Quote from: bbc.reporter on January 02, 2017, 06:27:46 AM

Everything you just said is what a scammer would say or what a person who believes in the scam would also say. Do you really believe that Dash will become a real currency? Wake up and never forget the ninja premine. There is no excuse for what Evan has done.

If I may tune in. There is in fact no such thing as a scam in a crypto currency. Every form of coin creation comes with seigniorage. Only perfect proof of work destroys that seigniorage, and even that is not true, because seigniorage comes in two parts:
1) coin creation
2) value increase of created coins

because in both cases, the holder of the coin is entitled to more market value than the value he brought to the market. Of course, from a certain point of maturity onward, the value increase of the coin is not "seigniorage" any more, but "speculation". One can define that this point is reached when about all coins have transited a few hands (real hands, not sybils). Someone buying a coin at a certain point, to speculate on a higher price at a later point (because of demand for usage, or because of greater fool expectation) is not profiting from seigniorage but is just speculating, if the coin's existence is sufficiently well known that it doesn't concern a small, but increasing club. Speculation is considered "fair" because you take risk, and you can win or you can lose. Seigniorage is considered unfair, because your gains are quite certain. But in both cases, someone is attributing himself higher market value than he brought to the market ; the speculator did bring some "information" to the market through his act of speculation ; the "counterfeiter" (the person obtaining seigniorage) didn't.

Now, all crypto currencies suffer from serious seigniorage: that's what stimulates their creation in many cases. Most crypto currencies are invented with the purpose of "becoming rich" without having to produce value to the market, but just because "being amongst the first few knowing about it". Extreme cases are like those with bytecoin or dash, where the devs have been inventing stories to gather a lot of coins for themselves before the actual market players could start taking place. But when we look at ZCASH, they attribute themselves a serious (post) premine, and most ICO do exactly the same: the ICO is nothing else but selling premined coins. ALL these schemes, which "optimize" the seigniorage for a limited clique, can be called unfair (a "scam" if you want to). But, apart from a coin starting out at very small value, and being mined by many people in a grassroots movement, where the "seigniorage" aspect is minimal, and the "speculation" aspect is large, so that the original clique has almost no coins from their initial mining and they all changed hands several times, ALL coins suffer from the unfairness of seigniorage ; some much more than others.

However, this doesn't seem to bother people much. Indeed, one way of gaining market cap is by convincing sufficient people to "join the scam early" and to rip off the latecomers. As such, there's not much difference between seigniorage unfairness, and "greater fool theory", which is the basis of most of crypto's market cap in any case.

So, a "scammy premined coin" can have a lot of success in the crypto market. Greater fool theory is very powerful. And it doesn't even mean that it has to crash, if the "greater fool" incentive stops early enough, to start to be used for real. I'm still very doubtful about that, for all crypto. Real usage seems not to take off. Market cap is still mostly sustained by greater fool expectations. For the moment this is not a problem: the world is still full of greater fools.