Only around 280 million according to Mrvega (who is a moderator on their forum) has been distributed so far.
So in a nutshell it's a 99.72% premine and they have 94% control of current tradeable stellar (5 billion coins for themselves plus the 280 they issued so far = 95% of coins that can be put on an exchange).
Then the remaining 6% of coins are largely owned by early birds, people with tons of fake facebook and speculators, et cetera. On their forum they already have people bragging about owning millions and tens of millions of stellar (most it one way or another coming from fake facebook accounts pre-verification requirement).
So yes I would consider this coin to be a scam. It's all capitalization manipuilation like Aurora coin pre-air drop, Marine Coin and Solar coin. Very easy to manipulate a coin when you have 94% control of current tradeable coins.
Really Stellar is a repackaged Ripple founded by a Ripple developer. If you think it's a new company then you would probably enjoy the 'real wrestling' on WWE, a 8 year old thinks it real but an adult shouldn't.
Stellar is really just capitalizing on the 'egalitarian fad' that you see in upcoming 2.0 coins so they forked Ripple and tried to pass off the egalitarian rhetoric.
The problem is, while Stellar might be 'free', it's far from being fair distribution as Stellar owns 99.72% premine and 94% of current tradeable coins. While they used to give out thousands of stellar, now it's down to $10 and a lot of people are reporting they don't even get the full $10 anymore!
BTW Ripple pulled the same junk. Ripple promised to distribute its' coins but it never did. Neither will Stellar. They wouldn't kill off their own money machine.
Looks like Bitcointalk just made a whole bunch of instant millionaires in California. All they had to do was copy Ripple, give it a reskin and a rebrand and pesto - easy several million.
It isn't even a proper method for a digital currency. It's worse than Auroracoin and Solarcoin and all that, because all you need is an FB account, and one can make one easily. Anyone can use bots to create hundreds and claim hundreds of Stellar-Crap. Ripple is dying, and they quickly created another scheme to absorb money.
What a bunch of evil geniuses.
Go try it. Only verified accounts apply. Stop the fud if you are uninformed well.
I have no idea. I just tried it, and I can't even find the connect to Facebook thing lol.
What he is saying is correct, Ripple and Stellar are premined and given to the "developers", which allows them to dump it currency once it reaches a high value.
TaunSew isn't scamming anyone, he's expressing his opinion.