So basically, he intentionally deleted a significant amount of legitimately mined blocks out of paranoia? Not once, but twice. A significant number of miners were hard forked and their earnings erased by this choice by Milkshake.
Yes, and that was probably wrong. Seeing giant reorgs of the chain can be scary shit, and it was freaking the channel out. Problem is, the release was basically at lowest diff possible so the genblock could be created quickly to get things going, but then the damn diff wasnt reset (yes, that's a fail). Of course what happened next was giant orphan chains and reorgs all over the place. Wasnt premining, but note my words: it was EXACTLY like every other altcoin release. It failed in claiming to NOT be like them, and then turned out to be exactly like them. You cant say its worse than CNC or RYC or YAC or PWC for that, cuz they were ALL the same for me (I got 0 CNC and 0 RYC, and gave up, cuz i was like 45 minutes too late or something).
Would it be nice to have a coin that launches NOT like that? Certainly. Was it this one? no. But is the market flooded with 100M early and premined coins? No, that neither. Diff was >1 by the 10 or 12k'th block - heck it was at .2 by the time i woke up after not enough sleep lol - and blocks were coming in slower than network propagation time (reducing orphans). Reorgs dropped from chunks of 20, 15, 10 to 2's and 3s. By evening reorgs were every 10-15 minutes. Now even rarer. Its stabilized, and mostly fair/proportional to whatever hashrate you throw at it.
Judging by the name "AWS GUY", how would someone have legitimate concerns that someone would rent enough servers to CPU mine and 51% a GPU coin? That would be rather expensive to accomplish, with basically no benefit for the person renting them.
Cpu mining for a brief period may have been worth it. Certainly their GPUs are ridiculously overpriced.
When it comes to "fucking up the blockchain", isn't that what Milkshake did, twice? All of my blocks mined below block 2500, some with >2200 confirmations, were wiped out by this choice.
Oh, I certainly noticed the REORG's, since elacoind segfaulted on each one. I was running one of the two servers that I believe a significant number of people here used as a seed node (I had up to 750 inbound connections to my elacoind at one point). The person running the other server people were using as a seed node experienced the same crashes. On just about every REORG.
Yes, I suppose he did fuck it up. He didnt have the experience, neither did I (except I never claimed to nor insinuated). But no one suggested against it - if AWSguy existed, he should have cautioned against it at least. No one did. (AWSguy probably never existed. Figment of imaginations gone wild watching a 0 diff blockchain frenzy creation clusterfuck). I lost coins in the 120 block reorg too and in many other giant reorgs.
I suggest no altcoin launch be taken seriously unless a trusted elderstatesman is around to guide any noobish rash action into harmlessness.
Now that all is said and done and there's a whole 15,000 coins out there, the question is what is the future? Can 15,000 early mined coins be overtaken by later mining by the increased reward? Certainly:
As I said, look at LTC's diff. 608 today. in ELC that's a block reward of 26 coins. If it were like LTC with a 50 LTC/block reward, that's _1300_ equivalent coins reward. Think of it that way. Mining _LATER_ will be worth something, unlike every other coin out there so far (modulo coins i havent heard of, and maybe hazardcoin or whatever ridiculousness is next).