Yes, exactly, the original PPCoin demonstrated that the difficulty was too low even way back then.
However much NoVaCoin increased it presumably also was not enough?
So by the time BitBar came out it should have been apparent that even more increase was needed...
-MarkM-
Nope, ppcoin started at difficulty 256, the first block took about 20 minutes to arrive after build was published. For a SHA-256 coin, it was reasonable at that time.
Novacoin started with a very low difficulty for scrypt coins, so you probably could generate early blocks very fast with even cpu. That's how Balthazar got > 110K coins. Technically Balthazar didn't 'premine' either, he told his compatriot about the release.
Bitbar started with very low difficulty too.
I would recommend developers who want to fork ppcoin, to pick a higher starting difficulty. Due to the way minting is designed in ppcoin, block subsidy would drop as difficulty increase, if you pick low starting difficulty, it would greatly amplify first day mintage and give the public an impression of heavy premining. For ppcoin, we started at a high difficulty of 256 and with 9 days of announcement, yet there are still people accusing us of premining to this day.
