Howdy! My background is 18 years of developing software and startups... C, Java, Ruby, Javascript, etc. I'm new to bitcoin but not new to the entire libertarian point of view and the entire notion of how fiat currency is a scam, etc. I'm a reformed gold bug of sorts. I still think that having a place to store your hard earned money should exist but alas, in this world of financial alchemy there's not a single market left that is left to true price discovery but I digress....

I've been looking at bitcoin and alt coins more seriously since December after some guys I know sold their bitcoin related company and after getting to talking it seemed that the bitcoin community held some of the same beliefs as I have. For short hand I call it the zero hedge mentality (zerohedge.com)

So to answer your question directly, no I'm not yet a miner. I have a fork of litecoin that I've rebranded to bootycoin and have that working on my laptop. As I said my focus was more on figuring out the branding and messaging to partners before the technology since the technology isn't the real differentiator here. And yes, a premine of some amount is needed in order to pull off some of the marketing plans and partnerships. At the end of the day people can cry scam all they want about pre mines and what not but as you so adeptly pointed out there needs to be an incentive to actually work on the coin, and the only thing I can see is, just like shares in a company, you set some aside that's used to compensate the team and used for marketing and business development. My time is valuable and if I'm going to spend it here it needs to be with some semblance of a promise for a reward in the future. Otherwise I'll go work on something else.

In my few months of diving into this world I've seen lots of people decide to fork litecoin, rename it, and announce it here in these forums with really no amount of branding or planning at all. Just some dudes wasting lots of time building something that nobody's gonna care about. That's why when you look at the bootycoin site you see that what's there is a landing page that's focused on the differentiation which is the branding and the focus on merchants. If you get merchants on board you'll get the miners, period. I guess you truly have no way of knowing if I'm just another scammer or not, especially as my identity is hidden here, mostly because of the nature of the coin and not wanting to attach myself to an adult focused coin (if that's how it ends up going), just yet. Once it's successful then of course I'd be more open to revealing my true identity.

Regardless I can tell you that I'm in the bay area (California), work in tech, am not hurting for money, and don't really need to do this project. I just happened to own the domain from a different failed experiment last summer and thought it'd be fun to launch a coin called bootycoin and immediately saw the potential for it to be a real thing. For you guys, and anyone that wants to be part of the community I can tell you that other than my identity I'm all about transparency. I simply can't help it given my libertarian and gold bug leanings. I'm a modern day Robin Hood of sorts that would love nothing more than to stick it to the establishment rent seekers and rejoice in justice.

My thoughts around how this currency should work is that you want a large number of coins like doge.. 69B is the first target (see what I did there?).. but with a little inflation 1-2% so as to encourage spending. There needs to be a way for everyone to easily gain access to receiving and spending the coin. So web wallets but perhaps with client side encryption like blockchain.info's wallets. A Twitter tip bot (@btybot... BTY is the symbol I picked) so that you can easily send and receive booty without being a techie. There needs to be an easy way for merchants to accept it and easily convert it to bitcoin but also with additional features that are enumerated on the site right now. I'd really like to investigate a way to make this CPU mineable so that it's accessible to everyone and open the door for javascript miners. Vertcoin seems like maybe a good coin to model for that, I dunno.

Look at the end of the day this is an experiment, like bitcoin itself really. The only way to differentiate at this point is to come up with a new technology or have a great marketing angle. There's the opportunity to do both here if we were to copy something like vertcoin and combine it with a great marketing angle like bootycoin. That's the hypothesis. Who's on board to see if that can be reality? :-)