An Investor's Investigation Into The Mining Statistics Of Bitcoin Alternatives

[Note: The following attempts to approach **90% of the top ranking coins** on www.coinmarketcap.com in terms of their rudimentary mining data. Everyone should check this data out on their own before investing in any coin and you don't even have to be technically minded to this sort of check. If you follow the methodology you can check brand new coins yourself before this wiki even gets edited. Also **NOTE**: Mining of coins is ONLY ONE ASPECT OF A COIN. While unlikely, you can still find a coin with questionable mining data and still invest in it. We also guarantee you will find a few coins with decent mining history that have no advertising, no development team, and nothing else going for it. This is NOT A BLANKET STATEMENT on whether a coin is worth investing. It is more a measure of mining integrity (and by extension developer integrity) than anything else. If you are a Devtome member and you wish to add content to this wiki, (not just edit it for grammatical mistakes), please do so in the “discussion” tab seen in the top left corner of the page. If this author agrees that your content will add to this wiki, he will add it and tip you the appropriate amount.] —

How To Use This Wiki

The **menu bar on the right** is a quick reference, alphabetized tool for easy searching of a coin in question. Once you are at a coin, you will see… the coin's hashing algorithm (bitcoin uses SHA256, Litecoin uses Scrypt, etc) whether is is Proof of Work, Proof of Stake, a hybrid, or something novel After these two facts, there will be a basic few paragraphs of investigation predominately using these websites… www.cryptometer.org www.coinmarketcap.com www.archive.org the coin in question's blockchain www.bitcointalk.org alt crypto threads ALL OF THESE COINS HAVE SOURCES LISTED when an accusation or important bit of information is conferred. This wiki has over 150 sources listed, please double check any fact you suspect is incorrect.

A Quick Introduction

Bitcoin has made it's mark upon the world with everyone from LA to Shanghai using the digital currency. In its wake came a slew of alternatives to toy with the specific formulation of Bitcoin. Should we mine fast? Should we change the hashing algorithm? Should be make transactions faster? More secure? Specific for pot smokers, cab drivers, and other jobs? It was an attack of the clones. Devcoin was one of the original altcoins after Bitcoin in 2011, including Namecoin, Ixcoin and Litecoin. 2012 carried just a handful of new coins, most notably Peercoin (then known as PPCoin). 2013 was a tidal wave of coins too numerous to list. Cryptometer.org, a data website for crypto currencies that will be referenced later in this article, shows an incomplete list of 25 currencies. By the end of 2013, www.coinmarketcap.com was list 67 currencies 1). From December 2013 to April 2014, the same website's list has grown over 150 currencies to a staggering 236 2) alt coins. A creative developer has assembled an altcoin calendar where it posts the inception date of incoming currencies 3). At a rate of around 1 new currency a day, we project ending 2014 between 400-500 currencies simply listed on www.coinmarketcap.com, not even counting the private currencies people create for their own purposes. Yes, it's safe to say that Bitcoin has blown open wide the case for currency creation. Perhaps too much so. The story everyone heard from Bitcoin was in relation to the sheer amount of appreciation the coins went through as they became popular. Considering it was effectively a penny stock when it first started, Bitcoin now trades between $500-1000 dollars, far eclipsing what any penny stock could reach. We all heard the story of some joe who had 100 Bitcoins on his old computer (back when that was $3.35) and all of a sudden they could buy a house. Clearly, in 2013 the web developers of the world realized they could possibly create the same thing for themselves. Herein lies the problem. Bitcoin was unpopular and known only to the computer savvy and the anarchist/libertarian leaning folks when it first hit on the scene in the winter of 2008/09. Let us take a look at the amount of Bitcoins created when it first started using the www.cryptometer.org website. Notice in the first couple of days, the amount of coins created does not surprise. A straight line is to be expected. There is an **opposite** of a premine in the first couple of days of Bitcoin, where the below graph shows a slow initial production… 4) Below over 90 days… 5) and here after 100 weeks… 6) Notice that the amount of coins being created are rather consistent. There is actually a period of 10-20 weeks were the coin production slows and then picks up again, giving some advantage back to the latecomers. In the following sections, very few coins follow this mostly straight line trend. So while the early adopters of bitcoin **were able** to get more btc, it wasn't because the coins were being generated at a significantly higher rate early on. All of those stories relating to people having just a few hundred btc early on and now are millionaires are genuine early adopter good fortune. They mined or bought early back when btc was pennies on the dollar. Years went by before the infastructure and usefulness of bitcoin began to be established before they received their fortune.

