Quote from: Tai Zen on June 05, 2014, 07:57:37 PM

Quote from: nutildah on June 05, 2014, 03:48:47 AM

Quote from: ghosthouse on June 05, 2014, 02:27:53 AM

Quote from: Spekulatius on June 05, 2014, 02:02:10 AM

Auroracoin showed how it can be done, although they ultimately failed for a couple of reasons, the concept is good. Maybe in a decade from now a similar thing will be done with a Bitcoin successor, who knows.

NEM is the best with the distribution concept. Great team too. The next big thing.

I have to hand it to NEM. Their distribution concept is novel by any definition. Whether or not it has much success, we'll have to find out.

Any coin that focuses on fair distribution or any type of gimmicky feature will sooner or later fail. You can not innovate based on one feature that has no worth or value in the real world. only a handful of broke folks ever complain about unfair disitribution cuz they live in a world of "scarcity". if u live in a world with an "abundance" mindset. u don't pay attention to nonsense such as unfair distribution.

I agree with you that the fair distribution aspect on its own cannot secure a long term success. It depends on utility x scarcety to create (=) value. Only when a currency has those two qualities it will be used. Nevertheless a fair distribution can greatly contribute to the long term success of any given currency in a competitive environment such as the cryptocoin space. In a theoretical case of two contenders (Acoin and Bcoin) with equal qualities and environment, the one that manages to be more equally and broadly distributed would win out over the one that pursues a narrow distribution imo. The main causes would be network effects which constitute higher adoption, recognition, larger community in holders, developers and investors and faster innovation rate. A real world example that comes close to the hypothetical case described may be the Monero/Bytecoin case where both chains have been introduced to the public almost simultaneously, they have almost the same qualities (Monero is a clone of Bytecoin with slower emission schedule and faster block times) but differ in the distribution by a large extent (Bytecoin 83% stealth mined, Monero 0% pre/stealthmined). Monero in opposition to Bytecoin has already achieved a huge appreciation in price, market cap and daily volume, however this case is very young and no conclusions can be drawn regarding the long term development of this case.

Your second argument goes in the direction of what has been mentioned here before and is also valid: that in order for acceptance a currency has to be perceived as valuable by its holders or it will be dumped at the first best occasion. In case of Auroracoin this perception was most likely not present with most of its target group. Thus the biggest part of the claimed coins were dumped immediately. With floating exchange rates and legal tender laws not strictly enforced, the reverse case of "Gresham's Law" applies, which praphrased states that "Good Money will drive bad money out of circulation into savings". Good money being the one with most perceived value compared to its exchange rate. So yes, with value people will accept the new coin and try to accumulate it (like Bitcoin). Without value, they will dump it for any other currency (like they did with Auroracoin for Krona).

Because this discussion kind of de-rails this thread I have cross-posted my response to:
Most efficient distribution strategies
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=528261.msg7456628#msg7456628