Its a fact that Dash has an instamine history, this has never been denied. Official statements from Dash about the instamine go all the way back to 2014 but you have to realise that Dash
Founders were not the only people mining at the time and massive amounts of Dash were sold off on the markets early on as people did not see any value in it.
Thanks for the reply. Regarding others mining at the time, don't you think that can be problematic? Let's say I want to game the market and control a big percentage of a coin. I announce it so it seems fair and not premined. Everyone is all set. At the designated time, though, I say wait, there are bugs so the launch is delayed, remove your attention from this matter for at least X days (or weeks) while I fix things. Then later that night when everyone has gone to bed in most timezones I start mining. Maybe there are a couple other nightowls awake and see the activity. Still, however, I have the advantage of knowing exactly when to start (even nightowls wouldn't be ready right away). With such low competition I easily amass most of the coins created over several hours. So your statement about others mining wouldn't exactly set things right, see?
According to that link the founder puts the instamine at around 2M coins. He then says this too:
Early after the launch, the main exchange Dash (Xcoin at the time) was traded on was hacked and all coins were stolen then dumped on Poloniex. This was one of the darkest moments of our history and many people got hurt badly by this attack. However, this created another distribution event where hundreds of thousands of coins were sold in a period of about a day. Between this and the early distribution, we successful distributed the currency to a multitude of investors in record time.
Okay, let's say the founder received 1.5 million coins from the instamine and others mining at the time got the other 500K. The problem is even if the founder had 200K coins on the hacked exchange and the other early miners had say 200K on the exchange that would mean a total of 400K coins hacked and effectively distributed. Note the quote says 'hundreds of thousands' were distributed, not millions. That would mean with
all official statements being true (others mining, hacked exchange with distribution and selling etc.) the founder could still hold 1.3 million coins from the instamine. See my point?
There is another problem. Due to the design of DASH, 'masternodes' apparently
receive 45% of the block reward. Having a masternode requires having DASH currency. If the founder did have 1.3 million coins in the early days that would have been a very large percent of the total supply. Even if they sold another 300K that's still 1 million coins while at the time there may have been only ~2-3 million total in existence. That means the ability to control a large percentage of masternodes too, and automatically receive a constantly supply of new DASH being mined, forever.
Its really up to the individual investor to decide if Dash instamine history from more then three years ago should still play a role or not. Dash community has long long long ago moved on.
With all due respect, DASH still exists, and is actively pushing for new users apparently. The price rise means a lot of new people looking harder at DASH like myself. Are you suggesting we just move on? That sounds more like a push from being biased about not wanting to really look at the history. I don't know what the real story is. Only the founder knows 100%. However, I don't like that the launch of the coin was done in a way that looked very intentional for the founder "accidentally" ending up with a huge number of initial coins. Why not simply re-do the launch cleanly/fairly? Well, as you say people will need to decide the events for themselves.
The lack of clarity around the masternodes is amazing. The only thing that seems agreed upon is that a small group of people control the majority of the supply. Whether or not there is a fixed limit on the number of masternodes, since it takes so much currency to have one, there is a de facto limit, and so there is centralisation.
Yes, the premine situation was a fiasco. Maybe it was a deliberate attempt by the founder to control the supply in perpetuity. They should have scrapped the project and started over, instead of allowing hundreds of thousands to millions of coins to be unfairly taken by a small group. Some are offput by that and will not use/invest in dash. But if there is value in what dash is and can do now, and ppl are willing to overlook this blemish (or don't know about it), then dash can continue to grow and be viable. But that's not the issue. The problem is that we have a currency that is largely controlled by a small group of ppl, with factors intrinsic to the currency design that prevent others from getting in. Centralisation is an anathema to cryptocurrency. Not only will you have decisions that are not in the best interest of the currency being made, but if the allegations are true that the founder unfairly and intentionally pilfered a plurality of the currency, and said founder is still in control, then what other decisions based on personal gain will be made?