Premines and why they are bad

[Spoetnik]

Yup.. buckle up it's Rant time again

I hear all the time well my premine for my newly released coin is only like 1 or 2%
and then they say that it calculates to a very small amount..

Take Digibyte for example..
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=408268.0

0.5 % Pre-Mine (105 Million) Note: We are effectively now a .25% premine as over half has been given away.

So that means they have 105 million coins premined at the public launch.

What bothers me is that the above calculation was made under the premise that all possible coins have been mined.
but in reality NONE have !
So what that means when the laws of reality are applied is that those 105 million coins are worth far more NOW,
than they would be if you had them way later when all coins have been generated..
It's the laws of supply and demand at work.. what is something worth if it's rare ?

The fact is most of us know that coins before they end up on major exchanges trade for insanely massive gigantic amounts
and when they are finally added to major exchanges such as Cryptsy the day one, hour one price is so sky high it's insane to buy any.. but people do !
And this routine on every new coin launch makes a LOT of people a LOT of money !
So all a so called "dev" has to do with his premine is sell off a chunk of coins for a super massive high value early on,
and then buy back coins later when the coins value drops like a rock and stabilizes (avoiding the pump and dump of course)
Then if there is a ledger made for the public they can cook up the books and make it look like no coins vanished mysteriously.
think about it guys..
How valuable would it be to you if you could "borrow" say 100 Bitcoins temporarily so you can do some trading for a bit ?
Then obviously take your profits and hand back the amount borrowed.. assuming of course Coin Cloners are even honest about handling pre-mines in the first place.

I tell ya i would have loved to have a 105 million Digibyte before launch i could have sold a bit way higher and bought back lower and still have the 105 million untouched.

There is no real need for pre-mines. There is excuses for them and that is it.
People who support them are being trusting and THAT is pretty dumb.. look around you lol

anyway that is enough from me.. if other people want to highlight some of the other bad things be my guest.. cough cough IPO <----

[swainzag]

Well you hit the nail on the head.

105M coin with a 3% pre-mine is 3.2M coins.  How long is it going to take most of these coins to mine that many coins? Days? Weeks? Months? 

The dev will hold between 25-50% of all coins for how long?  If the coin gets listed, they completely control the price.

Any coin launched with any substantial pre-mine or shady launch just tells me that intentions with  the coins usually isn't positive.

[DigiByte]

Thank you for taking the time to lay out your opposition to a premine. We agree that a premine can often be a bad thing, but if done correctly is is a very powerful boost to a coins long term success.

Since we can only speak from our own coin's experience here is what our 0.5% premine (less than 0.25% now) has allowed us to accomplish:
* Allowed us to get DigiBytes in over 5,000 wallets in the first week of the coins life with giveaways. Approaching 20,000 now.
* Has allowed us to pay several people for their continued development work. (Android wallet, language translations etc)
* Has paid for server expenses and web hosting.
* Has paid and will continue to pay for advertising expenses.
* Has allowed members of the Dev team to work full time on the project (100s of hours at this point in time).
* Will help members of the dev team travel to the Crypto Connvention in New York and promote DigiByte.
* Most importantly, it ensures we are committed to DigiByte each and every day.
* We have a reason to stay committed to DigiByte and not go make a new coin next week!

Many of the people we gave DigiBytes to told us they do not have any miners or significant hash power and the only reason they supported DigiByte was because we gave them a part of the premine. This has been very powerful as some of these people continue to be true supporters who have contributed to DigiByte in other very creative ways.

By premining and giving it away you can motivate more people to download a wallet and spread the coins out to more people. It is much more fair than only a few large miners mining most of the coins the first few days. How many miners are actually going to give back to the coins development team or give them away to new users who have no hash power?

I tell ya i would have loved to have a 105 million Digibyte before launch i could have sold a bit way higher and bought back lower and still have the 105 million untouched.

This would go against everything we are trying to accomplish. Our goal was to use the premine to get as many users as possible to download the wallet and to continue development into the future. Our goal was to offer a legitimate solution to the crypto community for a coin that could achieve main stream adoption by merchants and customers alike. This was never intended to be a get rich quick scam, otherwise you would have seen 105 million DGB dumped on exchanges a few weeks ago.

