Bitcoin Forum

Just wondering when a new coin launches, how much of a premine is acceptable(by most of the community) if all the funds are going into development (meaning bounties and community?) Is any level acceptable?

5-3%? 1%? 0.5%?

0%?

If its as transparent as possible is it a small pre-mine generally accepted?

Zero. 



You'll hear all kinds of counter-arguments, but they are all self-serving BS.  Stay away from premines and IPOs.  All of them.

Zero. Devs should mine and offer their own coins away.

This ^^

Zero is always the answer.

Thanks for the replies. Concesus is 0% premine . Now my next question is how do you determine when a coin has had a fair launch? If he posts it on a crypto forum? Does it need a pre anouncement? Does he have to post it on btcointalk? or are a few other smaller forums are all thats needed?

What I'm getting at here, does this mean any decent dev should really invest into some mining gear? For example say a dev has put considerable time, money and effort into his coin and he wants to start offering bounties for community engagement. He now posts up his amazing coin and development plan, anounces it as many places as possible to make sure all know its fair. Goes to start mining and the difficulty is so high he can barely get coins for himself to pay for development or bounties compared with miners.

I'm not trying to justify a premine but I'm curious to know how most devs do this? Do they hide the worth of their coin earlier to stop miners mining easy coins at the start?

A coin has had a fair launch when the value goes to the people who created that value. If a coin doesn't involve the creation of any value at all, then all distributions are equally fair. You can't unfairly divide a zero. The early Bitcoin miners created the value they gained from their mining by making Bitcoin secure and usable.

The focus in the crypto-currency community on *dividing* value rather than *creating* value is disturbing to me.

pre ann with a good launch time, not 5am for euro or others shit like that

also no KGW at start or stupid blocks value of 1, when real blocks are 5k, anti-instamine isn't needed if there is an ann

i like ninja launch too, as long as they are launched in a good time, again bad launch time is the worst thing ever, devs that launch at 3-4 am for euro/usa/other part of the world are just morons that want more instamine for themselves, usually they do this when the premine is 0%...

If your coin is really that good, there is no need for bounties and such. 0% Premine, that's it.
Even if you spent a lot of time on it, you can ask for donations. No premine.

In addition to zero premine I think a coin should having a up-ramping in the block reward to give time for miners to come online.  Make the first week's worth of coins have a zero or very low block reward and then either step up or jump to the full initial block reward value.  This way it gives people a chance to get setup before the block rewards start.

Thanks a lot, interesting replies. So say for example, a Dev had a pre-announcement but only gave the coin specifications, no future plans with a poor logo and then launched at a normal fair time. He had a lot of plans already but decided not to mention them. People would mine only with that information in mind. Then week by week the dev implemented some of his ideas. Updated it every week, slowly building value and community features into the coin. He then started updating the thread with his future plans, goals and timelines including updates he was making. In that same time frame he mined his coin enough to get some bounties going and a decent stack for himself, nothing crazy but he was trying to get a good chunk. Would this be considered a fair launch? Considering the value that is being given to the coin is from the Dev himself but slowly released in a manner which helped his poor mining rate?

In my opinion a coin should be announced in advance with plenty of warning and given a specific launch time so everybody who wants in can get a fair start.

+1

0% pre-mine is the way miners will tell you it needs to be. All they care about is getting as many of the coins into their wallets as possible. Ohhh......the thought of devs being entitled to any of those coins get miners throthing at the mouth with rage.

The miners don't have to work hard to develop a coin, build a community, update the coin regularly, pay for nodes, pay other devs to have a look if things go seriously wrong, nor will they have to spend every spare minute of their time trying to making things a success. All they do is point their beastly PCs at a pool for a few days before they hop onto the next coin that takes their fancy.

If you want to do a premine then it's up to you, don't be taken in completely by what others have to say. I would suggest keep it very small - max 1%....maybe 2% but any higher is pushing it and you'll have a mutiny before you even get started and miners won't mine it unless it's something that is very innovative or suddenly becomes valuable.

I think the zero premine argument is BS. I'm sorry but do you work for free? No? So why do you expect others to do so? I think a reasonable pre-mine is more than fair if the developer is going to put in a lot of work and maintain the coin and not just dump them and disappear (like many have.) Maybe a better solution is that the devs should provide the address the pre-mine coins are in and everyone can track them.

Honestly when fyrstrikken said he was going to change CryptoRush and add a requirement that devs provide a deposit equal to the amount they pre-mined, I thought it was a great idea. (I know he turned out to be a douche but that's besides the point.) We need some kind of way to prevent devs from dumping and running.

Your argument is BS. Nobody asks the devs to put in the work, they do this off their own back. Think of it as a charity, only a charity that is diddling the books so they can get 'paid for their time'. You should make the coin because you want to and for the good of the community, but the devs of most alts only create the coin with one thing in mind: get rich quick. This is why 99% of alt coins fail. They don't give a fuck about the coin as long as they can make a quick buck off it.

There is no acceptable level, acceptance only occurs when the premine is actually used and seen as development by the community.