The Alt Coin Bind: How To Adjust Mining So As To Gain Early Adopter Benefit Quickly Without Being A Scam

The problem became that as Bitcoin and by extension digital currencies became popular, alternatives to bitcoin didn't want to wait 3-20 years for all of those coins to be slowly mined. To generate the same early adoption benefit, many coins were either 1) intentionally designed to be mined much faster in the beginning stages or 2) somehow the coin generation increased in the begining, possibly due to low difficulty and a high amount of miners attempting to mine. Both 1) and 2) are problematic for the investor, the former especially so as it indicates the coin is designed to take money from you, not help preserve wealth or appreciate in value well. The latter is unfortunate but a big enough mistake to ask yourself… “Why use a poorly constructed altcoin when Bitcoin will do fine?” Within the following section are the coins that are quite obviously **bad ideas** to invests in, the coins that are quite **questionable**, and the coins that seem **okay**. All analysis is based on the concept of “instamines” (short for instantly mined) and “fastmines”.

What's The Problem With Soft Instamines ("fastmines")?

Hopefully one can see after reading this article that coins like Novacoin, Goldcoin, Blackcoin, Darkcoin, etc are obviously bad investments. (Hold your comments until reading the entire article, please). The amount of coins mined in the beginning is just too advantageous of those fortunate few who got the easy money. But what about the questionable mining…that aren't quite an instant mine but are not a slow mine, either? We know you haven't seen all the evidence in this article yet…but the graphs speak for themselves. Remember that these alternative currencies should be trying to be better than government fiat currencies. When your cryptocurrency is enriching the few for the sake of the rest of us, how is that different that the USD and basic economic configuration today? The problem with a fastmine or an instamine is that Bitcoin's rise to fame (and fortune) made sense. Adapting a clone of Bitcoin with a quick mining protocol reaks of a get rich quick scheme. How is this an improvement on government fiat? Keep this in mind as you read the evidence below.

Guide For The Three Categories

Extreme Caution: Bad coins for investment or usage

Obvious and proveable scammish behavior such as self evident instant mines, super quick block halving, unannounced premining activity, or premines that represent unusual amount of coins Most statistics tend towards unfair early adopter benefit. Very little benefits long term, fair usage.

Questionable coins

Questionable mining statistics; probably not rigged to be early adopter benefit, but the data suggests such. One cannot prove or lacks further evidence of the potentially get rich quick scheme. Has some good statistical mining qualities and one to two stats that are not so good. Coins who have some instamine but their total mined coins makes the instamine less significant. Usually older coins.

Okay coins

Coins that equal or improve upon Bitcoin's mining protocol (in terms of how long the coins mining extends into the future meaningfully); no evidence of instamines, (unruly) premines, or any shady activity or protocol. Only very minor knocks against the coin's mining start

Extreme Caution: Coins That Are Bad Ideas For Investment or Usage

These kinds of coins may seem appealling at first, but one strong bit of evidence or a string of evidence makes their investment value self evident; they are highly likely to be scams. Important **note**: Investigating the start and origin of any company/thing you are going to invest in is a good idea. The mining stats are JUST ONE ASPECT of what you should be investigating. This author is not omniscient when it comes to these coins, nor does this article pretend to cover all aspects of a coin; just the mining data. You should not assume the whole story is told in the mining data given here. A good place to start is www.bitcointalk.org and go to their alternative cryptocurrency sections. The forums there are a complete zoo, we will warn you. It's better to come in with a specific search term through google, like “bitcointalk + Zeitcoin” if you were wanting information about Zeitcoin. Very **important to note**: It's quite possible that you will find a coin in the questionable section that is worth investing in or using for you. If you disagree with any of the analysis, you could also potentially find a coin in the extreme caution section, although that is very unikely. A good example you will read about is Ixcoin and Terracoin. Both coins have reasonable mining data, and where possible we noted how there were other factors that make the coin a problem. (Ixcoin had an unannounced premine and Terracoin has been all be abandoned). Likewise, some people may disagree with our placement of something like NXT (which supposedly holds a lot of promise) or Noblecoin, which has a ton of things going for it except a large premine. The reality is that many of the coins in the extreme caution section are designed for pump and dumps. Miners with the ability to scoop up a lot of coins at the beginning of mining can pump the coins on the market with the anticipation that someone like **you, the average investor**, will take the bait and buy the farm on their double digit percentage rising coin. These pump and dumps sure are attractive to the investor when they see tons green on the 24 hour chart…**and that's the point**. Take the bait at your own risk. Best of luck in your investments.

