So was PTS written from scratch by i3?
PTS was created and released by FreeTrade, who used the momentum algo used earlier in his own MemoryCoin. He was awarded a bounty by I3 to do that.
I'm curious as to how easy it was for them to simply switch it over to DPoS. And I also wonder how viable doing that would be for existing PoW currencies.
It was not a fork, it was a snapshot and a new genesis block was initialized from that. The problem arises, as I3 found out after the merger/inflation (or whatever term alphaBar prefers), that the chain lives on as long as there are miners.
In principle every coin can be converted, the trick lies in convincing the exchanges and merchants (if any) to switch over.
It sounds like in this case some people have a large amount of PTS or something and want to get whatever they can out of it.
Mostly correct, the effort was put in by some of the big holders to squeeze out as much value as possible.
Having said that, I know at least one individual who was attracted to the deflationary aspect.