FYI, PPC is at 15M coins and has a similar fast ramp you can look at. It's different denominator in the bottom fraction (D^4) and since PoS started it got WAY more complex, but the general result was the same.
1) PPC is preannounced 1 week before release on
bitcointalk, no we didn't just announce it on our own website
2) PPC block chain started at difficulty 256 and 800 blocks later it was already at difficulty 1000. So no we didn't allow massive amount of low difficulty blocks by design. Our continuous difficulty adjustment works well to further limit the number of initial low difficulty blocks.
Yes early adopters are still rewarded with more ppc but that's over weeks and months plus 1 week pre-announcement on bitcointalk so it is much more fair for the mining society interested in altcoins.
I'm sure folks would have bent out of shape if you had given out 9999 PPC per block to the first few miners, which is a bit different than the (more) consistent block reward for FRC or BTC. Even the ~2500 rewards you started at were pretty large, so some folks might have the same argument about unfairness. There was also the fact that it took 2 days between 0 and 1 with that high difficulty. Don't get too high on a pedestal there King, your refusal to provide detailed background information and detailed calculations and modeling was pretty bad at the beginning, and caused me to limit my level of involvement with your project.
Personally I don't blame this team for leaving this board for most of their functions, they have been abused every time they have tried to get feedback. You may have noticed that BTCFPGA and BFL have done the same thing, there IS a pattern here, but it is not "being unfair to miners."
Much better short answer:
I don't understand. Are you trying to claim that PPCoin had a more fair initial distribution? I disagree with that statement. If you would like to dissect it we can do it in a new thread. Specifically, you chose the block reward as the inverse of the difficulty. If you think Freicoin is "unfair" to miners, why does PPCoin pay miners less to do more work?
Yes - a starting difficulty of 1.0 was a major fail. I looked at it and thought, WTF!
However, given the 66% tax, the majority of the initial mining reward goes to the recipients of the foundation money - so the "damage" or "unfair advantage" is contained to 33% of the first few 1000 blocks. Also, one has to acknowledge the fact that an easier mining difficulty will generate cheaper coins. Thus those initial FRC are likely to go into the market for a cheaper than average market price. It's unfair, because the initial miners are likely to make a good profit - however they will likely "kick-start" the market at a lower price point, thus a significant larger fraction of the profit will be available for speculators.
I find another question more relevant: How will the foundation money be denominated? FRC or BTC? And how does the grant proposal scheme work? A centralized grant scheme is against the very nature of cryptocurrencies.
+1 on the kickstarting effect, and remember that a lot of those first coins have changed hands already. I've seen at least 200 k move personally.
Not sure that I agree it was a major fail, I think it's minor in the long run. It sure got coins out there and buzz going. Now if someone starts at
1 difficulty with ASIC's in the wild,
that will be a major fail. Trying to do 2k-10k blocks per second at difficulty 1 and stay in turbo-block-mode for 16k-20k blocks would be one hell of a ride. Or not paying out right, or payout on the wrong formula, or maxing out at the wrong number of coins (cough, litecoin.) This worked as expected, even if it was a bit fast, nothing broke significantly.