Yeah, well, it won't be the first time. Look at LTC. They mined over half a million coins at launch. At the start they were close to worthless. At peak value (50$) they were around 25.000.000 USD. As the market moved around, as new coins entered the market, as these coins were traded back and forth etc, etc, it all became "less relevant" and the 500.000 coins instamine are now "ok, who cares".

http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=a_massive_investigation_of_instamines_and_fastmines_for_the_top_alt_coins#litecoin


Litecoin
type of algorithm: scrypt
PoW only
Despite being Bitcoin's supposed silver to it's gold, Litecoin does not escape from this analysis kindly. In the first 96 hours, we see a well defined curve that demonstrates instamining occurred, showing 450,000 LTC being created in less than 6 hours.



There are roughly 27,700,000 Litecoins in existence, which equates to about 1.5% of the total coins that have been created since October 2011. Some people make that case that Litecoin has gone through numerous rises and crashes in the price that could have brought out these initial investors. This is true. The fact that almost 3 years has past since it's creation and the amount of quickly mined coins is approaching less than 1% of the total coins in existence is also worth mentioning. One can still question the intentions of the creator of this coin, but the reality is the threat of the currency crashing because of instaminers selling is less and less likely. We consider this to be a questionable coin/okay coin (one foot in each category) based on this start but probably less risky now that it barely registers as a percentage point of fastmining.


...So did LTC have a big instamine? Yes.

Did it "relaunch" to fix the instamine? No.

Did the ltc dev make any offer to fix the instamined distribution (like drk dev)? Not that I am aware of but then again I wasn't around.

What's the status of the LTC instamine today? => "Who cares", it was 'just' half a million coins, a lot of coins have been issued since then, most have been sold/moved for peanuts in pre-pump periods", etc.

Satoshi having >1mn coins isn't going away either. BTC price has it factored.


Actually I did, when I said how the ratio will shift as the instamine becomes less relevant.

In any case, time can get you the respect and trust you need if you do things right.


Pre-summer 2014 the narrative was: Evan will opensource darksend and the "fair launch" dark clone will get higher value. Darksend was opensourced but this never happened - and it wasn't because of lack of attempts.

In any case the instamine is an excellent motivator for Evan to keep working hard if he wants DASH to be a top altcoin. The sort of motivation where trolls say you are a scammer and you are proving your worth to the market by delivering good software solutions. Ok anonymint will cringe reading this because nothing is up to his standards (and it's good to have high standards - even ideals), but anyway.

The numbers are just an example.

For every coin there is out there, there are reasons why one would adopt it or not adopt it and initial launch could be one factor among many. It doesn't really matter because all coins suffer from something, so... the field is balanced in a way.

For example

"Monero cli? No thanks"
"Monero infinite supply? No thanks"
"Monero bloat? No thanks"
"Bytecoin stealthmine? No thanks"
"SDC - where is the promised code review? No thanks"
"Doge infinite supply - jokecoin supply? No thanks"
"LTC dinosaur coin / no evolution? No thanks"
"Ripple centralized bullshit? No thanks"
"Dash instamine? No thanks"
"NXT distribution? No thanks"
"BTC Satoshi bag? No thanks"
"BTC at 1200 or 450 fuckin dollars? No thanks"

...everyone has reasons to turn down coins.

He is running a competitive altcoin. And Evan has a stated goal (since the launch of XCO / DRK) of displacing Charlie's coin from #2. So...


A lot of LTC supporters were butthurt as DASH rose and they felt that their coin was stagnant versus the competition. LTC was good... for ...2013 Now it's old news.


So, everyone knows about the instamine, it's #5 in marketcap, it has given gains of 7x to 280x to everyone who got in in the first three-four months of 0.001 price (when it was already a top20 marketcap coin), it's #2 in some crypto-gold and crypto-betting sites after BTC in terms of volume, and that's a problem? Ok, I can live with that.


If there is a crackdown on BTC tomorrow in some country and people start scrambling for anonymous coins to buy, the least of their problems will be who mined what, 2 or 3 or 5 years ago. Same goes for investors who will be seeing good returns.


ok...


The adoption curve is the same (or better, as the instamine's effect is lessened with time). So if DASH is improving positions year-on-year, despite the instamine => that's ok.

You can't change the past, you can only work for the future. So... you are doing the best, the market sees what you are doing and it will either reward you or not.


You could make a perfect launch of a cpu coin and you could be mining it with GPUs.
You could make a perfect launch of a cpu coin and mining it with your 10x CPU miner.
You could make a perfect launch of a gpu coin and you could be mining it with a specially designed client that blows the competition away.

