- Make people believe that they are mining the new coin, but instead mining MAX for him. The BTCs he earn through this mining scheme is over 100BTCs already. Do you think why MAX drops so much the last few days ?? I only think one of the reason that the dev dumps his MAX coins.
MAX was already very low (0.002 - 0.003) when wecoin premining started. Also it was kind of assumed that the public premine pool couldn't be the actual coin, because then it would have been just a regular launch. It was a way to buy in to the IPO with hash power instead of BTC. At the end of the public premine, shares of the actual coin would be distributed by measuring the number of shares you submitted during the investment period.
People are still mining and getting their coins from 3rd party pools, but I think it's safe to assume that the dev ran with the IPO money and didn't send out shares. I don't think it was a deliberate scam, setting up the premine pool required some work, it had a nice design and required some custom stuff like integrating btc deposits to MPOS and share calculations, the code worked correctly, but for some reason he didn't see it through. Maybe he got pissed off at everyone for calling him a scammer and digging up his personal details. He was already labeled as a scammer so instead of trying to figure out some huge problem it was easier for him to accept the fact that his reputation is already gone and just keep the money.
I don't see any reason why he wouldn't actually launch and give out people the shares, it doesn't cost him anything, and he probably had set up a part of the premine for himself (by creating fake btc deposits, as he didn't post txids of any investments). He could then make even more profit by selling the coins too.
One important thing to notice is, that
the actual coin was accidentally launched several days before the public launch when he posted the coin source to github. He said that it can't be mined before he publishes the genesis block and checkpoints, but those were in fact present in the source. He could have changed them before releasing the windows wallet, but he screwed up and released it with the exact same genesis block and checkpoints. At this point, someone else might have mined the first block or he mined it himself in a forked network. This could be the reason he was not sending out the shares since he didn't have anything to send and decided to flee because there was no way for him to fix that or he couldn't handle the humiliation. He could have relaunched the coin in that case, but maybe there was too much bad karma already and people threatening to kill him and his family that he wasn't man enough to clear the situation.
I don't understand what some of the bigger investors were thinking. With the huge coin amount and huge premine, if it got on a BTC exchange even at 0.00000001 btc, the 20 billion premined coins would have been worth 200 BTC. Could any altcoin be worth that at launch? Maybe it's actually good for the coin that the premine has disappeared.
Lesson to learn here: Investing in these IPO's is always a gamble. This time we all lost. I'm glad I only invested 0.005 BTC (which would have been worth 0.1 - 1 BTC if the price was 1 satoshi on launch, too good to be true is a good warning signal)
