People use the term 'premine' because it's easier than explaining what actually went down, which was an unfair distribution of coins.
I always found it amusing that FTC was claimed to take after LTC because the dev was enamored with what the LTC devs had done with their coin, but FTC actually is different from LTC in one crucial way.
LTC focused on a fair to everyone launch where the miners had plenty of time to see the post and prepare their miners. Let's not forget that GPU mining didn't exist at the time for scrypt, and despite that, FTC starting difficulty remained the same.
I figure I should chime in. Now that Litecoin is almost 2 years old, most people don't know or have forgotten how much effort I put in to make sure that the Litecoin launch was fair. I think that's one of the main reasons why Litecoin succeeded and why most of these recent alt coins will fail.
See the chart for the first week of Litecoin?
http://cryptometer.org/litecoin_90_day_charts.htmlNotice the days between the first 2 blocks and the 3rd block? Looks strange and none of the other alt coins have this. This is because I mined the genesis block and another block to confirm it, and then released the source code and binaries. People had almost a week to look over the source code and mine some Litecoin testnet coins to make sure the everything works. And they can decide whether or not they wanted to mine Litecoin from the start. Then at the community-voted launch date and time, I released the hash for the genesis block and pretty much everyone started mining at the same time.
This is pretty much as fair as I could possibly make it. It's too bad that all these new coins copied the Litecoin code but not the launch process.
Speaking as John, not for Feathercoin, we have a very different idea of free market principles. FTC was not premined, everyone that wanted to participate in mining the coin had an opportunity when it was posted. For those that chose to pass, fantastic. Personally, I came later to the party. I purchased my FTC from a few of the known members here and decided to contribute to the project after the fact.
We have quite a few interesting projects in the Feathercoin community, feel free to stop by and say hi. Many of our members also hold Litecoin, I'm one of them.
" think that's one of the main reasons why Litecoin succeeded and why most of these recent alt coins will fail."
We'll have to agree to disagree. As we talk with merchants, that's certainly not the words coming out of their mouths. They want great merchant tools, support and an easy way to provide products to their customers. Personally, I wish you the best, I'll leave it at that.
John