These things are not even visible. People would never know what happened thus they can never properly value "fairness" in the altcoin jungle. You could have a dev acting like a pumper. He has inside knowledge of events to come, so even if he says something he can pump price. He can buy before pumping, dump on the excited buyers, rinse, repeat, become rich. No need to premine or ICO if you play the pumper of your own "fair" coin. We've also seen pump groups be in cooperation with altcoin devs to pump and dump coins. DASH is an oasis compared to what's happening out there.


I explained the mechanism.

It was settled officially I mean, between community & dev. Those who have a problem with it let them have the "problem". Who cares? They are usually butthurt altcoin competitors...

The fact that they try to grasp anything to attack DASH is to be expected - and to a certain degree, welcomed.


Charlie Lee apparently doesn't understand the market very well.

If he said so he is taking the speculative aspect of the coin, talking about investment. Once something happens and it's relatively well known to the degree of "tarnishing your reputation", that means the market has priced-in this event. Which means you are buying with a price discount precisely because that event has allowed you to buy cheaper. But it is priced-in. It can't be ...re-priced in. Thus there is no uncertainty in this regard. When a bad event is priced-in the only way is up from that point.

But speculative aspect aside, if one wants instant tx or anonymity, LTC will be useless for a potential user. The user who actually wants to transact will not care about what coins got mined 3 years ago - as BTC users don't care who mined what 7 years ago. He'll juts get on with the job.

So

- from a user perspective, it doesn't matter as long as it fits the user requirements of conducting anonymously, instantly etc.

- from an investor perspective it's already priced-in and thus does not represent a risk due to the market discount by suppressed demand of all those who avoided DASH "due to the instamine". If 10.000 people know about DASH and 5000 avoided it due to the instamine / 5000 adopted it despite, that's a 50% conversion rate. It's a given. Now if say I speak to 100 people about DASH and 50 say "it's instamined crap" and another 50 say "I'll adopt it because I see potential or because I have a use for it", the adoption curve will remain at 50% conversion rate. But that curve is likely to weigh better in the long run in favor of the "adoption", as the instamine becomes less and less relevant. So, for the investor who buys, it doesn't matter because the adoption curve factors were the same yesterday and will be the same tomorrow - if not slightly better. For the investor it's not much different than if the instamine never existed and DASH was now trading at 0.07 BTC instead of 0.007. The adoption curve would have different numbers in favor of adoption (let's say 90% in favor) but the BTCs would buy 10 time less DASH due to ratio of supply/demand which is heavier on the demand side. So the upside would be the same, if not problematic due to getting to 'overpriced' status. Plus there is no "departure" from the historic point of the instamine, which smooths out as you go forward.

LTC itself benefited from this "departure" of its own instamine, as the increasing supply makes it less and less relevant. Sure, in the first weeks it was a big deal, now not anymore. The initial LTC price had to price in the extra quantities and the lack of difficulty in mining them but over time price got better and better. Would the price be higher without the extra instamined LTCs? Probably yes. It would also create a sense of a more valuable coin at launch rather than an abundant shitcoin - which probably followed it for years. But all these supply issues were priced in so, the buyers bought with discount. As they did with XCO/DRK.

Every crypto can be pruned. That's not going to make them scale to actual adoption levels.


Yeah, trolling forums is a selfless "let's spread the truth" agenda.





Scaling


Yeah, I mean monero people prefer actual real life threats, like those against businesses who adopt dash.

Look, dash is a 2 y. old project. The instamine issue was addressed in the first months. Evan proposed an airdrop to fix distribution, people voted it down, that's the end of the story. The community considered that with all which had occurred up to that point (turbulent first months), the distribution was pretty good and didn't require "fixing" with extraordinary means. That was early-mid April 14 IIRC and price was still 0.001. Then it went to 0.027, twice, with major coin reshuffling, again, and again. Mintpal also "reshuffled" the coin supply, as I suspect happened with the hack in the official pool run by Evan which Evan paid out himself. Now Cryptsy, again a lot of DRKs might be reshuffled.


The instamine was addressed in early 2014. People voted down the airdrop proposal. Get over it. But then again, if you do, how will you troll about "instamine", "instamine", "instamine".

As for running away from the truth, I asked, who got scammed by the instamine, I never got an answer.

The instamine coins were valued at 2.5 BTC for 100k coins. That's how much you could get back then, and many threw a couple of BTCs on it, becoming DRK whales later. The entire instamine was worth 50 BTC. For almost three weeks after the coin launch. So we could say if someone mined the ENTIRE early supply at most he got 50 BTC. But unlike altcoin scammers who hit & run, Evan stayed and developed the coin and gave it value, being a responsible dev, in a sea of scamcoins. And that was appreciated by the market.

