopter payoffs to skyrocket.
We live in an age where the moats are so wide that that even offering customers a solution which is 10x better isn't going to cut it anymore in terms of being able to turn any profit.
One might think that cryptocurrency would be immune to this; after all, the entire point of the blockchain movement was to fix such kinds of socio-economic problems - But having worked in the space for several years, I can say with confidence that incumbents in the cryptocurrency space have become part of the same problem which they were originally claiming to solve.
Development in the space is slow, inefficient, lacks a clear vision and the incumbents of the cryptocurrency space lack any incentives to give newcomers a fighting chance. They will happily let the most promising new projects drown in the noise of popular mediocrity.
The hypocrisy of it all is unmistakable. I've seen the ugliest side of human nature in this industry. That said I'm still cautiously optimistic but it's clear that something has to change at a social level in order to move forward.
This habit of disproportionately rewarding early adopters is a universal feature of our economy and doesn't only apply to cryptocurrencies. The reason why it's like this is simply because it's extremely difficult to get any project or company off the ground; the risk of failure for an early adopter is ridiculously high so rewards also need to be ridiculously high to justify those risks.
This is because most economic activity today is focused on seeking rents and building moats; so this has made the environment extremely adverse for newcomers; it lowered their probability of success and forced early adopter payoffs to skyrocket. We live in an age where the moats are so wide that that even offering customers a solution which is 10x better isn't going to cut it anymore in terms of being able to turn any profit.
One might think that cryptocurrency would be immune to this; after all, the entire point of the blockchain movement was to fix such kinds of socio-economic problems - But having worked in the space for several years, I can say with confidence that incumbents in the cryptocurrency space have become part of the same problem which they were originally claiming to solve. Development in the space is slow, inefficient, lacks a clear vision and the incumbents of the cryptocurrency space lack any incentives to give newcomers a fighting chance. They will happily let the most promising new projects drown in the noise of popular mediocrity.
The hypocrisy of it all is unmistakable. I've seen the ugliest side of human nature in this industry. That said I'm still cautiously optimistic but it's clear that something has to change at a social level in order to move forward.