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Well, it favors people who invest a little time and effort into mining (it's still relatively cheap to do, if you assume that bitcoins will continue to be valuable), and especially favors those who get in early to help support the currency in its formative stage (which is good for the value of the whole bitcoin economy).

You need to distribute the initial bitcoins somehow, and these people are putting value in by protecting the network from scammers (the reason for mining is that you're doing a lot of hard work to validate transactions, forming a long chain of valid transactions, such that it would be quite difficult to form an alternative chain in which an attacker spends money differently). So, miners are providing the security of the network, and helping roll out the currency slowly and smoothly, as well as speculating on the future value of bitcoins, so they do deserve to receive some compensation for their efforts.

If you feel like bitcoins will be valuable in the future, and don't want to get into mining, then sell some goods or services for bitcoins. If you happened to have sold a loaf of bread for BTC 50 last October (about $2.50 back then), you could now trade that for $50; that's a pretty good return on your investment. Don't worry about the miners are getting money for nothing; they are help making the whole system work, and there are plenty of ways of earning bitcoins besides mining.



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