Price started to rise from 0.000025 to 0.000080, to 0.000180, to 0.000500, to 0.02, dropping to 0.008-0.0016 (ccex hack), stabilizing at 0.0011-0.0014 for quite a while after the ccex fiasco, settling through voting the supply issue and the instamine issue, releasing darksend, going to 0.027, failing to deliver the dual consensus system with the forking issue, price dropping, rebounding, etc.

Whether one came one day later or 3 months later, their btc value now is from 7x to 280x. If that is "scamming" then, as somebody said, "Evan scam us some more". This value increase is directly related to Evan working on the coin and delivering. Anyone can make a shitcoin but few can give their shitcoin value. Evan did that, and everyone is gaining as a result. You say scam, others like the concept of an invested dev that has overlapping interests in the success of the coin - as he will be motivated to preserve and increase the value of his stash, and, by extension, the value of investors stash.

At the time point the instamine was done it was worth 50 BTC. If Evan got ~700k coins, as is circulating, that's approx one third of that, near 17 BTC. If you apply later valuation, you must also say that Satoshi too is a billion dollar "scammer" for ...solomining BTC. But you can't do that because at the time he was mining worthless coins.

Now... At current valuation, and if Evan has ~300-400k, he is at 900k / 1.2mn USD in holdings. For working 2 years straight, for more than full time (days and nights), that's 37 to 50k USD per month. Is that some kind of serious money for a crypto dev? There are normal day jobs that pay more. He would actually get paid more if he worked at market rates. IIRC Peter Todd was charging Viacoin with 60k USD per month and probably not for that kind of dedication and/or health risks that arise from anxiety, 16-18hr work, etc.

There's a lot of people who don't even see the advantage of DASH compared to sending their BTC in ...mixers and using their "anonymous" BTCs. So, that's the market reality right there.

Monero is almost FUBAR unless it changes direction.

1) Scaling / bloat = DOA. There is desperate need for a scaling solution and this is not on the horizon.
2) Community is shooting itself in the foot all the time, engaging with other alts
3) Devs gloat about development when ...well.... GUI
4) Actual development for transitioning the coin from a proof-of-concept to a viable coin is lacking
5) Due to 1 & 4, it is thought that if we attack the market leader perhaps we stand a better chance. Well, spending 24/7/365 on the Dash thread, trolling, won't fix Monero's issues.

DASH, on the other hand, is losing focus on the core industry of privacy (masternode blinding, ip obfuscation), wanting to extend beyond that, to instant transactions (ok, it may have broader appeal compared to anonymity, and it may well be that it's a killer app if Bitcoin's zero-conf are killed, but still), decentralized government and stuff and its roadmap to scaling will probably take quite some time. Yet it's better than having no map at all, or expecting BTC to solve the issue for you.

The market positioning of DASH and the consolidation as undisputed #1 in the market, as good as it may be for the investors of DASH, is not good for the anonymity development of DASH. If Monero, Bytecoin etc didn't suck so bad (difficult to use, incompatible with BTC, bloated to proof-of-concept levels, stealthmined, cripplemined etc), DASH would be pressed to improve its own core business as well. Users would actually have better anonymity systems to use due to the competition, so to speak. Now it's just "trolling wars" = bullshit.

It is instant & anonymous* in transacting a premixed balance.

* Provided there is an anonymous IP solution as well which I would prefer if it was offered out-of-the-box.

Premixing and sending mixed coins are two different phases for DASH.

Sending premixed coins is instant.

Mixing your balance can be done whenever you want. Speed will pickup with time, as more people use mixing and there is greater "availability" to mix with. At that point, when a lot of people are mixing, bloat and fees will be the issue. I think we already had a glimpse of the future when premixing with multiple rounds was implemented and the network got congested from all the people who were waiting to mix their coins for the first time. IIRC the fees were bumped a bit, or it was suggested that txs would go through faster with a fee - something like that.

I got into that discussion because I'm not buying the "ohhh we did all that awesome improvements" angle - and explained why.

As for Monero, well, now that I've sold all my Moneros (it seems like the Monero community wanted those with dual investment alienated) I will be pretty frank about it: It won't scale and it's not even working on some serious scaling solution. I'm not aware of Bytecoin working on a scaling solution either so there is nothing to copy from there. As it stands, we are looking at a proof-of-concept system / DOA for actual use.

I'm not saying reducing bloat by a few tens %. I'm talking about much more.

Dash will develop its own system and, at worst, if Dash fails to provide distributed storage etc, it can "adopt" a Lightning clone   (as a BTC-compatible coin), to compensate or as a short-term fix until it gets going with its own system. We'll see how it goes.

