Great write up on altcoins, including EMC2.
http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=a_massive_investigation_of_instamines_and_fastmines_for_the_top_alt_coinsEinsteinium
Einsteinium is a cryptocurrency that has a scientific Foundation alongside the coin's creation, The Einsteinium Foundation, intended to fund scientific research. They plan to do this by requiring 2.5% of all mined currency to be automatically devoted to the Einsteinium Foundation's coffers.
Einsteinium has some bizarre coin mechanisms that make a traditional mining assessment such as we have done here difficult. They use something called “wormhole mechanics”, a gimic really, where a random 180 blocks will be mined at a special 2593 EMC2 coin rate. Coins are currently mined at a rate of 512 coins per block 54).
The first round of blocks received 10747
(I know, there are some errors)coins per block. Because of the aforementioned strange methods of altering the mining amounts, we cannot use our traditional method.
By looking at screenshots of
www.coinmarketcap.com, we can get an idea of how many coins were mined early. The first block shows a date of March 1st, 2014 at 6 pm.
The earliest we see EMC2 on the leaderboard is March 19th, showing some 27 million EMC2 created by that point.
One day later, on March 20th, we can see a coin increase of around 1.7 million EMC2…
The next available screenshot of
www.coinmarketcap.com isn't until March 26th…
http://i61.tinypic.com/2vjy6c5.png}{{http://i61.tinypic.com/2vjy6c5.png}}What does this tell us? There will be a little less than 300 million EMC2 produced in time. From March 1st to April 11th, 60 million EMC2 were produced. It's hard to tell what this means exactly. Less than 20% of the coins were created in a month. That seems a little bit problematic. It's not an instamine but it kind of feels like a fast mine. Yet, the coin increases it's “wormhole” event probability as the coin's life goes on, which means by the time the end of the coin production phase nears, there will be wormhole events (i.e. blocks equaling a large 2593 EMCs) all the time. This certainly gives back some advantage from the early adopters and benefits late adopters, a commendable position. But wouldn't giving too much advantage to the late comers be just as unhelpful as giving too much advantage to the first adopters? In addition to their scientific foundation, it is hard to say how to categorize this “ethical” currency in relation to its mining practices.
All in all, ethical coins should be encouraged. We want the cryptocurrency revolution to be more than just making money. But we need to keep our guard up at all times, even if initial reports show that a certain coin appears to be okay.