Did NEM start with a pure POS when it launched? If so, how did it achieve fair distribution?
Its was free for the first 20 pages or so for people who posted "I am interested" in the Announce thread. After that there was a small fee, which increased every 20 pages. So in the end after sockpuppets were removed they got around 3000 stakeholders who each received a Nem stake (2250000 Nem).
It wasn't POS and all was released on the genesis block
Wow, so it was basically all given away when the genesis block was created. That is very interesting model compared to the usual POW launch. Was there any issues regarding getting on exchanges by using this distribution model?
Not interesting at all, it happens all the time and there's alway coin giveaways. It just happens that NEM turned into a real project, one of the few.
And why would there be issues listing it on exchanges? That doesn't make sense at all, there was issues with duplicate accounts and sock puppets but NEM foundation was very proficient at getting rid of most spammers/sock puppets.
I qualified for the free stake at the beginning but I ended up donating the NXT for the NEM to the foundation since I saw it as only acting in a fair way in accordance to the spirit of crypto space.
My "interesting" comment wasn't a criticism. I was just curious on the details of how NEM was launched and how POS coins can be launched fairly.
I didn't think you criticized NEM, I was just pointing out that the initial distribution wasn't all that interesting.
Even NEM didn't have a fair launch, UtopianFuture unfairly created and still controls many of the sockpuppets accounts he made to enrich himself/ his team. It was a sort of "premine" with the disguise of actual users which turned out to be sockpuppets from him.
Ironically he was the one heading the sockpuppet removal from the NEM distribution.
He supposedly retired but everyone that was involved from day one knows that he just stopped logging into his UtopianFuture account, made some announcement to pacify the community and is still around involved with NEM. We don't know who he might be, the only people that might know are the team involved in the creation of NEM and even then only 1 or 2 people might know who he is.
In the end, it doesn't matter because NEM is turning out to be something bigger than UtopianFuture anticipated. It was thanks to the efforts of other devs and community members stepping in and not letting the project die. Otherwise it would have been another coin that got pumped and dumped/died into obscurity.