Extreme Caution

AimCoin

type of algorithm: scrypt PoW(over)/PoS Aimcoin joins the unimpressive list of coins that crap out a bunch of coins via the PoW method and quickly switch to PoS. We call it instaPoW/PoS and you can read more about it here 7). The blockchain of Aimcoin reveals that there is no premine. However, the instamine is so awful that it doesn't matter there was no premine. The first block was mined on May 16th, 2014 and the 200th block was mined on the same day, two hour later. This 200 block PoW period produced 30,000,000 coins in 2 hours 8). After this block, PoS takes over. This is one of the fastest switches to PoS a coin has ever attempted. At a paltry 3.5%, the PoS minting will never, ever come close to the rate of production that the PoW period experienced. Even if we assume that every person were to perform PoS minting, in one year this coin would only produce another 1,050,000 Aimcoins. It is abundantly clear this coin gives all the advantage to the earliest mining period with the intention of scamming some latecomers into using their coin and giving them abundant wealth. To qualify for being late in this coin, btw, is 2 hours after launch. Don't touch this coin with a 10 foot pole. At the time of this writing, June 24th 2014, Aimcoin has produced another 33,000 coins.

Applecoin

Applecoin is a coin that provides random coin generation per block found. How that is appealing to anyone is beyond us, but nonetheless that is what they offer. For blocks 1-10000, anywhere from 0-1600 is the block reward. For blocks 10001-20000, the reward cuts down to 0-750 Applecoins. The blocks sstrangely get smaller from 20001-25000, where only 0-300 Applecoins are awarded. Blocks 25001-30000 provide anywhere from 0 to 200 Applecoins. Blocks 30001-45000 provide a random 0-125 Applecoins 9). To see how quickly this “random” block reward drops, let's view their blockchain 10). Block 1: November 18, 2013, 12:00 pm Block 10000: November 27, 2013, 2:51 pm Block 20000: December 11, 2013, 4:50 am Block 25000: December 17, 2013, 11:01 pm Block 30000: December 24, 2013, 10:51 am Block 45000: January 14, 2014, 10:30 pm As you can see, it took less than 10 days for the highest possible block reward to be cut more than 50%. The subsidy is cut from a max 750 to a max 300 in another 15 days. When all is said an done, the subsidy has gone from a max of 1600 on November 18th to 125 by January 14th. It took two months for this coin to go through 5 cuts in block reward. This coin is bizare and heavily weighted towards those first few weeks of mining. Avoid it.

Asiacoin

type of algorithm: scrypt Pow/PoS Asiacoin is proud that is has no premine and a slow first start, only minting 100 coins a block the first 1000 blocks. That is pretty commendable. This coin however, openly has only 2 weeks of PoW coin generation. After the first 1000 blocks (which started April 16th), the next 19,000 blocks are 10,000 AC and 5,000 AC (first week and second week). That will produce 160 million coins. Next, the coin will enter a one year period of **100% annual interest** in PoS minting. The following year, it is reduced to a miniscule 2% 11). Why the weird setup? Clearly, this coin was designed to **take advantage of a 2 week mining period that generates 45% of the coins** (!). But in case they don't get enough money from that instamine, they will reward themselves with 100% PoS interest. Once they have made their money and left, the common user will make a paltry 2% on their stake. Now ask yourself what this looks like…Does this look like a coin designed for the future use of thousands or even millions of people? Or does it look like another way for miners to make a buck? The website seems to hint that the coin is in the tradition of the failed country coins 12). Do they really want to be in that lineage? The website has virtualy NO information regarding the goals of the coin, the developer's motivation, or any sort of useful information. The first page has only two main subjects; where to mine and where to sell your coins. We stand pretty firm and say this coin is for the benefit of miners and not a future currency to use. Not to mention…why is this site lacking Chinese? There is no translation button. I guess for Asiacoin, only people who speak English will be able to use it. We have seen this in the other scam coins like Spaincoin…and we rightly called their scam before they imploded 13). We highly recommend doing the same for this coin.

