Personally I do not believe you could launch a successful currency (long term) based on investments. For now bitcoin early investors (obviously) make more from its success, so they have a financial interest in making the currency successful and will therefore be intending on pulling out at some point to make money. You don't help drive the price from $1/BTC to $20/BTC just because you want to help a magical internet currency.<p>If someone launched bitcoins <i>without</i> this whole investing thing (where the value changes a lot and is based on how many people it involves) it would be much more stable and usable, but it wouldn't have the easy momentum thing where you can hit a point where people will flock to use it, you'd have to grow it very slowly.