We spent a few hundred combined hours working on DigiByte before we launched it. Since then it has been a full time job 7 days a week. We have responded to over 5000 messages, posts, tweets etc since launch. We have continued to add new features and will continue to do so.

Launching a coin is expensive, if you calculate development expenses and labor costs your are easily expending several thousand dollars a month.

We felt a 0.5% premine was very fair if we gave half of it away in the first few weeks. We now are holding on to about 47 million of the original premine. With 566 million coins currently in circulation we are only holding about 8.3% of all coins now.

Most of the premine has been given away or used to pay for development. We have only sold about 5 million of the 105 million on an exchange for Bitcoin to pay for expenses. This has been done very slowly over the course of the last few weeks as not to dramatically affect the price.

Many miners & investors have dumped more than 5 million DGB on exchanges. Why would we want to kill off a coin that has the potential to be a billion dollar payment network in the next 12 months?

Once again, we are very committed to a bright long term future for DigiByte! The premine will allow for this to happen. Thanks again for starting this discussion and we look forward to answering any questions anyone may have.

- The DigiByte Team

[rokkyroad]

Thank you for taking the time to lay out your opposition to a premine. We agree that a premine can often be a bad thing, but if done correctly is is a very powerful boost to a coins long term success.

Since we can only speak from our own coin's experience here is what our 0.5% premine (less than 0.25% now) has allowed us to accomplish:
* Allowed us to get DigiBytes in over 5,000 wallets in the first week of the coins life with giveaways. Approaching 20,000 now.
* Has allowed us to pay several people for their continued development work. (Android wallet, language translations etc)
* Has paid for server expenses and web hosting.
* Has paid and will continue to pay for advertising expenses.
* Has allowed members of the Dev team to work full time on the project (100s of hours at this point in time).
* Will help members of the dev team travel to the Crypto Connvention in New York and promote DigiByte.
* Most importantly, it ensures we are committed to DigiByte each and every day.
* We have a reason to stay committed to DigiByte and not go make a new coin next week!

Many of the people we gave DigiBytes to told us they do not have any miners or significant hash power and the only reason they supported DigiByte was because we gave them a part of the premine. This has been very powerful as some of these people continue to be true supporters who have contributed to DigiByte in other very creative ways.

By premining and giving it away you can motivate more people to download a wallet and spread the coins out to more people. It is much more fair than only a few large miners mining most of the coins the first few days. How many miners are actually going to give back to the coins development team or give them away to new users who have no hash power?

I tell ya i would have loved to have a 105 million Digibyte before launch i could have sold a bit way higher and bought back lower and still have the 105 million untouched.

This would go against everything we are trying to accomplish. Our goal was to use the premine to get as many users as possible to download the wallet and to continue development into the future. Our goal was to offer a legitimate solution to the crypto community for a coin that could achieve main stream adoption by merchants and customers alike. This was never intended to be a get rich quick scam, otherwise you would have seen 105 million DGB dumped on exchanges a few weeks ago.

We spent a few hundred combined hours working on DigiByte before we launched it. Since then it has been a full time job 7 days a week. We have responded to over 5000 messages, posts, tweets etc since launch. We have continued to add new features and will continue to do so.

Launching a coin is expensive, if you calculate development expenses and labor costs your are easily expending several thousand dollars a month.

We felt a 0.5% premine was very fair if we gave half of it away in the first few weeks. We now are holding on to about 47 million of the original premine. With 566 million coins currently in circulation we are only holding about 8.3% of all coins now.

Most of the premine has been given away or used to pay for development. We have only sold about 5 million of the 105 million on an exchange for Bitcoin to pay for expenses. This has been done very slowly over the course of the last few weeks as not to dramatically affect the price.

Many miners & investors have dumped more than 5 million DGB on exchanges. Why would we want to kill off a coin that has the potential to be a billion dollar payment network in the next 12 months?

Once again, we are very committed to a bright long term future for DigiByte! The premine will allow for this to happen. Thanks again for starting this discussion and we look forward to answering any questions anyone may have.

- The DigiByte Team

Thankyou. Excellent post.

Goes to show people need to look at the big picture before they start running off at the mouth.

I'm off to buy some Digibyte ... I can see a big surge in popularity coming.

[DavidR]

Sometimes it is good, sometimes it is bad.  It's a case by case basis.  You can have no premine but the devs hide an instamine or you can have a really exciting and useful premine like Auroracoin which makes total sense.  So really, it comes down to a case by case basis issue.

