Hmmm we seem to be missing the ability to tag a comment nsfw. That's an oversight.

But that aside, did anybody notice that the cake is a bit "strange"?

Well, Bitcoin at least was a way to get rich quickly for the original inventor and the few who started participating very early. (I haven't yet read the article above, don't know what's in there about it.)

At the very beginning when the Bitcoin network only consisted of a few machines, mining Bitcoins was very easy, with a normal computer you could mine a reward of 50 BTC within minutes.

The difficulty of creating a hash to "sign" a block of transactions is adjusted, I think every two weeks (?), according to the computing power that is currently present in the network. This is required to prevent fraud by someone who has a lot of computing power at his fingertips, while still making sure that transactions can be completed within reasonable time.

I think the goal is to be able to compute about 5 or 6 bocks in one hour in the whole network.

Currently, finding a hash for a block means a reward of 50 BTC. This is how bitcoins are "mined". (It might be 25 BTC meanwhile, I read that there was some point when the reward would be lowered to 25 BTC, but I don't remember when.)

In the very beginning when there were only a few machines in the whole network, each of them would mine probably more than 1000 BTC every day.

So the founder and other very early adopters actually did become very rich with the Bitcoin project. And one might call it some kind of pyramid scheme based on that fact, though it doesn't really fit exactly. (Because mining is only meant to draw in users initially. People who dedicate computing power to the network can earn money not only by the mining rewards but also by transaction fees. Those are defined by the user who wants to do the transaction, but people who try to find blocks can decide to only incorporate transactions into the block with a certain minimum fee, so transactions where a higher transaction fee is set will probably be executed earlier. That's how those contributing computing power to the network will make there money when mining rewards are reduced and at last no new coins will be mined at all anymore.)

It's definitely true that a lot of Bitcoin wealth is in the hands of a few. Unless they exchanged it (or parts of it) for normal currency, which might be one reason for the smaller transactions all coming from a very big chunk.

Still, the good thing about Bitcoin compared to other virtual money is that no one is able to cheat (unless there are yet unpublished security holes in the concept or the code), not even the one who invented it (who always stayed anonymous, btw, and has not been heard of for I think about two years now). He did become a very rich man with it, though.