Really i dont mind a modest premine. I think it gives good incentives. If the devs are holding 5% of the currency supply than i see this as fair and good for the project since they have incentives to make their stake more valuable. But im forced to wonder if, as a result of such a short mining period, if the devs are holding much more than 5%. It worries me, and i think a lot of other people as well.
To clear the air: There was no premine here and in fact this was launched twice to make it even more super fair. And this crypto was written from scratch.
*edit* removed snarky shit
I was here on day two of mining, I consider myself one of only a handful of miners that are still here. The vast majority of large miners all sold ages ago for a quick profit. Being well connected and heavily involved from a hobbyist/supporter stand point I think that less than 10% of the total coins are still in the hands of the original miners including me.
The coin was launched twice and the PoW was cut short by a fair bit because some insanely powerful dark-hashrate came online on the network. It was the first time I had seen the secret proprietary asics in action. This dark hashrate I called the 'mad hasher' had 2+ times the total nethash of all other miners combined including the multipools! When this mad hasher showed up they started getting at times 60-70% of all blocks. There was a great emergency as the mad hasher would have taken nearly half the total supply. The devs quickly made the decision to cut the POW phase short to prevent the mad hasher from having to much supply. I thought it was the best way to protect the couple hundred or so actual miners who had been working hard on the coin from the start. I think it was the best option and greatly protected the distribution actually.
Me and several people combed the blockchain and eventually think we located the address used by the mad hasher, They sold the last on the second rise a couple weeks after PoW was over.
I actually think, that in typical 'good dev' fashion that SDC dev's don't have that man coins. I would actually prefer they did! Several other coins I have been heavily involved with had similar situations. Hell, Bushido of Vertcoin didn't even Mine his own coin! Several miners including myself took up a donation for him to get him a slice so if his coin took off he could at least buy a Honda civic or something haha.
I've been here since the near the beginning so I've seen how it has gone down. And that is why I am still here. The dev's (ryno, techno) specifically don't really seem to care about the markets, or PR or any of this junk I swim in. They just code.... This is why I think they don't have many SDC, Extremely easy tweaks and a few extra announcements all along this path could have us sitting on a much higher market cap. Instead... they just code....