@irnhnve
It has been mined since the inception of the genesis block where miners did not directly pay for those first bitcoins they received as rewards. Satoshi did not say "This is bitcoin and they are worth $5 a piece, come and get some". They did not have much perceived value to the miners because they never bought them and gained value only when the mining difficulty because harder and there was actual demand for them. At that point, people were willing to pay for them which incrementally increased the price to where it is today.
Ethereum's price is being set and you cannot get Ether without paying what they say the Ether is worth. When facebook had it's IPO, the price per share was set at a certain level and then when trading opened, it plummeted because the market did not think their shares were worth what they had set the IPO price at.
Bitcoin's market value started at 0 and then price discovery in the market raised it to the value people were willing to pay. Ethereum is starting much higher and if the market determines it is not worth what was initially asked it will plummet as well. The major difference here is that Ethereum is priced against bitcoin for now which could go way up. It's impossible to say what will happen, Im just trying to think it out in comparison to other crypto IPO's and thinking realistically when we will be using Ethereum for it's intended purpose and not as a speculative vehicle.
Good points, it's easy to forget Facebook's post-IPO stock price (not sarcastic, it was that immemorable).
But I think it's important not to get caught up in the concept of 'market'. A group of buyers B is a 'market', even if it's a subset of a larger group A. To me, as long as they buy, they're part of the Ethereum/Bitcoin stakeholder set. True, Facebook's stock price plummeted, but so has Bitcoin's price because the subsets of buyers at any time relative to stakeholders are constantly changing.
*edit: clarity
