Topic: Insta-mines and pre-mines: How to recognize them: A novice asks. (Read 679 times)

Easiest way is to get to the block explorer and check. Start with beginning blacks and cross check the time with the announcement time. Check also the time differebce of the initial blocks and see whether the number of blocks in th efirst few hours is disproportionately large.

I'm assuming you want to be able to tell at launch, most of us start yelling pretty loud if its becoming an instamine so just read the thread thoroughly. Normally the dev will call a premine a premine, but look for any odd language setting aside coins for anything other than POS and/or POW rewards.

Easy(-ish) Instamine check for within 24 hours of launch: Assuming you are comfortable downloading the new coin's wallet (suggest virtual machine in case theres hidden virus) sync the blockchain then take the current time subtract the time of launch to tell you how long its been released for mining, then divide that time by the blocks solved to get blocks per minute. Coin announces tell you the target time per blocks, if an incredibly larger amount have been mined than should have the difficulty retarget is not performing as planned and it is turning into an instamine. Few miners can get large amounts of coins that should take hours/days/weeks and the trouble is they are candidates for a dump as they cost much less to mine than the coins in the future emitted at the projected normal rate.  Example, 1 coin per block, 1 minute target block time should emit 1440 coins per day, if at the end of the day you see 5000 blocks solved you can tell the retarget did not work and it has been (slightly) instamined. (for what its worth, as more miners join a new coin blocks get solved ahead of schedule while retargets kick in, its not weird to see more solved than planned for to some degree as the coin is running up towards a steady hashrate)

Premine check: most devs are up front about wanting a premine so you can usually tell by the announcement, heck they do deserve to get paid eventually for their work unfortunately with pow coins it can take months for miners to catch up to 1 or 2 % of the coin while one person has held that amount from the start with no guarantee as to what their plans are it can be a dark cloud over a coin. POS coins with a 1-2% premine can be dangerous too though with all the coins emitted there are miners who may easily control many percentages of a coin, it can be dumped but it could be by anyone. in the code you can go to a coins github page and navigate to /src/main.cpp for instance squarebit coin has a 2% premine listed on their announce (opened random announces til i found one with a premine nothing against squarebit)  scroll around the main.cpp file until you find " CBlock and CBlockIndex" it will tell you about the rewards at said blockheights. in the case of squarebit we can se 40,000 coins were created in block 1, then first set of rewards is 500 per block, reducing to zero by block 10080 for the POS phase as can be seen here: https://github.com/Squarebitdata/Sbit/blob/master/src/main.cpp#L971

sorry this may be more complicated answer than your looking for.  truth is if its was premined or instamined doesnt mean its garbage, and even a perfect launch and no premine can still end up in flames.

for premine check how much coins are mined in first few blocks that were mined before public release
and for instamine at the time of launch the devs mine the block fastly with high mining power and sometime they block the connection on nodes for sometime and report it as a tech problem, you can check block explorer and see how fast the first few hundred blocks were mined

go to blockexplorer and look at the first few thousand blocks being mined. Is reward and time of blocks correct?

Coinmarketcap indicates premined coins by placing * or ** next to the available coin supply.

* means Not Mineable
** means Significantly Premined

I suppose it would be nice to see some kind of iteration tree that could tranche coins as they come out.

A bot that can batch all coins and new coins as they come out.

I can see all kinds of moral hazard in such an effort.

I suppose a mutual fund of crypto would be nice for a guy like me ....

Infancy ...... what an incredible innovation this crypto world  is .....


....

 

Thanks for the responses.

At some point, hopefully an appraiser type person/group will come up with a way to segregate coins into groups.

As this crypto world matures .... hopefully folks will pass on the learning curve and the low info guy like myself can make more confident moves in this arena.

Right now it is quite mesmerizing to witness the absolute mad dash towards filling some kind of crypto niche yet to be filled.

Cheers

Yeah, take 30 minutes to write up how to check. Too lazy sorry.

Insta a flash mines are signs of an impending pump and dump and a short coin lifetime, the best source of information is the source code and the emission curve what you can check in the blockchain statistics.

Premines are more difficult topic as the fate of the premined coins depends only on the intentions of the dev. IPO/ICO/ITO stuff is a special case, as it easily could be a PD even if the dev has honest intentions but a PD group messed up everything.

here is a nice source of info http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=a_massive_investigation_of_instamines_and_fastmines_for_the_top_alt_coins

I prefer non premine coins that pay high interest stake, TEKcoin, HBN, etc.

As a beginning investor:

How does one recognize an insta-mine or a pre-mine?

And how does one recognize stealthy efforts that disguise a big portion pre-mine ?

I have seen one site that rates coins; but (Gecko - I think) .... but it appears to miss the boat on details about pre-mining factors.

How a coin is rolled out and made available is quite important so as to distinguish hype from potential value.

A site which was able to show a graph for each coin to expose its roll out would quickly help get rid of scam coins.

We might even find that out of 500 coins .... maybe 10 or so are worth bothering with.


Any thoughts?