I didn't say the pre-mine hasn't been spent, I asked whether anyone had checked whether it has been.
I thought Thomas had paid out various bounties, but whether he did so from pre-mined coins or other coins of his own I do not know.
Really the pre-mine has historically been such a low total value of coins that it would hardly have been worth spending yet anyway, if one desired to hand out bounties whose dollar-value looked tempting to folk only interested in the actual dollar value of a bounty rather than what its value would be when the coin hit, say, one dollar per coin.
That is why it has so far seemed to me folks might as well just buy a bunch of the coins themselves before doing whatever work to help the coin rather than bother with bounties; it is not as if we could even offer $25 an hour pay for work on the coin if we tried to use the pre-mine to pay for work to be done, whereas anyone actually worth that much or more per hour could relatively easily spend that much on buying coins each hour they work on the coin simply by also doing an hour of paid work on the side too to earn some cash to buy the coin with.
If we can get a block explorer for $100/year how long would the pre-mine last if we had been spending it at that rate, or if we started to do so?
Seems likely it'd be better to let someone spend $100 on buying the coins and $100 on paying for a block-explorer, if having the block explorer would help their investment in coins double-or-more in value.
If we still have the pre-mine handy when the coin reaches a dollar per coin in price we'd have $580,000 to spend on bounties or whatever, at that point it could maybe actually do some good.
At current/historical prices the coin isn't really worth spending, that is a huge reason why I have seldom been tempted to try to use them to pay to have things done. Better to pay for stuff using DeVCoin shares, which are still being minted, until the coins are worth enough that the actual dollar amounts such bounties or pay would be worth would start to look tempting to folk who aren't looking to hold the coin a few years hoping it will eventually become worth something.
In the old days I used to keep my IXCoins and I0Coins offline, figuring I would not even bother to fire up a client to look how many such coins I even had until they reached a dollar or so a coin; I had maybe about 20k or more of each coin back then and figured it wasn't even worth my time to go look how many until I expected to find I had twenty grand or so in dollars in them.
Similarly thus when thinking about bounties: if the receiver of the bounty was not thinking in terms of 1000 coins being $1000 or more why even bother; wait instead for someone who would instead throw $1000 into buying the coins expecting once they did whatever work they had in mind the coins they'd bought with their $1000 would be worth $2000 or more. That there would be some work actually worth paying for, so they would not need us to pay them for it because they could pay themselves out of the profit they made on the coins they held. In fact they could choose to buy $2000 worth of coins before doing the work, so that they'd end up making two grand instead of only one grand for the work once the work did double the value of the coins! Or they could buy $100,000 worth of the coins then do the work, and thus end up getting 100 grand for the work! Etcetera!
Figure out how much coin you need to hold in order for the increase in coin value your work creates to work out to a nice pay per hour, basically!
Me I put in endless hours year after year just typing in buy offers to try to stack up a nice buy-side, and so far I am losing money on those hours working at a cost spending hours while still the coin keeps going down in value, so losing on thousands of hours of labour in addition to any losses from the coins I hold and keep buying losing value. This experience is why I said I would not be surprised to find just getting the buy side built back up to the 10,000 satoshis per coin that I consider to be a minimal, low-end value, a mere partial recovery, seems very likely to leave who-ever does it holding more coins than the pre-mine was; I have seen just how many coins get dumped constantly forcing the buy-side pile back down long before it even gets back to the pathetic, low-value price of 10,000 that I had managed to build it up to on Vircurex before Vircurex stopped honouring the bitcoins I tried to deposit. (That last 2 bitcoins I sent there they STILL have not credited to my account, so I started over on Cryptsy and have a surprising amount of coins there now starting from scratch without getting near 10,000 satoshis per coin yet. I think 7200 was highest I got it to before CEX folks initiated huge new wave of dumping by stopping their mining and trading of the coin.)
Also, I already pay for three dedicated fixed-IP servers, on which I run nodes with open ports that clients can connect to; would it cost another $100 per year on top of what I already pay for those servers to have a block-explorer running there too? I do not happen to know of a git clone -> git pull I could do on one of those machines that would result in a running block explorer though. Historically I was more pressing for fixes to p2pool that would have let people who mined at the p2pool instance I ran there to get paid not only for the bitcoins mined but also for the secondary merged mined coins such as IXCoin the p2pool I ran there was also mining. So never even thought about putting a block explorer there since I had not even managed to get a p2pool working in the way that would have actually paid miners the merged mined coins as well as the bitcoins they mined.
Do other merged mined coins have block-explorers? How are they doing so? DeVCoin for example, is it giving out a share to a block-expolorer-admin to maintain a block explorer? Or is someone donating money to pay some commercial block explorer site to keep DeVCoin in its collection of chains it explores? Or does DeVCoin too not have a block-explorer? If not or it could use another maybe someone interested in such things could make one that explores DeVCoin as well as IXCoin and get a DeVCoin share for doing so as long as DeVCoin is one of the coins it explores?
Or maybe exploring could be added as a compile option into the IXCoin daemon so all three public IXCoin nodes I already run could suddenly also serve as explorers?
-MarkM-