You are applying "house rules" to a coin that isn't playing by them. I find this thread myopic.
120K registered users or unique users checking in per month? There is a big difference. Poloniex doesn't compare to something with volume like Jango.com. NEU growth is linked to Jango.com usage and growth. Do you have access to comscore? Compare Jango and Poloniex. You don't get fully accurate numbers but it is good for comparing the size of two sites. (Jango.com gets 10-20x as many unique visitors without counting mobile apps.)
The question is how you define "user". Let's say I buy some Neu and make an account on Jango and I tip some others there. Do I make them to "users"? I wouldn't agree with that. They just have an account with some Neucoins and most likely the majority won't care about it. And even if it's widely used on Jango... what would that mean? It's like a thump-up-button but without any real usecase that would give real value. If just 5 persons would try to collect as many coins on jango like they could and dump it on Bittrex the price would be at 1 sat. The only reason why that doesn't happen is because it has no value.
And what we don't see is that hundreds of new users, or at least 10 of those claimed 8000 new users per day make an account on the official forum or tweet how great Neucoin is. What does that mean? 8000 new users every day but nobody cares? And why should they? You could tip every account on Jango and it wouldn't change anything.
And the comparison with Poloniex is because that are real users! Just a little bit more than 100k but that's an economy. Jango is no economy and if the Coins on Jango would flow to Bittrex the price would crash even more.
The innovation is exactly the stuff you don't like, which means you overlook it as innovation. Nothing wrong with that, its a personal choice. You have to realize you are being highly altruistic in your requirements. Again, nothing wrong with, that but it lacks a little bit of pragmatism. What you are asking is very unlikely to occur without some monetary motivation (aka greed)
Not sure if I understand what you mean with
"The innovation is exactly the stuff you don't like, which means you overlook it as innovation.". Maybe you want to say that there is innovation but I don't recognize it as innovation? If yes, the question is where is the innovation? I mean, tipping and micro-transactions will definitely be a use case in crypto. But it won't be the way like Neucoin tries it. I believe it will be part of a project like Ethereum, maybe with a special Ethereum-micro-Coin but backed with the whole protocol. It needs an economy around it instead a monster-premine with a monster-inflation.
And no, my thoughts are not about altruism. And of course, it needs financial intentions or at least it would be naive to believe it would go without that. But if greed is the only real intention without any further philosophy it won't work. And what I try to say with that is already proven. The fact that they have to switch to full PoS (which has even a more intensive centralizing-effect on the eco-system) and to destroy half of the total supply is the admission that it wasn't well thought through. How is it possible that we here could easily predict what would happen and make calculations about it while the team behind planned it for more than a year with totally naive assumptions? I don't think they are stupid. I believe what I've said: Blinded by greed. Not thinking in scenarios to find the best way for the project, just believing in what they hope what would make them rich quick.
Ultimately the "decentralization" concern comes down to the PoS vs PoW argument. NEU will be centralized for a time. Neucoin is decentralizing its currency by paying them out to consumers as rewards. It is going to take a while but in reality is not any more BS than an average PoW model. (eth has an amazing PoW model, but I digress) There is a hidden PoW model in the neucoin approach. Instead of buying an expensive graphics card or ASIC and burning electricity to solve arbitrary problems, people frequent websites or create content. Its human-based PoW. They then have the option to grow their coins by staking or using a growth account that functions just like a common CD.
We don't need to talk about PoW or PoS. I'm not convinced about PoS-Systems and that's also a concern regarding ETH, because they want to switch to a PoS-model (but it's also different).
The real question is: Why this huge premine and why this high inflation rate? And they could destroy the whole premine but it wouldn't rescue Neucoin, just because of the high inflation. The market can't even handle the 200 Mio.
Which of the two approaches do you think is the most inclusive of average consumers?
The problem in all eco-systems is that it all has a centralizing effect. But PoS even more/faster, while it has a lot more risks at the same time. I don't believe that any PoS-project will survive in longterm. Ethereum maybe, but it's a different design, not the usual PoS.
They've taken steps to address some of the major concerns raised here. Decentralization will be accelerated and the number of coins will be greatly reduced. This coin is so young. Will you not have a different opinion many years from now when the coins have been distributed and are no longer centralized? It may not start trading well until that point, but I'd rather be staking a few coins in the meantime.
I see no reason to be optimistic that this project will survive the next 12 months. The reason is very simple: They've raised money in the ICO = 4,012 BTC. About 78 BTC are left.
https://blockchain.info/address/3MrNuksZ1VePU3dGiSQFiouWerJUJgDkfHI don't know what they did with the money but it doesn't look as if they would spend it for the development. But if they have such a monthly burning rate, how will they move on? There are just two scenarios:
1. They've used it for Neucoin, which would mean that it's way too expensive and than they won't be able to pay the next months.
2. They've used it for different purposes - not the project. Than it's..... hmm....
And who makes good work for free? Will they pay the Developers with Neucoin? And they have dump it on the market because they need money to pay their bills?
In fact there is a third scenario:
3. They still have the money, just not on that address and they will be able to pay the next months. But: Where is the development? What are they doing? Sometimes I showed the github of Factom with their daily updates. They have to pay a big team of Devs, advertising, they have to travel and so on... I don't see anything like that in Neucoin.
So, under the line that's just one reason why I'm sure that this project has no chance. The other is the economical-design. And there are a lot of projects with really innovative approaches and Neucoin is like a dinosaur in comparison.