a PoW blockchain trying to be a merged mined "sidechain hub" is imo not a bad idea
It would be much better, if it would be launched in a Merged Mining way. Because now, this altcoin simply says to developers: "you should use Merged Mining to build your sidechain on top of our chain, but we won't use it to launch our chain, to let BTC miners mine ECX with the same hashing power". And then, how would developers believe, that the idea of Merged Mining is good, if the sidechain itself doesn't use it?
Because sidechain developer is basically in the same position: enabling Merged Mining between BTC and ECX is very similar to enabling it between ECX and ALT. If there are any reasons why ECX shouldn't use it, then for exactly the same reasons, ALT shouldn't use it, too.
reallocation" really discourages me to invest a single thought in this
Also, it is completely unnecessary. If they start with 3.125 ECX per block, and difficulty equal to one, like they did in their alpha phase, then early miners will get 100k ECX, or something around it, until the difficulty would adjust.
By the way: copy-pasting BTC rules, while also resetting the difficulty to one, leaves their network wide open to the same timewarp attack, as it happened on testnet3. Maybe in alpha stage, nobody cared, but I wouldn't be surprised, if someone would want to try it, when they will launch the final version.
With a timewarp attack, they could easily get the same amount they want to "reallocate", and get around 500k ECX, while also overprinting for example around 210,000 blocks, and going one halving to the future.
Again, properly done Merged Mining between BTC and ECX could solve it, but they explicitly decided not to use it.
eliminate the "Satoshi reallocation code" and create another fork
Not only that. It is possible to launch sidechains, where you could for example only peg-in and peg-out coins, which were not reallocated.
Also, by constantly hard-forking, instead of using their own upgrade mechanism, they just discourage users to use the tools they created. Because all alpha coins should be upgradeable to beta, by just pegging them out of alpha, and pegging them into beta. But instead, they plan to watch BTC status again, and do another hard-fork, by taking a snapshot from BTC again, and showing a middle finger to all alpha testers, by showing them, that their ECX coins are now worthless, and they would have more beta coins, by mining BTC, instead of mining alpha ECX.
In general, when you have working sidechains, then you don't need any hard-forks anymore. Every time you want to hard-fork, you can instead launch sidechain B, and then people can do a peg-out from sidechain A, peg-in to sidechain B, and they are upgraded.
Or just start a new coin from scratch and only take the drivechain code.
There is no need to start a new coin, if you can just use
Proof of Work inside Script. In this way, there is also no Merged Mining between this solution, and BTC, but in this case, you can just peg-in and peg-out real BTCs instead, without making any new coins out of thin air, splitting coins between BTC and ALT, and doing other unnecessary things they did.
