Bullshit.
Check the target time per block.
If the starting difficulty has been designed to ensure the first few miners rake in blocks way faster than the target time, then you are not witness to the fact no pre-mine happened, you are in fact participating in pre-mining.
The whole scam is to deliberately use insanely low difficulty so that in very short time a huge pre-mine will be accomplished by those few people who get in on the pre-mine.
Once the difficulty reaches target, then maybe normal mining rather than pre-mining commences.
The start difficulty should be high enough that blocks will take far LONGER than target time UNLESS many miners get in on it.
Instead though the scammers deliberately set it way too low, so that an entire massive pre-mine can take place EVEN IF plenty of miners get in on it.
By recruiting miners into the pre-mine scam, they hope to basically bribe them into colluding with them in pulling off a huge pre-mine right in front of everyone's eyes.
-MarkM-
I'm fairly new to the cryptocoin game. Could you highlight some coins that DIDN'T do this on launch? (Seems all the recent ones have, so I'm curious)
I don't recall ever hearing that Bitcoin did. The starting difficulty of bitcoin was high enough that testnet needed to be 1/16 the difficulty of main net in order for small numbers of machines to be able to do tests, because with the normal net's difficulty it would take more machines than testers usually used, or something like that.
When I first made prototypes of UKB, CDN, UNS, CZB, MBC, NKL, GMC and GRF I used the testnet side of the code so that players could have just one program and run it in bitcoin mode or altcoin mode, which would have whichever of those was the one their nation / clan /guild / whatever uses. Mining the genesis blocks took hours per genesis block, despite the difficulty being only 1/16 of the difficulty of the main net.
I think Litecoin began this whole instamining method of premining, they lowered difficulty to 1/4 of bitcoin's difficulty despite knowing many times as much hashing would be directed at litecoin on launch than had been directed at bitcoin when bitcoin launched.
The merged mined coins all have the same difficulty as bitcoin, I think, and also the reaction to altcoins was maybe not as eager back then, but I guess their difficulty was four times as difficult as Litecoin's, which we can see lately is massively too low. We should be multiplying the starting difficult 1024 or more times from bitcoin's initial difficulty, which would be 4096 times Litecoin's. And that might maybe make the launch of something like YACoin, which wasn't expecting GPUs instantly, from being quite as disgusting as it was.
For anything GPUs can mine we should assume several thousand GPUs instead of several thousand CPUs will jump on.
I guess most likely all the scrypt coins have used this scam, "justifying" it by saying that is how Litecoin did it before GPU Scrypt mining software was available. I am now getting curious as to what the starting difficulties of Tenebrix and Fairbrix (the first scrypt coins) were...
I don't remember the exact >> numbers offhand, I thought it was >> 32 for bitcoinj and >> 30 bit litecoin?
But these recent scams used >> 20, which is 2^10 less difficult than Litecoin's if litecoin's was in fact >> 30 ?
So litecoin barely hinted the direction, it is these recent ones that took it 2^10 further, maybe?
-MarkM-
