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Flattr Adds Support For Funding In Bitcoin
An anonymous reader writes "Swedish startup Flattr, which offers an 'online tipjar' service, has announced it has added partial support for Bitcoin: you can now fund your account with the virtual currency. Furthermore, the company is considering adding the option to withdraw in Bitcoins too, but it first wants to gauge its community's desire for the feature on Twitter."
Except the initial investment was a tiny amount of CPU time. The person who wrote the original software made a ton of BC when it took no cost to create them.
Not to mention having a great idea and taking the time to implement it.
If that's so trivial, then why didn't you do it first?
No, the initial investment was not a tiny amount of CPU time. The initial investment was in watching out for a workable decentralized currency and potentially trying out a lot of stuff that failed until one day bitcoin came along and was actually semi-successful. You are looking at it now in hindsight, and that is heavily misleading. It's like saying that an oil company's investment was only a single drilling rig when they worked for years beforehand to figure out where to start drilling.
Also, currencies have a network effect and thus need a critical mass to ever be successful. So, it is highly likely that you need to incentivise early adopters in order to establish a successful currency because there is zero value in a currency that essentially noone accepts yet. A company trying to establish a product with a network effect usually does that by spending tons of their investors' money on incentivising early adopters, which later will be recouped from late adopters and paid back to the investors with interest/dividends/whatever for the risk that they have taken, so there is nothing unusual about bitcoin doing the same - it's just in the nature of a decentralized, independent system that the late adopters have to pay early adopters directly rather than that payment being obfuscated by a controlling company.
And finally: Are you suggesting that whoever invented bitcoin got all the time they invested in order to figure out the scheme and to write the software for free? Seriously? Or was your assumption that it took no time to build the software?