In my opinion, less than 2% pre-mine is required for bounties etc

Those that push 'zero premine' have no understanding of the implications of releasing a coin with zero blocks mined (and hence no pre-existing blockchain). We have seen this so many times before, where a 0% pre-mined coin has been announced and forked 20 different ways on launch as a result  ::)

That is completely fine, since he is mining at the same time as others.


That is BS. They create a coin because they want to, not because they expect some kind of reward. If your coin is really that good, you can ask for donations. I'm sure people will be tripping over each other to donate because of such a good coin.
What a selfish and greedy person you are.

The devs of most alts are greedy and selfish  because the community is greedy and selfish. If most people here were honest and good, we would have honest coins. The crypto world is the Wild West.

Yeah. I wish the world were a peaceful place.

1% would seem fair to me. I have no problem if a dev is upfront and wants some of the premine for himself either. I don't think most programmers should be expected to work for free.

1% means nothing. It's easy to set a limit of 100 billion coins with a small block reward of 10 coins per block: 1%=1 billion.
and 1% is much more with a pos coin.

I was apart of the logicoin launch and I must say that it was one of the best launches I've ever been around for. Wallets posted 30 minutes before launch and password/source uploaded right on time. 0% premine and a ninja launch of sorts. Not to mention that there wasn't a single fork. I'm actually not that worried about premined coins but they don't get my faith at all and I usually look at them as pump and dumps because all it takes is some of that premine to move and the price gets destroyed very quickly.

The logicoin dev was apparently considering donations in order to get bounties out and thats the sort of dev I'd be happy to donate some coins too. Works hard and doesn't want money for themselves but only to see the coin survive. It astounds me that coins like that go unnoticed but then you have huge scams like stack/edge that get to 50 pages before launch.

Just my 2 cents and sorry if it seems like I'm talking up logicoin but its just the most recent example of a great launch I could think off but there have been plenty.

0.01 is fair

I dont see any problem with premines when they are announced and accounted for. The biggest problem by far is instamining. That is what you want to look for.

Depends on the time frame the total amount of coins is released. If it is released in 100 years, a 1% premine would equal 1 full year of mining for the dev.

Premine should be relative to the amount released in the initial development phase. You don't want the dev to run around with >50% of total coins during the first year. But if the release is faster, say 1 year, this 1% would be less than 10% of total coins very fast.

Zero. And you'll get more support for it. If there must be a pre-mine, it should be 0.1% or less. The problem is that a 1% pre-mine seems small but can be an absolutely massive amount of coins depending on the reward structures. 1% is usually enough to dump a coin to death.

Plus, building a currency is a serious thing. A pre-mine sticks with it forever.

If the premine has no purpose a coin should be 0 pre-mine. if there are reasons behind the pre-mine it is acceptable.

but what people do is they announce a coin 0% premine with a lame wordpress website and start mining for couple of weeks, premine it that way to make it look legit

there is one coin has not hit the exchange yet but will soon probably, basically 70% is mined by 3 miners in 6 weeks under the radar.

Also One word of advice, the level of scam is off the chart these days, do not even consider mining a new coin if the coin has no block explorer from day one to inspect the first mined blocks.

none

-- This message brought to you by the Spoetnik Foundation™ --

Hi,
I think nothing as premine is acceptable for any coin if you want it to live long life. I am running away from premined coins

The problem with 0 premine or low percentage premine coins is that, once the developer dumps his share to the market and cash outs,

He basically stops supporting the coin or gives minimal support out of pity,

it remains to be seen which Devs are going to stick with their project and give continued support and for what reasons.

In a time where Bitcoin is almost unable to pay salary to its own Devs, it will get more the difficulty for 0 premine coins to develop and stay ahead of the competition and pay for the expenses to keep up with the challenges ahead.

Of course you would say that. And it's usually the opposite. They dump the coins they premined and move on to the next shitcoin.

Having x% of the minting fee going to the original dev would create the right incentives.  The more successful the coin, the more valuable that 1%.

You could even set it up so that it is 1% starting 3 months from launch.  If another dev creates a modified client, then it shows that the 1% wasn't really needed in the first place.

That's a very good idea but has to be hard coded in to the client, very good. it must be in such a way that even the pools modify their code the peer2peer network would reject the solved blocks by the dishonest pools.

+1

It's really funny to me to see all these replies that are like OMG OMG NO THAT'S BS! NO PREMINE! So far, the general argument is that they should not do pre-mines because they should just do it for free. Some douche even compared it to 'charity work' which was a real laugh for me.

News flash: there are no rules. If you don't like pre-mines, then you don't have to support those coins. Only problem is all you retards love btc and that was pre-mined like a motherfucker so you're basically a bunch of whining hypocrites.

Look I'm not a dev I just think it's insane that you people consider it somehow wrong or evil for a developer to want a return on something they built if it becomes successful. Are you all fucking socialists or something? I guess I just grew up with this silly notion that if someone creates something and it becomes successful, then they should get a good chunk of profit from that. Crazy me!

