CoinMarketCap could easily put an end to this debate by changing the tag to "significantly pre-mined, insta-mined or ninja-mined". So my suggestion is to make this change.
This. Or alternately select coins that had a clearly scheduled release time publically announced say a minimum of 24 hours ahead of any mining, with coins subsequently emitted substantially in accordance with the originally published schedule. Filter the rest.
XMR should be included with this tag as well because of the scam mining software they released on launch. It is was purposely "de-optimized" so that the developers and insiders could mine at 100x the speed of the normal user.
That's false. The difference in the deliberately de-optimized code was more like 2x-9x, and it was fixed by us as soon as we found out about it, affecting roughly 1% of the coins, or possibly less (it is hard to know how many of the coins were mined by non-scammers but it was clearly a lot). That's likely not "significant" even if the definition included it
Yes, with a lot of work and a high level of expertise in completely rewriting and optimizing code over a period of two months you could eventually speed it up by around 100x but that was not (beyond the 9x) from removing the deliberately de-optimized part, it was investing a lot of skill and effort in improving something from which any deliberate de-optimizations had already long since been removed.
Smooth and friends claim that this was an oversight or an accident, just like Evan claims the same for that launch of xcoin/dash. Same issue, same tag?
No, because mining optimization has nothing to do with premining or instamining. The supply of coins was and is unchanged from its original specifications.
Every single coin has miners optimizing in different ways, its always been that way since day one of crypto, and it will always be that way until the last day. That's not a scam, it's skill. I will grant the original de-optimizations that lasted a few weeks was indeed a scam by the original developer (not us) but it was small in magnitude and didn't affect the supply of coins at all, only who mined them.
The launch was clean in the sense that it was clearly announced ahead of time (and indeed the code was available so anyone could have examined the mining code and optimized it themselves if they wanted), launched on schedule, difficulty and speed of emissions promptly adjusted as specified, and the emissions were never subsequently changed. There is no premine/instamine issue here, whatever other issues there may be.