Yeah looks like most of them start out with a PoW phase initially to "encourage fairer distribution" but seeing as how I've never been and likely never will be a miner really, I feel a bit excluded. But that's on me of course, I'm excluding myself from the party so if I were better, I'd get to participate I think.
Yeah, many of these people are computer nerds and have an edge with 'fair' mining.
But do they offer any value to the coin with mining?
No, mining is poor way to secure the network. Instead of competing who has the strongest computer, you can just compete who has the most coins in order to decide who can validate a transaction. It's called POS.
By just using POS you have much cheaper (validation of) transactions, and much more secure network as 51% attacking POS is much harder than 51% attacking POW.
Thanks to kicking out POW fully, Nxt was able to build the first cryptoplatform.
I actually agree with this. The PoW being necessary or the "easiest way" to secure it and then have a whole separate PoS implementation just seemed to be...kinda lazy to me with a lot of coins that say that. More like they didn't want to bother figuring a more appropriate and consistent solution for their needs, or weren't capable, dunno. I know PoS only becomes a potential issue when A. volume of coins is either super low, super depereciated in value for some reason, etc., where one person or group might feasibly buy up a majority of the supply without much cost, but even then I think the potential attack surface is limited by the implementation of the staking mechanism.
Either way, lots of cool stuff these days regardless and got new version of PPC running smoothly. They have yet to update Peerunity it seems, but should be in a few days.