People on r/technology are completely delusional and apparently like to comment on things without reading anything about them. Some samples of their fine commentary:
It's more "someone gives what they claim is $400 equivalent to everyone, then holds onto what would be billions if the equivalency were true"
This is basically a premine.
Some guy has mined a lot of a cryptocurrency, and then, because Icelands population are pretty well documented/administered, he's said "you can all have some of these coins - they're worth money, trust me"
Value is relative. If you give everyone free money, the value of the money goes down. If everyone has something then it's not worth much. If Aurora coins were worth anything, they wont be when they've all been claimed.
I'm a huge cryptocurrency advocate, but this isn't the way it should be happening. This rushed efforts by pseudonymous individuals are doing more harm than good. IMO, when these things inevitably flop because they've not been well thought out, it'll have a negative impact on the concept of cryptocurrencies as a whole.
Maybe it's not that simple? Wait, there was another half to that economic theory... demand!
Everyone has money, is money worthless?
When this system fails (point out one other coin that has been premined and succeeded) the media will say "Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are a failure" when in fact it's just this rushed implementation that will be a failure.
Gotta love those fallacies.
50% of all auroracoins are pre-mined and in control of one private group.
The unclaimed coins will remain with this private group. Now, if the coins are totally anonymous and the Icelanders don't claim them, then the premined coin are an anonymous treasure.
As far as I know, a Brazilian group came up with this brilliant idea: let's create a "coin for Iceland"...100% genius. Now you got another group creating a coin for Spain....and so on.
These "alternative coins" use the Bitcoin software, have a couple of parameters and the logo changed, and bam! New coin! You can start your own coin for a couple hundred dollars, just pay developers and they'll customize the Bitcoin software to your brand.
tl;dr; Someone outside of Iceland is very rich today.
Did you read
anything before you said that?
50% of the remaining coins will go towards a development fund and/or towards an Auroracoin foundation formed by the community. The other 50% will go towards a charity or charities, to be determined democratically by the Auroracoin community.
