Topic: Initial Coin Distribution Importance (Read 1095 times)

I agree that technology and community are the most important components for the success of a coin.

But if the development team premines more than 1% or perhaps 2% for themselves, I would consider it as unfair. Cryptocurrencies are potentially worldwide payment systems, and in case of success that would mean the team having a huge revenue and an unfair advantage 1) to other coin users, 2) to other software developers.

Peercoin and Nxt are examples for relatively fair distribution mechanisms (I prefer Peercoin's a little bit more as its distribution stage reaches potentially more people).

That is true.

Even if the guys at Ripple Labs decide not to do any obvious shenanigans, the simple fact that they hold so much of the total value (and thus power) in a decentralized distributed network might not sit too well with some people.

Bob, I think I may have over-simplified what I was trying to say about initial coin distribution.  Here's the thing.  Imo for a 2.0 project like Ripple, they might get away with the fact that they have one of the worst distributions out there.  Here's why...  

  * Ripple Labs is a for profit company.  So in effect it is in their interest for XRP to go up.

  * We know their identities (devs, execs, etc...), and know that they could get imprisoned for fraud if they do
     any shenanigans.

In Bitcoin's case, it must be very important.  And the fact that Satoshi holds 1m BTC may be a problem.  Why...

  * We do not know who he really is and what he intends to do with his coins. He cannot be held liable for
      anything because he's anonymous.

So I think knowing a person's identity, his intentions and that he can be held liable for fraud has to be given more importance than distribution.  Not saying that distribution isn't important at all.  Because if one dev wants to be anonymous, then distribution must be fair as much as possible to encourage trust in the system.
    

Edit:  I started a thread about why Satoshi didn't "burn" his coins if he doesn't have any intention in gaining access on them in the future https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/does-satoshi-still-have-plans-to-access-his-coins-1045997

Some inputs with be nice.

NXT's distribution is much better today than it was originally. The fact that it's price has been quite low for some time now probably helps as well. Here's an interesting infographic I found about the subject. It's pretty old so the numbers are probably even better today:




Agreed. Well said. Distribution does affect the chances of a coin surviving but a highly innovative coin should be able to overcome it except in the most serious cases.

Wuuut?  Nah man.  You intorduced me to her.  Don't you remember?

What about ripple?
Man, ripple is not even a real cryptocurrency. The company still holds a large premine. I don't think ripple can ever claim to be fairly distributed. What ripple did right was drawing in gullible people and some bigger investors with their shilling. I don't think ripple will ever go mainsteam.

What about NXT? Well, it was open to the public to buy in the beginning and possibly one could call it fair but it isn't a wide distribution. NXT was fair but not good (wide) distributed. It did go places however. But in both cases ripple and nxt some technical innovation justified their marketcap. DRK same story. In cases of great first mover innovation large cap can be aquired without good distro but these coins always need to fear the copycat that is better distributed. NEM cuts into the demand for NXT, several anon coins cut into the demand for DRK and Stellar cuts into the demand for XRP. So these coins all gave room for competition thanks to their bad distro in the beginning.

About bitcoin: Back when it was created and had highest blockrewards people were mining it on their Laptop CPUs. The community in the early years was very small so the distribution is sub optimal and this fact to this day affects market sentiment (satoshi wallet for example will always be a topic and will prevent many people from putting any real money into BTC). Of course it was beyond satoshis control but he could have given away a large amount of these coins too but he didn't.
Today more people know about crypto and i think many of the alts of today have a much better distro than bitcoin had when it was their age.

If you know the coin is very good distributed you can catch a falling knife where this means higher risk on less good distributed coins.

NXT's distribution seems to have turned out pretty well, so that's part of the reason it's still one of the top currencies.

I think distribution is pretty overrated in general, as long as it's not an extreme case there are many more important factors.

Satoshi didn't premine BTC, but he did set up a mining farm and mined the majority of BTC during the first while. Around a million BTC according to expert research.

How about NXT? Or Ripple? Or Darkcoin/DASH which was supposedly instamined? These coins still have very high market caps.


Is there any proof that Bitcoin was actually premined? Didn't Satoshi insert the message "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks" into the genesis block to prove that he didn't mine a ton of coins before it was released?

It might be accurate to say that Bitcoin was ninjamined because Satoshi and Hal Finney were the only ones who were mining it during its early days, however this was almost certainly unintentional and beyond Satoshi's control. Back then, very few people knew about cryptocurrencies and most of those who did realize the potential of decentralized blockchain-based currencies were the same people who Satoshi directly took inspiration from to create Bitcoin. Also, it was announced on a public mailing list from the very beginning.


