I think the reason for this is that cryptos allow for small investments to turn into big gains, at a great risk of course. Before, if you wanted to play the speculation game, or if you wanted to invest, you needed a fairly big amount of money to start with. Real, hard money.
So like you said, if you happened to have that hard earned money, more likely than not you were not simply going to go ahead and give it to the first guy claiming he has a good investment. You were gonna do your research, and if a company was starting up (the most similar example I can think of) and there was an IPO of sorts, they would do EVERYTHING to prove to you and all potential investors how their company was a good investment. Unless of course it was some kind of ponzi scheme, which normally catered to less informed, less solvent people. Guess who are also less informed and less solvent, and equally greedy? People interested in investing in cryptocurrencies.

Don't get me wrong I'm in love with the whole cryptography based currency concept, but as long as dollars (or euros, or fiat, or gain in the form of an established currency, or whatever you want to call it) remains the moving force behind cryptos, it will be like tainted water, and they will be used and created for the sole purpose of profiting, instead of being used and created for the purpose of further developing the technology, and only then profit from the economic growth that any revolutionary new technology will generate as a byproduct.

it's hard for me to believe that all these people hyping this coin are not being paid to do it. Cryptocurrencies are supposed to be based on trustlessness, and all this blind trust just seems so ironic.

It doesn't even have to do with wether the devs are running a scam or not, it's the fact that people are happily taking their 50/50 chances on this. If you invest on this and win, it means that next time something like this comes up again, you will take your chances again, and you may loose or you may win, again. You might as well just go play martingale on bitcoin roulette.

http://i60.tinypic.com/2isdyz6.jpg

first: AMD fx-6300 mining XMR on 5 cores
below: 3 x 750 ti.

I let ccminer do autotune. Also disabled ccminer.exe's affinity on all but 1 core and now desktop is slow but usable.

confirming broken link

I'd say thanks dev for the idea now it's time for somebody else to build on it and make something worthwhile

What's the purpose of such long maturity times for mined blocks?

thank you both

Anybody know where I can see the total hash rate of the network? It's not showing on any pool, or the ultracoin site.