[hellscabane]

As someone mentioned, there is a grey area when it comes to premines some of the time.

What I am surprised is that those who want to premine for the sake of development don't take the approach of embedding it into the block reward. Although there would likely be huge amounts of antagonism towards it, it's one of the more effectual ways of addressing the disparity of premined coins vs. coins currently in existence.

Let's say you want block rewards to be 100, and you want 1% for development purposes you could:

Make the first [insert # of blocks] reward 102 with 100 going to miners and the last 2 going to a wallet for devs.
Afterwards adjust to 101 with 100 going to miners and the last 1 going to devs (assuming that there will be continuous development).

If the premine is just for promotional purposes then just allow the first [insert # of blocks] have additional height and truncate after the promotional period is over.

[hostmaster]

premines if used wisely can be very helpful we should not bother but anything above 1 is not fair anymore

[BitcoinEXpress]

@spoetnik


Why do you insist on bringing logic, reason and common sense backed up with facts to the debate?



~BCX~

[PoolMinor]

ORB 66%   pre-mine
NXT 100% pre-mine
XRP 100% pre-mine
the list goes further....

Edit:
How does a pre-mine "pay" for services?
Answer:
The people get paid in the currency of the coin they are working on.
How does this give the developers money?
Answer:
By dumping on an exchange, therefore OP is correct, pre-mines should never exist. If your coin is good enough people will flock to your coin without hesitation. Or if they need payment, pay them with real established value, not imposed value.
Take NXT, for example. Dude makes a pie and decides to sell it in 1 billion pieces to 73 people, why do these people need this pie? Because it may gain value in the future? Only if you get it into enough ignorant peoples' hands that somehow perceive value.
The point is NXT was never bought for 21BTC it is controlled by 1 person that has over 51% of the coins. You cannot trust anyone, there is no point to any of these "currencies."

Launching a coin is expensive, if you calculate development expenses and labor costs your are easily expending several thousand dollars a month.


- The DigiByte Team

Here is the great idea, if you cannot afford to do something don't do it. Don't complain about it afterwards, as if someone put a gun to your head and made you take on the responsibility of making a coin. What a half-assed thoughtless statement.

[Spoetnik]

BCX you always make me laugh.. you come out of no where LOLOL

i don't think a coin should be made if it requires a premine.. if you can't afford to release one fairly then don't do it.
why do a scammy premine and make excuses for it ? maybe leave the currency creation to people more qualified ?

and no i don't trust that DigiByte guy why the hell should i ? and that is a major issue with premines.. do you trust the preminer ? should you ?
plenty of warning bells went off for me on that guys coin.. such as he has devs implying he is not one of them.. so who is he then ? pitch man ?

as i'm writing this i see the last guy is saying the same thing lol

always justifying bad behavior i see around this scene..
and i have loose morals myself and i don't have a problem with people wanting to bend the rules.
what bothers me is all the endless lies, games and deceitful bullshit these two faced scammers pull.
it would be different if a coin releaser said hey.. you know what ? i premined it because i want some money for myself.
that would be waaaay easier to choke down than the usual scammy pricks roaming around crypto playing dumb about it.

[FalconCrypto]

@spoetnik


Why do you insist on bringing logic, reason and common sense backed up with facts to the debate?


~BCX~

On the contrary my friend. Really?


+1 to DigiByte, excellent post!

[creativecuriosity]

BCX you always make me laugh.. you come out of no where LOLOL

i don't think a coin should be made if it requires a premine.. if you can't afford to release one fairly then don't do it.
why do a scammy premine and make excuses for it ? maybe leave the currency creation to people more qualified ?

and no i don't trust that DigiByte guy why the hell should i ? and that is a major issue with premines.. do you trust the preminer ? should you ?
plenty of warning bells went off for me on that guys coin.. such as he has devs implying he is not one of them.. so who is he then ? pitch man ?

as i'm writing this i see the last guy is saying the same thing lol

always justifying bad behavior i see around this scene..
and i have loose morals myself and i don't have a problem with people wanting to bend the rules.
what bothers me is all the endless lies, games and deceitful bullshit these two faced scammers pull.
it would be different if a coin releaser said hey.. you know what ? i premined it because i want some money for myself.
that would be waaaay easier to choke down than the usual scammy pricks roaming around crypto playing dumb about it.