Also, if you notice, a lot of 'no pre-mine' coins were manipulated in some other way - either by instamining, or somewhat shady launch tactics enabling the dev and/or his friends to quickly mine some early blocks before the general population can begin, or even manipulating the price down and encouraging an early crash so the dev can buy in for pennies.

Just think about this logically for a second - if the developer has no vested interest in seeing the coin succeed and grow in value, how long is he going to hang around and keep fixing issues and supporting the coin?

I would accept coins with a premine of less than 0,1% in the case of coins with fixed cap, and 0,05% of the estimated supply after 1 year in case of coins with no fixed cap (e.g. PoW/PoS hybrids). 1% is way too much in my opinion (think of a multi-million market cap at bubbles), but I would not only accept 0.0000000%-premined coins.

I am the developer of Marinecoin so far I can safely say I spent over 100 BTC out of my own pocket, buy hey who is counting.
I am about to move Marinecoin into an office, because my wife is finally kicking me out of the house, pay rent hiring two programmers for extra help paid of course with real salary and a secretary, mninum requirements for now.
Running banners over the internet, constant code upgrades to the wallet and other projects that I am working on. with 4-5 hours of sleep a day the past 6 months just working on the Marinecoin project..
I paid over 10 BTC just last week to outsource mining hash power to get Marinecoin out of a difficulty spike.

I am fortunate enough to pay those things out my pocket, but to pay for them indefinitely without any support from the eco-system itself eventually should be considered insane.

Marinecoin Dev

Right hard coded.  It would probably require that it is paid to the public key of the dev.

The point is that there is nothing stopping some other dev from forking the coin to one with no payout.  Users would have to decide which branch to support.

If the paid dev is doing a good job, they might decide to stay on the paying branch.

Understanding that good dev should be rewarded, why not instead of creating a premine, having a %tage of the reward of each block sent to the dev ?

I would be completely on board for something like that. But how would you stop them from continuing to collect payments if they just walked away from the coin? Carboncoin, flappy, stories, NYCoin, and like a million others right now are dealing with replacing the devs as the original ones disappeared or just effectively stopped working.

Well I will add to this, I am also doing pro-bono work for two other coins because their devs disappeared, I have 0 vested interest no coins even, they were in terrible situation no available source codes straightening out their github, provide free server support on Marinecoin cloud servers, seed nodes etc and giving free advice are also what I do, the major problem is that average dev in this community is an a**hole. This needs to change.

VERY well said, dude.

As for the guy who said a coin should be treated like a charity.... what fucking planet is he from!?! It's like suggesting that all miners donate all their mined coins to a charity fund. We all know how likely that is to happen...

I just don't understand why miners think it's their god-given right to reap the rewards of somebody else's time, hard work and innovation. 

Also, it is worth considering that the current environment - one of hostility toward devs making any kind of a profit - is not terribly conducive to drawing talented individuals into the crypto world. How do you think Apple and Google recruit the best programmers? By promising them sunshine and rainbows and a chance to break their back making the world a better place for free? Um, no. It's called a massive paycheck.

And depressing to me. We always, always have to re-learn the same lesson the hard way: "fair" distributions always create a tragedy of the commons. That's why the "free and fair" fad will fade.

Einsteinium have this. 2% sent to a fund and 0.5% sent to the devs of every block mined

Satoshi is not a scammer, he created a new coin from scratch.

its a fact that 99.99% of altcoins are scams or clones of incompetence that just survive with marketing and their sock puppets.

The real devs (0.01%) who know their stuff deserve to be rewarded for their efforts but not those who make this wave of shitcoins.

Bingo.  Even if person premined 50% and he created alot of value everybody wins. Also each person can decide what is acceptable for him/her :)

Well I don't think anyone is arguing that scammers should be rewarded but unfortunately it's not always so easy to tell which coins are going to be straight up scams and/or which coins are going to be abandoned early by the devs. And sometimes, a coin is abandoned not because it was a scam all along, but simply because the dev got frustrated that it wasn't taking off, or he was just in over his head.

I don't think percentage of premine, or the fact that a pre-mine occurred, is a valid criteria to assess whether a coin is a scamcoin or not.

Case in point - look at flappy coin. This was most definitely NOT a scam. The dev did not pre-mine and there is a massive community around it. But yet the dev basically disappeared/gave up and the coin shot down to near-death over a period of weeks. So, the fact that there is no pre-mine really doesn't tell you whether a coin is going to suck and/or be abandoned.

(As an aside, a new dev has taken over flappy and is trying to breathe life back into it.)

You forget about the magic powers of hindsight. :)

Depending on what the coin dev wants to develop. If just for his/her own bounties, 0.1% will be fair.

If there is a real and good business plan to promote and maintain a coin, 5% still can be acceptable.

I love how people make up these arbitrary numbers as though there were any real rationale behind them. "I John Doe hereby decree that anyone who makes a coin is entitled to 1/10 of a percent of the coin cap. No more, no less. This is my will and you must obey."

Right.