It's been a while since I was active but back a few years the way it worked was thus:
A percentage of all block rewards were retained by the foundation.
For a given period those rewards accumulate and worthy science projects are nominated.
At the end of the period the community votes and the winning project receives the accumulated sum.

Someone correct me if I'm mistaken or things have changed.

Edit: generally the currency is sold and spent on the project.

Sooo... like another guy posted here recently, I have just started looking at cryptos again after more than 3 years away from it.
I still have some coings in an offline wallet from when I was holding some EMC2 back in the day.
Is it really as simple as downloading the latest wallet then copying across the wallet.dat?
This wallet hasn't been online for over 3 years but I can open it up and it still shows my balance.
If it's so simple then why are there warnings that come with new wallet versions: "must update by xx date"?

Thanks for your help

Hi All,

Is there any way to check whether I might have had funds at MintPal?
I was trading a couple of alt coins on MintPal back in April 2014 and haven't really done anything crypto until a couple of weeks ago.
I honestly don't remember if I left coins there or not. Though I've been able to recover an account on another exchange and found my coins still there.

I've been reading a bit of this thread and it sounds like there's a claims process but I would need to know what I had in balance?
Or do I just hope me-from-the-past was smart enough to consolidate all my holdings before purging crypto from memory?

Thanks