Come now, Spoetnik.

BitcoinTate, a.k.a. Digibyte Dev is not a bad person - I have talked with him at some length. 
I understand completely some of your arguments and why you would be skeptical, but you are being a bit unfair in your criticisms of the DigiByte team.  I suppose, skepticism is always preferable to blind trust.  However, let a team's actions speak to their character.

Whether you are interested in looking deeper or not, is up to you; but with even a brief look at DigiByte you should see quite a difference from the classic pre-mine scam your exposing in this thread. 

Who pre-mines as a scam and then publishes, right on the announcement thread, a spreadsheet of all expenditures from the pre-mine account?  And please, don't argue that the 'ledger could be fake'.  Last I checked, the blockchain was public.

I applaud you for this thread, as insta-mining and pre-mining has been a scourge on the community.  It is not fair, however, to call scam when you haven't even taken the time to research or get to know the team in this particular case.  These people have invested hours and hours supporting and promoting crypto-currency and developing DigiByte.  They have quite assuredly done more for crypto (the reason we are all here) then either you or me. 

If you don't believe, don't participate.  Although, I think everyone over in the DigiByte thread would much enjoy your company and constructive input.

But don't claim to have knowledge you don't - that is called ignorance my friend.

That said, keep preaching the skepticism, that is a healthy and helpful pursuit! 
Please just don't target a group of people that don't deserve the negative lime-light as everything I have seen, heard, and come to know about their intentions in entirely well-intentioned.

[Mk2vr6]

And here we are again, yet another negative thread from Spoetnik.

Can I ask, what exactly is your purpose in spreading so much hate towards recent Crypto's - and in fact Bitcoin itself because these recent ones have spawned off the back of its success?

Do you want people to stop creating them, and in turn stop mining, selling and/or buying them.

In fact do you want us to stop having any interest in Crypto's at all, or is there something better you think we should all be investing in?

[brooklynite]

It's funny when I see people say 1% or 0.5% is ok but 5% is too much.

Guys! 0.5% premined of one coin could be worth 1,000,000x more than even 1% premined of another coin. It really depends on how long the coin will be mined until finished. If a coin takes 400 years compared to another that takes 42 weeks to be fully mined.

Another funny excuse is promotion. Bitcoin was not premined and yet it took the world by storm.

But again to developers point, if your don't like it don't mine it dint trade it. That's the beauty of unregulated world. Developers can lie cheat hide steal, there is no regulation. But isn't that what the entire community was dying to achieve? Freedom from regulation and central control and governments? And still when your coins vanish from the exchange first thing that comes to your mind is to sue them out call the cops. Resorting to the very first thing you thought is useless government control.

[alexrey]

Not all Premines are bad as long as they are properly used. DigiByte is the best example for this.

Most successful coin listed on Coin Market Cap are all Premines. Are they bad?

@Spoetnik can you launch your own coin without premine and let's see how far can you go. Just used the same user handle as the dev of your own coin. 

[Scribbles646]

anyway that is enough from me.. if other people want to highlight some of the other bad things be my guest.. cough cough IPO <----

Yes the only thing worse than pre-mine is these so called "IPO".
For those who aren't hip to the IPO game let me lay it out for you step by step.

1. Dev creates alt-coin with a pre-mine say 2%.
2. Dev offers coins for sale before mining starts, sells say half of the pre-mine for BTC, LTC, ect.
3. Dev uses IPO proceeds to pump the coin price up, people without knowledge of the Dev manipulation, see the price rising and invest additional coin, price rises even more.
4. Dev cashes out his pre-mine after the price is inflated well beyond what just pocketing the IPO proceeds would have brought.
5. Price crashes, dev abandons coin, maybe it dies right away maybe it doesn't.
6. Dev doesn't care, moves on to next project, maybe under new name.

[Acidyo]

Thank you for taking the time to lay out your opposition to a premine. We agree that a premine can often be a bad thing, but if done correctly is is a very powerful boost to a coins long term success.