I said I can't code shit in terms of cryptocurrency code but I do have some programming background and experience - although it's not that recent / it's more like in the distant past (with an exception in tweaking cpu and gpu miners in '13 and '14 for scrypt and x11 - primarily for myself). So I know how these things work.


Art is a whole different animal.


I'm not sure I even care what anyone says about things that I can judge on my own. It's not going to change my mind on things that I know how they are done.

To relate: For someone with zero pc knowledge, most of tech savy people are like gods if they help others to fix their laptop, or save their data in the event of a crash. The knowledgeable people know what they did is not hard. They just formatted the system or run a data recovery program. Now they can either sell that they were awesome, or they could say that it's not that big of a deal. If you sell the "I am awesome" angle and another tech guy comes along, he'll be like "huh? He just run a frickin' program to undelete your data - how is is he awesome?".

Likewise, in cryptoland the coders are selling the "we are awesome" angle / we are tremendous in what we are developing, etc etc. I'm not buying it because I can understand how the thing works. I only acknowledge real work, based on my own criteria.

I can't code shit, in terms of cryptocurrency code, but I do know that a few tweaks here and there are not anything special.

Whether it is "x11", a fancy block reward, a fixed or adaptive block size, these are fairly trivial in terms of code - if someone knows how to code. If you have the general algorithm in your mind, on what you want to achieve, the rest are easy. But coding a currency from scratch, well, that's another issue altogether.

For example, dash and monero devs, didn't develop a crypto from scratch. They are just adding brush strokes on what was an already existing currency. Dash more so than monero, due to introducing new systems (instantx, masternodes, decentralized voting, darksend etc) but still, the essence is that it is more like brush strokes. If you add a lot more code to what you started, then you start to be more "legit" as an actual coder that can take credit, rather than making tweaks.

That's how I see it at least. That's how I always saw it. People were saying "oh DRK has this, that" I was like, ok guys, let's not brag about that, it's not something THAT special - if I felt the coding effort wasn't anything to brag about, despite the fact that I can't code it (but I know that it's not THAT much of an effort). I feel the same for Monero tweaking the adaptive block size, or doing similar tweaks. I feel the same for people claiming there is some kind of "development" going on with BTC because some punk will fork BTC and make a BTC clone with a different brand (XT, unlimited, superultraunlimited, etc). Like changing a constant is ...development, or a "solution" to the scaling issue. This is bullshit.

Fixing crypto from scratch is the difficult part. Fixing new crypto subsystems is second in difficulty. Tweaking an existing system or making improvements in things that were not-so-optimal, is not the hard part and I can't give much credit for that. People who have no clue, and are in crypto as investors without knowing much about how programming works, might be impressed by apparent "development". I think that's where all the hype is ultimately aimed. "Oh we are so good devs, we did this and that, and allll that. We deserve your investment money". I call bullshit when there is little effort behind it. I will make an exception in genius solutions, like saying a guy comes along and reduces BTC tx bloat by 80-90%, without serious tradeoffs - even if that involves a few lines patch.

Well, Monero took Bytecoin's codebase. That much we know.

https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-block-size?showDataPoints=false&timespan=all&show_header=true&daysAverageString=7&scale=0&address=

Avg block is at 0.5 - 0.6, including spam and dust. Many miners are running 750kb, others are mining empty blocks, even when they can run 1mb full blocks.

Where the fuck is the "demand" for 8mb

Too much blame for my preferences... It's not like altcoins have solved scaling or the attack vectors related to spamming (except by raising fees - which is the way for BTC too).

In the end of the day there is an equilibrium between the available transaction space, the fees paid, the abuse the network gets and the willingness of miners to mine transactions. And this equilibrium will not get any better (in favor of scaling) if either

a) the software itself doesn't gets better in terms of using storage, processing and network resources
b) the resources themselves aren't upgraded to cope, as technology improves

Well, I don't see many others doing scaling work. Tampering the constant isn't improving the scaling fundamentals. This is a power grab by questionable people.


Bitcoin mining is more like a cartel rather than a free market. When 4-5 people have supermajority, it's an issue.

You are rewriting history. Bytecoin brought ring signatures and the codebase to play around with.

And what exactly are they endorsing? Changing a constant to 2MB?

The only people who can seriously do development and maintenance work are core devs. Not bitpay, or coinbase, or the miners. Anyone can set the constant to whatever value and say "this is bitcoin xt, unlimited, classic" etc.

"This project began as the work of Marshall Long, Olivier Janssens, Ahmed Bodiwala, Jonathan Toomim, Michael Toomim, and Gavin Andresen, but we hope it includes you too, soon."