[Svartalfiar]

"And who decided that Bitcoin miners would get rewarded for doing complex computerized calculations with more Bitcoin in their accounts; who exactly is paying the miners for their time and effort?”

Miners validate the blockchain technology by performing those calculations. This unlocks bitcoins to them. It was set up by the founder to limit the amount of bitcoin available.

The bitcoin tokens are provided to give incentive to continually validate the blockchain itself.

Yes, and the BIG scam here is that the bitcoin are limited, so as more are 'mined', they get rarer and rarer, until no more can be mined. So guess what? All the early adopters (Wright and his friends) have millions of them, and made a killing when mining released them ten per day divided by two people, but now they're rare and only .001 are released per day, divided among thousands of people.

[aMorePerfectUnion]

“All the early adopters (Wright and his friends) have millions of them, and made a killing when mining released them ten per day divided by two people, but now they’re rare and only .001 are released per day, divided among thousands of people.”

1. Computers have become more powerful
2. No guarantee of the value of any bitcoin ever
3. Anyone can simply buy slices of bitcoin - even today
4. People bought AAPL, MSFT, GOOG, etc early before IPOs or as compensation at prices unavailable to the public. It’s life.

The only concern I see is when the reward is so small, that few want to make the effort to validate the blockchain...

But I’m no expert on this.