Do we? Surely a smaller steady hashrate means there's a higher distribution of overall grains, than if some big hashers came in and started reaping the harvests? That's what would happen if this hit an exchange. I think heavily promoting grain could make it a victim of its own success. Get more people mining it yes, but as soon as it hits an exchange it will be pumped and dumped and seriously devalued once the hashrate drops back down.

I guess it would mean cheap grain for everyone if they wanted to buy it, but that seems to defeat the point. If it takes me a week to mine 100k grain, but then I could just buy it for a mere 0.001 BTC, then what possible incentive do I have to keep mining it? I could buy 10 million for 0.1 BTC. The coin would be as good as dead. Just like all the other highly inflated coins.

The only way to defeat the inflation is through higher distribution, and you're not going to get that by putting this on an exchange in the near future. It seems like a logical fallacy and contradictory to what this coin is trying to achieve. Long term sustainability.

Just look at what happened to ColossusCoin. I admit this coin has a lot more going for it than that copyclone, but the principle is exactly the same. Who wants to mine a coin you can buy for at a satoshi each, when you could mine more profitable coins and just buy them instead?

That's the kind of thing you'd want to do halfway through the total supply of coins, or at least to a point where the supply is becoming more scarce. Once there's no incentive to mine and no possible profit forseeable over the horizon, people will give up and move on just like every other coin. I hope that grain learns from other altcoins and doesn't follow the same path. If this hits the exchange at a Satoshi then there would be absolutely no reason for me to mine it anymore. I could buy 10 million, and sit on it like everyone else would.

The market cap would be flat and near-zero.