You are absolutely right, this is a bit sloppy. The premine was a little below 25 billion. It is lost somewhere in the thread above, but the formal premine (which you can find in the source code on github) was "only" 24 billion. Then we also did a small in-class experiment (about 1 week of mining which should give 2400 blocks or 24 million SMLY), so the full premine was 24 billion plus a few million mined during the experiment. We really wanted to do the in-class experiment with rewards before launching, just to know whether we were missing something.
I guess I could have counted the exact number, but it felt simpler to just talk about 50% even though it is actually slightly less (more like 48%).
Sorry for the confusion.
That's OK
So there are less than a billion non-premine coins out there? But that can't be, as I have more than a billion. So the coin supply figure on coinmarketcap must be totally off.
EDIT: Sorry, I don't have more than a billion
Not good at counting!
Right, you shouldn't have a billion. If you look at coinplorer - at
https://coinplorer.com/SMLY - then there are a few addresses where people have about 100 million stored, but nothing more than that.
We're now mining block 96285 and except for the first few premine blocks, each has paid 10 000 SMLY so the total mined, in billions, should be 96285*10000/1e9 which gives 0.96285 and this (plus 24) is very close to the number given in coinmarketcap (the difference should just be that coinmarketcap correctly deletes the 10 K SMLY from the first few blocks). I can find the exact formula if needed.
We should be mining half the potential in 7 years, i.e. 12.5/7=1.78 billion per year. We are about 8 months into the first year and don't quite have 1 billion yet. I believe this is due to the occasional spikes in difficulty, which takes so long to get back down again. Hopefully the change proposed above will alleviate this. The student rewards are starting off even slower: The plan was to do the same, i.e. give ca 1.8 billions in rewards per year, but the first large course to use the SMLY only starts in September and we've really just been testing how to adjust the rewards for different achievements. Therefore only about 3 million SMLY have been used in rewards so far, but I'm hoping that will take a bit of a jump already in September. It won't be anywhere close to a billion though.