adhitthana, I guess this summary of the early DASH history will interest you. It provides you with all the answers to your questions. All sources are included.
When you read it, you'll be surprised to find out DASH actually started in 2013 in stead of 2014:
The official story about the instamine:
https://dashdot.io/alpha/?page_id=118Evan Duffield:“The instamine happened, there is no one disputing that fact. The crypto-community at large has no problem with this except a few who think it’s trying to be hidden in some way. In fact, I posted multiple times about the instamine, first in “The Birth Of Darkcoin” which is an account of the first few weeks of the launch and the mistakes that were made. Recently I also posted spoke about the Instamine in the video “Virtual Corporation”, which considers the concept that it might have been key to Dash’s success, which I believe now. It’s also important to note, I was working a very challenging day job while working on Dash in the first couple weeks. So I was putting out fires every night, keeping tabs on Dash during the day (while getting yelled at by my boss when he caught me a couple times). Eventually I quit when I got Dash stable enough to work on full time and decided I really wanted to explore what I could do with it. “
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The evidence shows that it was a planned instamine. This wasn't mentioned before launch.
The features of this coin were also not public at launch.
=> Nobody was really interested in the coin at launch, making this instamine more a kind of "stealth launched premine".
In my books, that's a scam.
Please don't ignore the facts:
2013-12-29: 2 guys from Hawk Financial Group, Evan & Kyle, are asking on the Bitcoin Dev mailing list for "1 or 2 really good C++ programmer that is familiar with the bitcoin internals to help with a for-profit startup". They are planning to build a unique coin that is "not just a clone of the original Bitcoin code" but in stead "a merge-mined altcoin that will provide a very useful service to the whole crypto-coin ecosystem". They claim to have "detailed plans on how to implement it".
2014-01-18 There were some issues at launch, so Evan said he would postpone the launch and would "definitely not" launch it in the next hours. But he did launch it a few hours later.
2014-01-19 Xcoin was launched.
This was the emission in the first 72 hours of the coins existence:
This was the emission of the first 100 days:
At the moment, there are about 6 million DASH in circulation. There would be
84 million Xcoins eventually.
Note that in the first hour, 500k Xcoins were mined. Due to the "quick fix" of the bug, not many people expected to launch a few hours after Evan said he would "definitely not" launch in the next hours.
2014-01-19 Right after the launch, there were problems with the windows binaries. Evan clearly was mining right from the start, as he offered 5000 Xcoin as a bounty for compiling the binaries.
2014-01-20 After the emission of almost 2 million coins, Evan said that "now that everything is stable, I'll be posting later about the vision of this project and milestones!". Up until this point, only the "X11 hashing algoritm" was a known feature. According to him, it was "time to move on to actually implementing what I set out to do".
2014-01-22 Evan releases his plans for XCoin. At this point, more than 2 million coins were mined.
Xcoin rebranded to Darkcoin and eventually to DASH later on.
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Later on, some contradictions surfaced:
* The emission schedule changed multiple times. The latest we heard is that the number of coins would be
somewhere between 14 million and like 16 million DASH.
* Evan said that this project was
just a hobby he started while working on a full time job and coded Xcoin in a weekend.
* Evan claims
there were hundreds of miners if not thousands when Xcoin launched. Recent investigation showed that there were
124 IP addreses that were mining at the start. 115 of those addresses where Cloudhosting and Dedicated Servers, 9 of them seem to be private/users.106 of them were at Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure cloud instances. ---
Conclusions:
*Evan isn't acting alone, he had/has a team behind him right from the start. It wasn't a hobby. he had a plan to make a profit.
*Evan had plans for his coin right from the start, but didn't release them until after the instamine
*1.5 million coins were mined in the first 8 hours. Most of these coin ended up in his (and his friends) hands. It's very likely the 500k in the first hour were only mined by him with cloudhosting services.
*He lowered the emission later on, to make his relative share of coins bigger.
How can this be all an accident (like Evan is always saying) and NOT be intentional?
FACT:
>Evan was looking for c++ devs for a "for profit startup" at the end of 2013 for the launch of an altcoin.
QUESTION:
>How can you make a profit by launching an altcoin (and be sure to be able to pay your devs)?
ANSWER:
>by intentionally premining and/or instamining.
How he did it is pretty easy:
*telling people the release would definitely not be in the next couple of hours and after that do launch it a few hours later
*buggy windows binaries
*a "code error" creating 500k coins in the first hour, >1.5 million in the first 8 hours.
=> DASH was clearly a planned instamine (and thus a scam)
