Interesting concept. I have a LOT of questions. I am going to start with the most pressing ones.
Where do the invite tokens actually come from? It seems like I need an invite token to actually activate my wallet. Though it seems like the key generation was actually done before receiving the token -- at least I got my seed already. Are these tokens coming from the Merit foundation? If so, isn't that a tad centralized?
How long has this project been in development? The roadmap says that the first release was December 2017, but I see 30k commits on Github. When did you actually BEGIN development?
1. Invite tokens are randomly distributed and awarded for mining. Additionally, I think that when you first get an invite, they now give a free additional invite token.
Previously, the mining pool did not distribute invites that were mined using it, but they have changed that and now distribute them to members of the pool.
Yes, you do need an invite token to activate the wallet. I would suggest checking out the discord, its pretty active and a great place to check out if you are looking for invites or more information.
2. I'm not sure when the project started exactly, but I discovered them back in March. At that point the number of people mining on the pool and the community was pretty small, maybe 100 or so, since then it has increased a lot. You'll have to ask someone else for a more detailed answer, but December 2017 sounds about right, they are VERY active with their updates.
The ease of mining was really great for a relatively non-tech-savvy person like me, and I was even able to get my Crypto-Noob friends to start mining.
They also are really actively making updates and are pretty open about discussing all aspects of the project, even the current negatives.
Feel free to use my invite code if you are interested in joining: Crypto
https://wallet.merit.me/?invite=CryptoI can send you a couple MRT to play around with
P.S. Grab the good Aliases while they are still available!