I agree with this.

It is important if you want to make a successful project. Coins with bad distro don't go very high because smart people (the ones with the money) don't buy it. Litecoin wouldn't be where it is now if it wasn't fairly distributed.

From all the coins i have been looking at i see these as failry distributed: Litecoin, Unobtanium, Vertcoin - that's it. Maybe doge, maybe digibyte, maybe megacoin, maybe clams (but these all go with a questionmark) Bitcoin wasn't fairly distributed (stealth, private premine, ninja launch)

Well, the distribution certainly affects market sentiment a lot a long time into the future.

You been stalking my wife dude? 

I would say that they are definitely "fairer" than most. Both coins had public launches with a lot of people mining in their first few days. Litecoin had a mild instamine where half a million LTC was created in the first six hours but many of these early miners have probably already sold their coins (its creator coblee definitely did). Now that there are almost 40 million LTC mined, this only affects 1.5% of the total supply so it's pretty much irrelevant at this stage:



Link: http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=a_massive_investigation_of_instamines_and_fastmines_for_the_top_alt_coins#litecoin

Dogecoin's chart looks even better. It was launched on December 2013 and I remember it already had many people mining it on 4chan by mid to late-December. I'd be very surprised if it had any severe problems regarding distribution:





Link: http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=a_massive_investigation_of_instamines_and_fastmines_for_the_top_alt_coins#dogecoin1

Did Dogecoin and Litecoin have fair distributions? I have not read any distribution complaints about them yet and they have both been near the top for over a year.

I really don't know that much about Ripple so it's kind of hard to say. As I understand it, their distribution is controlled by Ripple Labs who distributes the XRPs in a centralized manner while keeping a large chunk for themselves (making it similar to a premine). I suspect many people will already see it as being flawed due to this fact alone but personally, I think it could work. Many people don't like the idea of a centralized entity creating coins out of thin air and selling them or handing them out to people whom they see fit but if the technology is good, then 9 times out of 10, it shouldn't fail. Whether or not Ripple "succeeds" really depends more on the technology and how many people/businesses it can manage to get on board than anything else.

Another thing is that XRP's role as an internal currency rather than one used for traditional purchases and/or functioning as a store of value isn't really comparable to the other premined/pregenerated coins that we've seen so far so I guess that's something to consider as well.

What do you think about something like Ripple?  Obviously it's distribution sucks.  But will it succeed?

There aren't that many altcoins out there that can claim to have good distribution but there are many that have poor distribution. An extreme example is Bytecoin (BCN). It was probably mined by a very small group of people from its launch in July 2012 to its discovery on these forums in 2014. During that time, the Bytecoin community was absolutely tiny and exclusively consisted of deep web users. The end result was that 82% of the coins were owned by a very small group of people and thus Monero (XMR) was later launched as a fair relaunch. Monero is currently more active than Bytecoin development and community-wise and despite their comparable market caps, is usually viewed as being the more successful coin of the two.

Then there are coins like NXT which had much better distribution than BCN but were still not 100% perfect. With NXT, 73 initial stakeholders got all of the NXT during their initial distribution with those who had invested the maximum 1 BTC getting the lion's share of this. However, NXT's distribution has improved greatly since its launch and is now comparable to that of Bitcoin's. NEM was created to be the fair relaunch of NXT although unlike XMR, NEM was designed to use brand new code. While it's probably too early to make any real comparisons with NXT, NEM's market cap is currently much smaller than NXT.

While BCN isn't completely dead, it's obvious that the coin's distribution prevented it from achieving widespread appeal. Had Bytecoin not been ninjamined, Monero would probably not exist today. When it come to judging altcoins, distribution is certainly a factor and if extreme enough, then it could potentially break a coin (see Tenebrix as an example of a coin which flopped due to the dev having premined most of the coins) but then again, it's really just one of many other factors to take into consideration as well. My general belief is that if the technology is good, then a coin will survive whether or not it's distribution is ideal. However, this is only really true up to a reasonable limit and if this limit is passed, it's likely that a clone might just rise up and take it's place.

Can't blame you man.  She is hot!

Sorry man.. the wife calls so i gotta answer

What?  You going?  I thought you're staying.  Tell your young beautiful hot wife to let you stay on for a bit.  I'm pretty sure she's ok with it.  Come on, let's make more nested posts, it'll be fun!

You mean keep brain farting? If so its gonna smell pretty bad in here in a bit. Maybe I should twist up a fatty and call it a night.. yeep.. fatty and a massage from the wife and Im off to bed.. later dude. I'll see ya around im sure.

Stay 420 strong my fellow pot brethren.