BitBar

type of algorithm: scrypt PoW/PoS Take BitBar for example. This coin follows the attraction of something like gold, which is finite and rare. Supposedly merging the good ideas of Novacoin and Ultracoin (a now defunct crypto currency), Bitbar was described as a “fair start” PoW/PoS crypto with everything going for it. They list multiple reasons why it's a fair start… 14)FAIR START O RLY? Yet, www.cryptomer.org tells a different story. Unless the data used by the aforementioned site is proven flawed, it describes BitBar as the poster child for instamines. 15) Bitbar was created on May 1, 2013. Almost a year to the day and there are 10,670 Bitbars in existence. This data shows about 2,000 Bitbars created in a coulple of hours. Regardless of this was an intentional act or accident, the reality is that cryptocurrencies such as this are **not safe for the average investor**. Either a developer's friend or a few lucky miners acquired 20% of the currency over the course of an evening dinner. On one hand, the developer has found a way to pay themselves or their friends very well and it stands to reason that they don't have **your** financial interests in their eyesight. On the other hand, the incompetence of creating a coin that produced such an instamine should keep you weary of buying into their technology for wealth preservation. Even in the event of an accidental instamine such as this, the website should not insist on the coin's inception as being fair and balanced. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Blackcoin

type of algorithm: scrypt PoW initally (closed)/ PoS 10,000 coins generated per block 16) block 1: 2014-02-24 06:00:25

block 1000: 2014-02-24 22:10:19

block 10000: 2014-03-01 18:38:46 Blackcoin is not readily searchable on its blockchain 17) if you desire to look at their early history. (The first page shows around 50 of the most recent transactions, but deeper searches only bring up one block at a time). Blackcoin is also a PoW/PoS hybrid, so one cannot simply take the number of blocks X the number of coins per block. One can readily see, however, very infrequent blocks of PoS in the beginning. For instance, this author manually scanned blocks 1,000 to 1,099 and saw only PoW blocks. Rather than scan all one thousand blocks individually, we then jumped to block 2000 and scanned individually again. blocks 2000-2100 were all PoW. 3000-3100 also contained zero PoS blocks and only PoW blocks. The trend continues into blocks 4000-4099, none are PoS and all 100 of them are PoW. What can we conclude from this data? Considering we NEVER saw a PoS occur, let us take on the basic PoW formula of number of coins per block X blocks up to block 4100. 10,000 x 4100 = 40,000,000. Now since we only viewed 10% of the block chain up to 4100, we can throw in 50 PoS as a safeguard. The PoS blocks witnessed much later in the blockchain, for example, show the production of 1-5 coins, a nominal amount, instead of the PoW block of 1000 BC. For each block that should have been a PoW (as we counted to get 41,000,000) we need to minus 1000 BC. 50 blocks x 1000 BC = 500,000 BC that we are going to minus from our total as an estimate of some possible PoW blocks that we didn't see but counted for in our total. So this puts our total at 41,000,000 - 500,000 = 40,500,000 BC at around block 4100. This is not definite but rather and estimate. (Edited to add: it has been reported that the first 5000 blocks were all PoW. **If this is the case, then 5000 x 1000 = 50,000,000 BC were mined in 3 days**) Thankfully, people take screencaps and save them to the internet archive over at www.archive.org. We have the following snapshots of coinmarketcap.com with Blackcoin on them which helps to back up our case that some 40 million BC were created in 3 days. The first day we have record that Blackcoin appeared on www.coinmarketcap.com is February 28th. 18) By the next day, March 1st, we see this… 19) And by March 7th we see a total number of Blackcoins that is close to the amount today in late April, the 74-75 million range… 20) For those of us keeping track, Blackcoin was launched Februrary 24th at 6:00 (no indication is given what time zone this is) 21). Block 4100 commenced on February 27th at 6:15. In 3 days…Blackcoin produced some 40 million coins (or 50 million). Now they rest at around 75 million coins and only PoS occurs from here. This is photographic evidence that supports our brief searching of the blackcoin blockchain. The majority of the first 10000 blocks were PoW, and since they were all producing 1,000 BC, the bulk of the coins were made within one week. **Anyone should be highly skeptical of the start of this coin**. Who would think that the creator of this coin is thinking about enriching your pockets and not theirs? To this end, **who cares about their PoS option?** They dished out thousands of blocks at 1000 BC a pop for three days. You would have to hold 100,000+ BC to be able to mint that kind of Blackcoin, which at today's rate would cost you in the neighborhood of $15,000 to obtain 100,000 BC. Are you sure you want to lock in that coin for minting now?

