Topic: Whats the difference between an ICO and a 100% Premined Altcoin? (Read 163 times)

Incredible some of the replies here, there is a huge difference. With an ICO, the project now has a lot of funds it can use to hire people, pay project expenses, and develop the project much quicker and with a bigger vision compared to if they had no funds. A 100% pre-mine has no funds to do anything with. That is the difference.

Look at BitCoin, it is the oldest and most highly dedicated coin there is, but it had no ICO just volunteers, and it is behind ETH (which had an ICO) in terms of scalability, cost, speed, smart contracts and utility.

ICO does define both mineable altcoins as well as issued tokens on or off smart contract.
A premined coin whether small percentage or 100, can sell some amount of premined coins as ICO to gather the funds for development and maintenance of that particular coin.
And generally ICO of a newly issued token is held by a particular company to fund it's project.

ICO is generally on ERX20 Token are Token are created within few hours, whereas minable coin requires a lot of time and
it's not possible that anyone can 100% Mine all Coins,
HE/SHE will leave either  30% 20% or 10% for other miners,

They are both coin/token in the first place. ICO or Initial coin offering offers project of a company or a technology that can be use in the near future it can be premined coin or smart contract token. In General, People would buy it if the demand is too high.

Gobs and gobs of greed to go around.

Bump.

It's interesting how everyone is turning a blind eye on this subject, the copy/paste erc20 disaster.

Interesting how people call ZCash a scam because is has a massive 20% dev fee and yet promote a 100% premined scam ICO in their signature.

As if running a 100% premined coin on Scrypt is any different than running a 100% premined ICO on ERC20.

You need BTC to buy the first.
You need ETH to buy the second.

The devs get 100% of your funds. First scenario.
The devs get 100% of your funds. Second scenario.

First scenario: devs walk away but in reality no one has tried that yet in real lifen
Second scenario: devs walk away and almost every ERC20 dev has done that.

Eth used to be called a platform for "smart contracts". That name is now long gone. The only contract ever written was DAO that got hacked and ICO generator which is used 100x daily to make 100% premined coins.

And every single ICO must an purchased with ETH. And mostly all that ETH is helping Vitaliks 60M premine of the Eth.

There is no "platform" with ICOs with a few minor exceptions, they are wholly owned and sold by a small team. And technically the ERC20 tokens are 100% premined, except that to buy a 100% premined altcoin you need BTC, to buy a 100% premined ERC 20 ICO you need ETH. And ETH had a billion dollar premine itself 12M coins were mined for Vitalik and his team.

ICO = 100% Premine Altcoin

  OP is spot on, it is the same.  The difference is perception and presentation, you have told people upfront there is a pre-determined number of coins/tokens, so they accept thats the deal.  With a premine the project is claiming everyone can get involved from the start, but not quite the start, so they see the project as getting an unfair amount of the distribution.

I haven't heard of a 100% premined altcoin ever. Maybe you are referring to ETH tokens. Yes, in a way they are 100% premined by the project's team. But I guess the reason people invest in such ICOs is for their crowdfunding. You are crowdfunding their projects and you get some tokens in return, which give you early advantage in their platform. Maybe later you can sell them at a higher price too. Or use them like it is being used in Lunyr, Decentraland etc. And of course many people are just for the pump and dumps. Community has changed. Quick profits is what everyone wants, so people are investing in any project where they can secure a top position and later sell their tokens at higher prices.

SO

Whats the difference between an ICO and a 100% Premined Altcoin?

Arent they essentially the same thing? Someone mined all the coins in a blockchain for himself and SELLs them for fiat/BTC/ETH for his personal gain and calls it an ICO (with a few exceptions such as BAT for example).

Back in the day when someone premined 2% and then introduced the coin we would all get riled up and mad and call him a scammer. Even worse, there were some developers who didnt premine but somehow when the wallet/mining software was intraduced there were difficulties so somehow a large sum was "instamined". Yes Instamine was a BAD word back then because it meant someone Instantly mined say 1% of the total coins for himself . That was frowned upon.

Now a 100% premine, is all cool and these ICO dudes have Instagram ads and websites! I am stunned or maybe I dont understand the difference. Well technically I know a fork of litecoin and a "smart contract" are different in terms of programming language but essentially an ICO is a block chain where the owner has collected ALL the coins for himself and sells them for profit.

I was busy on this forum back in 2013 but I have been away since 2014 and just got back (they deleted my username here) in the game and I am kind of stunned by the appearance of these 100% premined, 100% creator owned altcoins called ICOs and how our community tolerates them. Whats worse is that all the money that goes into ICOs actually goes into the Ethereum owners pocked who sells the Eth to buy the ICO.

So what happened? How did we succumb to this?