People aren't being whiny that they missed out. The coin metrics are HORRIBLE right now. What don't you understand? There are 16 MILLION coins in circulation now, dev team says they have 4 Million. That means there are 12 MILLION coins in the hands of early instaminers. WAY WAY WAY WAY WAY MORE than there should be. There shouldn't even be 4 Million coins in the entire float right now and there is over 4X that. So you basically have 75% of the float in the hands of instaminers that paid virtually nothing to mine those coins. And the problem is NOW there will be no new miners (unless they are really dumb) because those original 16M coins cost about $0.00001 cents to mine and right now it would cost about $0.10 to mine a single coin. That is a MASSIVE difference and completely destroys the coins metrics permanantly. The more I think about it, the ONLY solution is for the dev team to seek out these rich list early instaminers, buy their coins, and publicly burn them. I have coached dozens of teams on this exact same problem over the last 5 years and have done PR/marketing for coin teams. And I will tell you right now this will be a PR nightmare and end very badly for this coin if the devs don't take care of this problem immediately. Waiting for the dumping on the exchange is a bad idea and won't work. Some whale will just buy the cheap coins and the dev team won't be able to. Then these whales have full control over the coin instead of the mass public and dev team.
DEV TEAM-For the love of God, if you don't want your coin to fail (and you've spent a year on this), you must buy those coins back and burn the extra coins produced over what should have been produced. And I have also consulted with Bittrex over the years, and I can tell you that they also will not list your coin with this blunder. I have had to have devs send instamined coins to Bittrex to be burned by them before they would even consider listing the coin. Please contact me if you would like my services in helping resolve this problem.
To everyone saying I am just complaining-Obviously you DON'T understand crypto coin metrics, don't know my reputation and work I have done on problems with projects just like this, or you are an early instaminer that understandably wants to keep all those coins and hope that it fetches a high price on the exchange. But you are wrong because it won't, and it will only severely damage the short and long term viability of this coin's price and project.
I am done trying to help save this coin from sure death or sub 100 sat graveyard. I will not mine, buy, or promote this coin unless the dev/team agree with my analysis and hire me to help them fix the coin metrics and PR nightmare.
I thought long and hard about whether I wanted to reply to this as "some" people are hellbent on either accusing the Devs of doing this deliberately despite all evidence to the contrary, or implying it by very cleverly using double quotes and referring to it as a "bug" instead of the simple human error that it was, and then throwing out personal attacks if anyone dares to point out their factual errors. Not really productive, and it's casting a shadow on an otherwise terrific project. But I believe this project has fantastic potential compared to the copy/paste crap and vaporware ICOs that dominate the scene these days, so here goes...
Full disclosure: I mined for a short time on the 1st day, but not for long as I had problems with the vardiff going sky high on the various pools. I have been mining on and off since things settled down somewhat, despite the 10K blocks, and have approximately 23K IPBC - an amount that increases by ~480 per day at the current difficulty. So before "some" people (I can use double quotes too) accuse me of talking my book, there it is. I also have no connection whatsoever to the project other than recognizing its potential.
Whether you see this as a problem or not seems to be a matter of timeframe. I really don't see it as one, not because I benefited hugely (I didn't - see above), but because I tend to approach crypto projects with a timeframe that's measured in months if not years. When viewed through that lens, 16M is really neither here nor there. The current rate of emission is approximately 335,000 IPBC per day. 20.5M have been mined in total, and of those, 16M came from the 10K reward blocks. Therefore by the time another ((32M - 20.5M) / 335K) = 34.33 days have elapsed, the 16M from the 10K blocks will be in the minority. Let's go crazy and call it 1 1/2 months. And I'm not even allowing for the fact that the Devs claim to have 4M of the 16M, I'm assuming the whole 16M are out there in early miners' hands.
Personally I look at a project like this as needing at least 6 months to a year to even come close to catching fire. In 6 months from now there will have been another 60M coins mined - now the 16M will be in a roughly 4:1 minority. A year from now they will be positively dwarfed. And by the time 1B coins have been mined, they'll be little more than a blip.