Bitcoin Scrypt

type of algorithm: scrypt PoW only Using this data wiki's methodology of simply looking at the blockchain and considering how fast the coins were mined would've saved a number of investors time and money. It's likely the Bitcoin scrypt bubble has already happened, but in case another pump comes, here is what you should know. Even a casual glance at the total number of coins expected to be mined (21,000,000) and the total number of coins in existence (currently ~4,800,000) let's you know a fast mine occurred, but how fast, you ask? All blocks below generated 50 coins per block block 1 (2013-09-08 06:01:25) block 500 2013-09-08 06:26:59 block 1000 2013-09-08 06:43:43 block 1500 2013-09-08 06:59:40 blcok 2000 2013-09-08 07:16:46 block 2500 2013-09-08 08:49:12 block 3000 2013-09-08 09:41:24 block 3500 2013-09-08 10:53:56 block 4000 2013-09-08 11:31:26 block 4500 2013-09-08 12:23:03 block 5000 2013-09-08 12:52:26 As one can see here, the coin's start was rapid an rocky. After initially average ~17 minutes per 500 blocks, it slows down to more than an hour, and then speeds up again to under 30 minutes per 500 blocks. All in all, 50 coins x 5000 blocks = 250,000 coins in 6 hours. By block 7500, it was only 4 pm on the starting day (375K coins created) By block 10,000, it was 8:50 pm on the starting day (500K coins created) This represents a little less than 2.5% of the total coins possible mined in around 14 hours. The instant mine slows down from here but Despite trying to run on Bitcoin's success, this coin had an instamine and messed up. There are other mess ups you can read about this coin, like the wallet information you download to your computer overwriting bitcoin's wallet information. This could've wiped out people's real bitcoin. In addition, the coin has already experienced a hard fork (a step the developers must make to change the coin intentionally, aka admittance of a bad setup). Plus…isn't Litecoin the scrypt version of Bitcoin? With a stronger and safer network? The only reason why you would invest in this coin is to speculate on some pretty longshot odds.

Bitcoin Plus

All the alarm bells ring for this one. The coin is not mineable before anyone could mine it. They creted 100,000 on the first block 22), apparently on April 7th, 2014. As of this writing (the first week of May), there is no official information about this coin. At all. Their website is completely blank. It's one thing to just just be starting your coin and needing to gather resources and put it all together in something nice and pretty. It has been almost a month and still nothing. There is a disturbing blog post that presumably was meant to gather followers and excitement for this coin, except it only turned this author away. Written on bitbillions.net, the author Ellie Jan goes on to say that “…there is a lobby now which has been created in which a general consensus agrees to destroy the **premine 50k or thereabouts coin** ( Maybe leaving a few k for promotion and development/bounties etc, not sure yet)” 23). It's the casual mention of the 50% premine and the casual leaving of a 3 thousand for promotion (that's a few percentage points). No official information and a littany of social media beggars who receive free XBC if they promote a coin they know hardly anything about. Stay away from this coin.

BoostCoin

type of algorithm: x13 PoW/PoS In the tradition of fast PoW/PoS coins, Boostcoin does nothing from the norm, which is to say they quickly mine most of the coins via high paying proof of work blocks and then use proof of stake minting (at a much lower rate). Boostcoin has a 1% premine (assuming 40 million cap), which means 400,000 coins. There will be 12 million coins made by PoW, making this effective premine 3.3%. Once PoW ends, only 10% PoS takes over, meaning that while in 20 days PoW will produce 12 million coins, the PoS stage will AT MAXIMUM create 1.2 million coins in a year. That is over a 100x rate decrease. Not only that, Boostcoin takes 15 BOST per PoW block for a “Boostcoin foundation”. What does the foundation do, exactly? The explanation on the bitcointalk forums is hardly flattering, basically saying that they developers need to get paid 24). This actually increases the amount of “premine” significantly. The coin started on May 21st, 2014. By June 4th there had been 41,000 blocks created. Random searching of the blockchain shows very little to no PoS blocks being minted, so we can safely assume >95% of the first 40,000 blocks are PoW blocks. 40,000 x .95 x 15 = 570,000 extra Boostcoins. Here is a direct quote from the bitcointalk thread by the opening post… “ So far we have 3 full time team members and a load more people working on single tasks for BoostCoin. this all costs money that the foundation supports, and if the coin really takes of do you think they will work for free? i dont think so…” 25) What do you think those developers are doing, paying their rent bill in Boostcoins? They are trading into fiat when the time is right. Considering the hidden double premine and the fact that this is a classic terrabad instaPoW/PoS coin, we give Boostcoin a hardly hell no.

