I did a few skims over the source today, a diff against NXT and a quick glance over all of the classes in the crypto library. No hidden surprises in the wallet, no obviously blatent bugs/oversights, no shenanigans with hidden pre-mines etc. This means the only argument someone could make to yell "SCAM" with would be the dev pre-generating some huge plot. I think this is not so unfair at all, and would be hard to call scammy.
Overall an excellent launch. Kudos to the dev(s)!
To be sure, I deleted all of jars, downloaded dependencies manually, and built from source on both linux and windows under cygwin. Building on windows took some fiddling with classpath, but otherwise went fine.
I've generated a few GB of plot and am mining, but no blocks yet. I'm assuming by now that some people already have huuuuge plots.
I think the mining process could be optimized a lot, but I personally don't have much time to put toward it and don't want to have to either trudge through java land or do a new implementation... Maybe later.
I think this is a great concept and has a lot of promise to move blockchain technologies forward, but I worry about the economics of the coin. It is hard to value "empty storage space over time" in a meaningful way. It is pretty easy to quantify your availability of electric capacity under traditional PoW, as energy costs are fairly fixed. Storage space is not very scarce, and it's costs (at large scales, anyway) are somewhat variable.
it could be improved by instead of storing un-relevant data, its store useful data.
for example to store a filesharing on blockchain, the larger u store people (network) file, the larger chance that ur nonce will be valid to announce block
