But if a premine isn't a good idea (for a real, long-term Bitcoin competitor), how to launch a coin, being able to pay for development and some marketing?
I've collected some possible strategies which don't hurt decentralization too much. The following list are methods I would approve, from "simple" to "sophisticated":
- 1. Invest in mining and mine strongly at the start, without instamining*. The simplest one. This requires some initial capital if the goal is really to mine a good amount, but it is the fairest launch policy.
- 2. Collect donations before and during the launch.. Also a simple one, which needs no further explanation. The advantage from 1) is that you don't need that much capital, but the disadvantage is that you need good fundraising/communication/PR skills and maybe connections to interested businesses.
- 3. Create a side business, e.g. an exchange, and earn money primarily with this business. This one also needs some capital. But if the coin becomes popular, it ensures a first mover advantage and can be quite profitable.
- 4. Create a token on the new coin's token platform and sell it, for example as an utility token. If you are a developer, you can accept the token for development work, or if you own any business, for the business's products. Utility tokens for existing services have the advantage that for example in Europe they often don't need regulatory approval.
- 5. Don't start a new coin, but mine or buy up a dead coin which was launched fairly. This is a quite simple method if you don't have the fundraising skills and/or mining equipment for method 1. I'm quite sure this method could become popular, so old almost dead fairly launched coins may not be a bad investment. In some cases, such coins were rebranded (Zelcash/Flux, Burst/Signum).
- 6. Voluntary developer fees. As a variant of method 2, you can publish an implementation of the coin where by default a part of the transaction fees or the miner reward goes to a development team. As long as you always can forfeit and not pay the fee without any disadvantage, this is simply a donation, and is thus acceptable for me.
*I define an instamine as "mining before publishing the source code and announce the launch" -- but this is in my opinion equivalent to premining, so I don't recommend it if the goal is really to be able to market a "fair launch". Also I don't like the method of simply forking an old coin like BCH did, because in this case you have modified its consensus with a centralized decision - for me these coins are "contamined" forever, BCH will never be BTC even if it tries hard.
Method 1 (mining at the start) has several variants which can increase your possibility to mine with a relatively low difficulty without recurring to a full-fledged instamine:
- Beta/Test version launch: You can declare the first version as "experimental", "beta" or "test". For example, you could clarify that the protocol can change during this phase, but the mined coins stay valid.
- Announce the launch but don't be too vocal about it. This is approximately what Steem did, and called sometimes "stealth mining". I think it's still an acceptable launch policy. Nobody can force you to make marketing.
- Local community launch: Launch the code repo/installation instructions or announce the coin in a language other than English. This was not well looked at in the past, but I consider it acceptable. Why should everybody accept English supremacy? Isn't that Anglocentrism?
My personal favorites are methods 3, 4 and 5. These are really open methods, accessible to almost anybody, while 1 and 2 require investments or relatively controversial sub-strategies (the variants below), and 6 is a gamble, because it can be seen as "centralism" if abused.
If anybody knows more methods, I'm happy to add them to the list!