Thank you for taking the time to lay out your opposition to a premine. We agree that a premine can often be a bad thing, but if done correctly is is a very powerful boost to a coins long term success.
Since we can only speak from our own coin's experience here is what our 0.5% premine (less than 0.25% now) has allowed us to accomplish:
* Allowed us to get DigiBytes in over 5,000 wallets in the first week of the coins life with giveaways. Approaching 20,000 now.
* Has allowed us to pay several people for their continued development work. (Android wallet, language translations etc)
* Has paid for server expenses and web hosting.
* Has paid and will continue to pay for advertising expenses.
* Has allowed members of the Dev team to work full time on the project (100s of hours at this point in time).
* Will help members of the dev team travel to the Crypto Connvention in New York and promote DigiByte.
* Most importantly, it ensures we are committed to DigiByte each and every day.
* We have a reason to stay committed to DigiByte and not go make a new coin next week!
Many of the people we gave DigiBytes to told us they do not have any miners or significant hash power and the only reason they supported DigiByte was because we gave them a part of the premine. This has been very powerful as some of these people continue to be true supporters who have contributed to DigiByte in other very creative ways.
By premining and giving it away you can motivate more people to download a wallet and spread the coins out to more people. It is much more fair than only a few large miners mining most of the coins the first few days. How many miners are actually going to give back to the coins development team or give them away to new users who have no hash power?
I tell ya i would have loved to have a 105 million Digibyte before launch i could have sold a bit way higher and bought back lower and still have the 105 million untouched.
This would go against everything we are trying to accomplish. Our goal was to use the premine to get as many users as possible to download the wallet and to continue development into the future. Our goal was to offer a legitimate solution to the crypto community for a coin that could achieve main stream adoption by merchants and customers alike. This was never intended to be a get rich quick scam, otherwise you would have seen 105 million DGB dumped on exchanges a few weeks ago.
We spent a few hundred combined hours working on DigiByte before we launched it. Since then it has been a full time job 7 days a week. We have responded to over 5000 messages, posts, tweets etc since launch. We have continued to add new features and will continue to do so.
Launching a coin is expensive, if you calculate development expenses and labor costs your are easily expending several thousand dollars a month.
We felt a 0.5% premine was very fair if we gave half of it away in the first few weeks. We now are holding on to about 47 million of the original premine. With 566 million coins currently in circulation we are only holding about 8.3% of all coins now.
Most of the premine has been given away or used to pay for development. We have only sold about 5 million of the 105 million on an exchange for Bitcoin to pay for expenses. This has been done very slowly over the course of the last few weeks as not to dramatically affect the price.
Many miners & investors have dumped more than 5 million DGB on exchanges. Why would we want to kill off a coin that has the potential to be a billion dollar payment network in the next 12 months?
Once again, we are very committed to a bright long term future for DigiByte! The premine will allow for this to happen. Thanks again for starting this discussion and we look forward to answering any questions anyone may have.
- The DigiByte Team
Show Posts