Bytecoin

type of algorithm: CryptoNote PoW only Bytecoin is an enigma. Supposedly started on the darknet by developers inspired by bitocin, it takes advantage of a completely revolutionary kind of algorithm called CryptoNote. In a white paper by Nicolas van Saberhagen 26), you can read all about a CPU mined only algorithm that uses something called ring signatures to make transactions truly anonymous. The algorithm doesn't compare to 98% of the alts that were made before it OR after it. Bytecoin is in the same league as Monero, Quazarcoin, Fantomcoin, Boolberry, etc as they are all cryptonotes made in 2014. Now, the crazy thing is that Bytecoin flew under the radar during the entire crypto explosion of 2013. Everyone was making copies and clones of Bitcoin and Bytecoin never really jumped on the party bandawagon. We find this fact unfortunate because the mining data does not encourage new investors to jump into the coin at this stage. Bytecoin has a large amount of total possible coins at 184,460,000,000. When you look at Bytecoin today, you can see that there are over 156 billion coins minted already. From July 2012 to July 2014, a total of two years, the currency created around 85% of it's total expected amount. There aren't too many Bytecoins left to be mined now that they are on the map. 85% in 2 years is fast, especially under the cloak of darkness. Now, some may say that Bitcoin was in a similar position in early 2013 as “everyone” started to get on board with Bitcoin. However, at that point Bitcoin had only mined 50% of its currency total, not 85%. Second, Bitcoin was usable in a myriad of ways (and even more today). People weren't just holding Bitcoins for investment purposes. People were spending it as well. To this date, Bytecoin has been a purely speculative currency with a couple hundred people or less on the darkweb using it (the reality is that people “back in the day” were more likely to use Bitcoin than Bytecoin). Bytecoin has not even been on any exchanges until very recently 27). Thus, this is very different from how people jumped into Bitcoin in 2013. Bytecoin was hardly been used at all save for a tiny amount of people. Now that the mining is virtually done, it is getting more attention and finally being traded on an exchange. (It is probably garnering attention because Monero, it's younger sibling, is gaining lots of press. Monero is only 8% mined at this time.) This coin does not appear to have any significant premine. The blockchain does show that on the first block, there was some 703,600 Bytecoins created. Looking at the total coins in circulation, one sees there are some 1,407,000 coins. This could mean there is an undocumented premine of exactly one block, which at the time was around 703,000 coins. Considering the coins is measured in the hundreds of billions, this is not a premine at all. But it is a strange anomaly. There is nothing malicious about this coins intentions, at least not in our reveiw of the mining data. Considering the above facts, however, we don't see a need to jump into Bytecoin. This coin is in both the extreme caution and questionable section, not quite fitting into either one.

Cinni

type of algorithm: scrypt PoW initially (closed)/PoS Not sure where to begin with this coin. How about their completely blank website? The front page displays absolutely no information. When you click the about page, this is what you see… At least they list the wallet downloads, the currency exchanges you can sell your Cinni on, and the pools from which you can mine Cinni, because apparently that is all that matters. :crickets: Cinni resources…a lot like their “about” page. Much ado about nothing. Their blog consists of 8 “rules” in the tradition of fight club. The first rule of Cinni club is that you do not sell your Cinni coins. The second rule is…etc etc, all of which advocate holding your coins, buying more, waiting for a forever pump. What the hell are we pumping? We don't know anything about the coin! Of course, this is a miner centric coin, so you have to know to go to www.bitcointalk.org forums and search out their initial post. They apparently used PoW mining to create 15 million coins. Each block was supposedly 868 coins. You cannot verify this for yourself by going to their blockchain, as it is the first block not to report any transaction value 28). They don't seem to be lying about this, however, because the last PoW block was (supposedly)17,280. They claim it never halves, so all the PoW ming should be represented here. 868 x 17,280 = 14,999,040. Slightly off, but how can we verify anything? We can't, which should be disconcerting to people. Their blockchain doesn't even read normal time stamps and we cannot verify how fast the PoW mining took place. Taking their word for it, 15 million coins were mined in 3 days 29). Now that it is 100% PoS, the only new coins to come into the market will arrive at 3.5% interest. To an investor who understands simple math, this coin is obviously stacked in favor of the miners and the PoS minters are left out to dry. Within 3 days, 15 million coins were created. Plenty of miners received 10,000s of coins during this period. 10,000 cinni as of April 30th is worth around $500. An investor would have to purchase 100,000 cinni at a price of $5,000 and mint at 3.5% interest. At that interest rate, you can make 3500 cinni IF YOU MINT ALL OF YOUR COINS. That's about 175 bucks. But wait, there's more bad news for PoS minters. You cannot mint more than 10,000 coins on one computer 30). Most people only have one computer, maybe two if they have a spouse or a desktop. So now 20,000 coins will mint a max of 700 coins, which is roughly $35 for a minting period. We are pretty sure you can do better on your $5,000 investment then $35 bucks. So why would someone use Cinni again? This author isn't sure, but he hopes a decent answer shows up on the website soon enough. **We can clearly see why someone would mine this coin; we can't see why someone would mint this coin or use this coin**.