Since we can only speak from our own coin's experience here is what our 0.5% premine (less than 0.25% now) has allowed us to accomplish:
* Allowed us to get DigiBytes in over 5,000 wallets in the first week of the coins life with giveaways. Approaching 20,000 now.
* Has allowed us to pay several people for their continued development work. (Android wallet, language translations etc)
* Has paid for server expenses and web hosting.
* Has paid and will continue to pay for advertising expenses.
* Has allowed members of the Dev team to work full time on the project (100s of hours at this point in time).
* Will help members of the dev team travel to the Crypto Connvention in New York and promote DigiByte.
* Most importantly, it ensures we are committed to DigiByte each and every day.
* We have a reason to stay committed to DigiByte and not go make a new coin next week!

Many of the people we gave DigiBytes to told us they do not have any miners or significant hash power and the only reason they supported DigiByte was because we gave them a part of the premine. This has been very powerful as some of these people continue to be true supporters who have contributed to DigiByte in other very creative ways.

By premining and giving it away you can motivate more people to download a wallet and spread the coins out to more people. It is much more fair than only a few large miners mining most of the coins the first few days. How many miners are actually going to give back to the coins development team or give them away to new users who have no hash power?

I tell ya i would have loved to have a 105 million Digibyte before launch i could have sold a bit way higher and bought back lower and still have the 105 million untouched.

This would go against everything we are trying to accomplish. Our goal was to use the premine to get as many users as possible to download the wallet and to continue development into the future. Our goal was to offer a legitimate solution to the crypto community for a coin that could achieve main stream adoption by merchants and customers alike. This was never intended to be a get rich quick scam, otherwise you would have seen 105 million DGB dumped on exchanges a few weeks ago.

We spent a few hundred combined hours working on DigiByte before we launched it. Since then it has been a full time job 7 days a week. We have responded to over 5000 messages, posts, tweets etc since launch. We have continued to add new features and will continue to do so.

Launching a coin is expensive, if you calculate development expenses and labor costs your are easily expending several thousand dollars a month.

We felt a 0.5% premine was very fair if we gave half of it away in the first few weeks. We now are holding on to about 47 million of the original premine. With 566 million coins currently in circulation we are only holding about 8.3% of all coins now.

Most of the premine has been given away or used to pay for development. We have only sold about 5 million of the 105 million on an exchange for Bitcoin to pay for expenses. This has been done very slowly over the course of the last few weeks as not to dramatically affect the price.

Many miners & investors have dumped more than 5 million DGB on exchanges. Why would we want to kill off a coin that has the potential to be a billion dollar payment network in the next 12 months?

Once again, we are very committed to a bright long term future for DigiByte! The premine will allow for this to happen. Thanks again for starting this discussion and we look forward to answering any questions anyone may have.

- The DigiByte Team

As someone who isn't in any way connected to the digibyte dev team, and someone who isn't holding a single one right now.

I can say that they did actually do big giveaways at the start, I got 30k coins by just being there on the thread.

I know many do bad things with their premine but this coin is not one of them, they have spent most of it and are holding very little left that they are willing to use for more bounties etc.

Even if they end up with some of the premine in the end, then they do deserve it for making one coin that stands out from the rest of trash that is appearing on a daily basis.

Hopefully they will be able to buy stuff with the premined digibytes directly when the time comes.

[PoolMinor]

As someone who isn't in any way connected to the digibyte dev team, and someone who isn't holding a single one right now.

I can say that they did actually do big giveaways at the start, I got 30k coins by just being there on the thread.

Please clarify.

-----------------------------------

It's funny when I see people say 1% or 0.5% is ok but 5% is too much.

Guys! 0.5% premined of one coin could be worth 1,000,000x more than even 1% premined of another coin. It really depends on how long the coin will be mined until finished. If a coin takes 400 years compared to another that takes 42 weeks to be fully mined.

Another funny excuse is promotion. Bitcoin was not premined and yet it took the world by storm.

But again to developers point, if your don't like it don't mine it dint trade it. That's the beauty of unregulated world. Developers can lie cheat hide steal, there is no regulation. But isn't that what the entire community was dying to achieve? Freedom from regulation and central control and governments? And still when your coins vanish from the exchange first thing that comes to your mind is to sue them out call the cops. Resorting to the very first thing you thought is useless government control.

I think what we want most is simply public ledger, again why block chain explorers are crucial to any coin.

[cords51]

I would support a premine if almost all of it is for the community.

[flounderella]

Why are premines bad? Well I have just one word for you: Wolong. You are smart; you figure out the rest.

Don't get Wolong-ed, ok?!?