Alt coins. What are the dead giveaways that an alt coin is a scam coin or a pump and dump scheme.
Most of them are, but look for total lack of innovation. Why does the coin exist and what ios the point of it? If there is none then likely a crapcoin.
What is the downside of pre-mining? OneCoin has just started their closed source mining on Jan 20 and has already mined 550,000 of their own coins. They claim that this mining internal of their own network is only a way to make it "fair" for the network. They plan to mine the majority of their own coins prior to going public and are still not in an exchange.
The downside is it's a con designed to make the devs richer.
Bottom line question: What is the best way for newbies to cut their teeth in cryptocurrency?
Avoid alt coins and buy bitcoin. You can easily earn your first coins from this forum via a signature campaign so I'd avoid 99.9% of alts altogether.