Clean Water Coin

type of algorithm: scrypt PoW/PoS Here is a coin that is attempting to take humanitarian causes as one of it's chief aims, not unlike Primecoin, Riecoin, Gridcoin, or Einsteinium. Rather than sit back, relax, and say “hey, its for charity! Don't worry!”, we will remain extra vigilant. And when we do, something does not add up about Clean Water coin. To begin with, they provide on their bitcointalk thread (but not the website) the information of a premine which they call “pre launch” coins, supposedly going all to investors and none to development. You can see this in the blockchain 31). The coin supposedly provides up to 1000 generated coins per block, which gets smaller as the dificulty of mining goes up. There is also proof of stake at 8%. Currently, there 32,197 blocks on the Clean Water Coin blockchain. IF we take the assumption that every single block gets the maximum possible, 1,000 coins, and we multiply 32197 x 1000 = 32,197,000 coins. Including the 10,000,000 premined coins, this should bring a overestimated total of **42,197,000 CWC**. What is the actual total today? A little less because of our estimation? NO. The total as of May 6th is roughly **488,000,000 CWC**. How can the coin total be that far off? What else can we say about this launch? They started on March 30th. On April 29th, we can see on an archived www.coinmarketcap.com that there were already 484,000,000 CWC in existence. 484 million divided by 30 days is a little more than 16 million coins per day. Now if you go to their blockchain 32), click the double right arrow to set the search at the beginning. Choose to view the blockchain by 50 transaction per page. As we click through 50 transactions at a time, we see that from the inception of March 30th, 8:30 p.m. to March 31, 8:30 p.m. has a total of only 12,924,054. Then we have to minus the 10,000,000 premine, which shows only 2,924,054 CWC were created in a day. The next day, April 1st at 8:30 pm, we see the total coinage at 13,503,054, which means only 600,000 CWC were added the next day 33). April 2nd at 8:30 p.m. shows block 4033 with a total coinage of 14,278,054, meaning that another 750,000 CWC were created. This is no where near what is necessary, ~15 million CWC/day, to reach their current total. How did they do it? The coin should be avoided until this dilemma is solved. Even still, The coin has reached half of the total maximum coins of 1,000,000,000 in almost a month. That is an incredible fastmine. Once the above is solved, we would STILL avoid this coin as something doesn't smell quite right. ETA: **Dilemma Solved** This author went through a lot of clicking to view each page of 50 transactions and noted the amount of coins created per day, starting from March 31st. We covered up to April 2nd above…here is the rest of the blockchain data up until April 7th.

Blockchain data

Legend: first column numbers are blockchain, second is date, third is # of transactions, fourth amount transacted, fifth is difficulty and sixth is total number of coins minted. 5027 2014-04-03 20:30:37 11 6640.539596 36.253 14972054 5570 2014-04-04 20:31:57 12 6503.023654 13.522 15515054 6275 2014-04-05 20:33:34 16 13619.239612 12.497 16220054 6971 2014-04-06 20:32:32 5 2068.161995 11.019 16916054 7857 2014-04-07 20:30:05 18 6073040.428916 27.947 407560848.588562 HEYYYOO. What they hell happened between April 6th and April 7th? Let's take a look at the evening of April 6th. After chugging along around 1000 coins per block…. The coin generation is about to jump from 1000 coins a block to some truly absurd numbers…like 500,000 coins a block! Now, we can know for certain that some of these blocks were MAJORLY mined by looking for the ones with only one transaction on them. That transaction is the sending of mined coins to the miner. The coin generation jumps from 1000 CWC to hundreds of thousands of CWC… and this continues…notice that with 50 blocks per page, they are now generating an absurd 20 million coins in that period… …and continues… The carnage ends around block 8136. They now have 472,000,000 CWC in creation, **a hidden instamine of over 450 million CWC** (going back to April 6th there were roughly 17 million in creation). Absolutely unreal! Not only don't use this coin, TELL EVERYONE not to use this coin. ETA: According to supporters in the Clean Water Coin thread 34), the 450 million explosion was an accident by one of the devs. They decided to just keep chugging along. Don't bother informing Clean Water Coin, they are fully aware nearly half a billion coins come into existence beyond the rules they structured. They have decided they don't care that around 90% of their coins have been created accidentally. Does that sound like something you want to invest in and support?