Now, if a miner's timeframe is measured in days or weeks, then sure it matters a lot more. If that's the case though, I'd venture to suggest that gambling on brand new projects that aren't on an exchange probably isn't the wisest choice. I'd love to say that I sympathize with those looking to make a quick killing, but I don't. They're the ones who will dump at any price if Rome isn't built in a day, and good riddance to them. Those with more vision and patience will pick up the pieces if the project is worthwhile.
So on to the various proposed solutions:
1) Restart mining from scratch: Not just no, hell no. It would be the fastest way that I can conceive of to destroy the project once and for all. Who would ever trust mining it again if they knew that days and weeks worth of work could be wiped out if another problem is discovered? Absolute non-starter.
2) Increase the emission to some unknown higher number for some undetermined length of time: Not clear what this is supposed to achieve. The 16M will already be a minority just over a month from now. And you know that once THAT period of high emission came to a close, there would be more complaints about how unfair it was that the people who mined for the first X weeks got a higher block reward, and round and round we go.
3) Leave the emission at 10K permanently: Until when? Until 1B coins was reached? That would take 100K total blocks, so mining would be over approximately 4 months from now. Or really go for the gusto and end up with trillions of coins on an LTC exchange? Neither are good solutions.
4) The buyout solution: I see a number of inherent problems with this:
- It is based on the idea that rather than have the errant 16M (or 12M - either way) coins in 300 - 400 miners' hands, it's somehow better to have them concentrated in even fewer hands. Why? I don't mean any disrespect to your reputation by this, you may indeed have a long and impeccable track record and you've certainly been here on BCT about as long as I have, but I don't know you any more than I know the 300 - 400 miners who hold them now. I prefer to trust neither, but rather to put my trust in efficient markets. I'd certainly rather trust 1.6% of the project in the hands of 300 - 400 miners than a 10% premine in the hands of a few anonymous Devs like most projects around here.
- It assumes that all of the early miners simply want to dump the moment the coin hits an exchange. Patently not true, I was one of them and have zero intention of dumping. I highly doubt that I was the only one who saw a diamond in the cesspool that is the ANN forum and thought "Holy ****. Something worth getting involved with!".
- It further assumes that if they do all dump, the only beneficiaries will be "some whale" who will scoop them up to be dumped at a later date. Why do you assume that? Are smaller miners / investors / strong hands somehow incapable of doing basic math and submitting buy orders if the price is far below the true value?
- The final, and fatal IMHO, assumption: that all 300 - 400 miners would comply and sell for $0.01 each. I wouldn't for one. I suspect that a great many others wouldn't either, because they're here for the right reasons i.e. they believe in the long term prospects for the project and view their first day bonus as just that. If even 20% by volume of coins take the $0.01 offer, and they'd have to be phenomenally bad at math to do so, then what has been gained? Virtually nothing.
Finally here's another proposal that doesn't seem to have been mentioned at all. It's a radical one, but here goes:
5) Let the markets sort it out: Fair value at the moment would be roughly 4.17 cents. Not sure how you arrived at a cost to mine of 10 cents as 1KH/s on CN will currently bring in roughly $2 per day, or 48 IPBC. Divide one by the other and you get 4.17 cents. Regardless, anyone dumping at 1 cent would literally be giving away free money by selling at a > 75% discount to cost of production. Moreso at 50 satoshi, or 3 satoshi, or whatever other dire prognostication. So let them. Plenty of farsighted people who would welcome the chance to relieve them of those heavy bags knowing both a) the actual cost to mine and b) the long term potential of a project with <gasp> an actual functioning product at launch.
The project hit over 3MH/s in the first few hours, and currently sits at 7.17MH/s despite the 10K blocks. That says something as it's a bigger network than some CN projects that have been around for far longer. KRB and XLC to name a couple, plus ITNS depending on whether or not NH is currently invading. I doubt that they're all mining away blissfully unaware of the 10K issue. More likely they view it as a bump in the road in the long term, and many of them are probably waiting (as I am) to scoop up cheap IPBC if the early miners do dump. After all, who wouldn't want to buy an asset at less than 1/4 the cost to mine it?
One final thought: the offer to buy at 1 cent values the whole project at $200K. Sorry, but that's laughably low. Put a $10M market cap on it 6 months from now, which is extremely conservative for a project with a working product from day 1 in a huge potential market, and you'll be looking at around 12.5 cents. That makes mining at the current opportunity cost of 4.3 cents a steal, 10K blocks or not.