Cloakcoin

type of algorithm: x13 PoW/PoS Cloakcoin joins the club of rapidly mined PoW coins that transition into PoS within a month, usually one to two weeks. This one ends the PoW/PoS hybrid period after 7 days and turns completely PoS at 6% annual interest. Unfortunately, when this author visited the blockchain of Cloakcoin he received this warning from his computer… If you can't see the image, it simply says the certificate on the blockchain website is not trustworthy. This author didn't bother clicking through the link as it is not worth it. There is enough info on the bitcointalk thread to do an analysis. This warning will **not** be considered as malicious unless someone contacts this author to verify it. It simly serves as a potential warning to others and we will give them the benefit of the doubt that this author's computer is over protective. The bitcointalk thread shows a total of 4,500,000 coins and yet coinmarketcap is showing that there are 4,510,000 coins, so they must mean there will only be 4,500,000 coins generated during the PoW/PoS hybrid. After the PoW period ended, the maximum amount of coin that can be made in a year (at 6%) would be 270,000 coins. 4,500,000 coins in 7 days. 270,000 coins in one yaer. You make the call as to whether this coin is worth investing in (if you aren't a miner who got in on such a good deal). It should be obvious.

Cryptcoin

type of algorithm: X11 PoW/PoS Cryptcoin misleadingly declares they are a coin without a premine on their bitcointalk.org thread 35). The fact not revealed is that this coin cut their mining subsidy by 10x in 14 days, which when you look at the raw math, can only be described as an instamine. Instamines can have virtually the same effects as a premine and the developer can get away with The bitconitalk thread reveals the first 2000 blocks will have a 500 CRY generation subsidy per block. From block 2001 to 4000 is 250 CRY/block, and 4001-8000 is 125 CRY/block, and 8001 to 16000 yields 62.5 CRY. The generation scheme then completely breaks its super fast rhythm and from block 16001 to 224000 the creation is only 31.25 CRY per block. EDITED TO ADD: Apparently the rate at which coins will be produced as changed. The initial distribution plan is slightly modified so that blocks 4000-12,000 produce 125 coins/block, than blocks 12,000-48,000 produce 62.5 coins/block and from block 48,000 to 386,000 there are 31.25 coins/block produced. This is a negligable change The coin launched on May 21st and block 16,000 occurred on June 5th. We cannot assume all blocks are PoW, but we can see that 1.9 million coins were created in two weeks from PoW. The maximum number of coins is declared to be 11 million coins, making this initial fortnight the time to get into this currency. Look at the graph of goldcoin 36) to get the idea of how much this two week period benefits th early adopter/miner and not necessarily the late comer investor. Ultimately, this coin is very similar than the surplus of instaPoW/PoS coins that we currently see today. Cryptcoin has decided not to turn off the PoW quite as fast as Cinni, Blackcoin, et al, but the effect is still the same. To read more about how the instaPoW/PoS system is worse than the ugliest of instamine in 100% PoW, read below. The Hottest Trend In Alternative Cryptocurrencies Is A Hidden Scam Tread with extreme caution here. This coin seems to have a lot of pumpers on its side, judging by the 2-4 million recent volume spikes in a 24 hour period. We don't advise trying to ride the wave of a pump and dump coin for obvious reasons.

Darkcoin

derived from Quark type of algorithm: blake, bmw, groestl, keccak, jh, stein PoW and PoS The following data and time stamps were collected from the Darkcoin blockchain 37). Block 1: 2014-01-19 Time: 3:54:41

Block 1000 : 2014-01-19 Time: 4:33:39

Block 2000: 2014-01-19 Time: 06:25:47

Block 3000: 2014-01-19 Time: 09:10:16

Block 3250: 2014-01-19 Time: 11:22:11 Looking at this data, we see that Darkcoin was mined with 500 DRK generated per block from the get go. **From block 1 to at least block 3250, according to their blockchain, they were still producing 500 coins each block**. The transition from 500 to 277 coins per block occurs between 3250 and 3500 but this author did not see the necessity of getting the exact moment of halving. Simple math shows that 3250 blocks multiplied by 500 coins a block is 1,625,000 Darkcoins created between the times of 3:54 and 11:22 on January 19th, 2014. As of today there are around 4,300,000 DRK in existence, making this a pretty hefty instamine. The Darkcoin website expects around 22,000,000 DRK to be created. That means in less than 8 hours, almost 5% of the Darkcoins that ever will be created spawned in that 1/3 of a day. **It's safe to say Darkcoin has left it's investors in the dark on this one**.

DonationCoin

type of algorithm: scrypt PoW only The block reward is 50 DON and it halves every 720,000 blocks. We are only on block 50,000 after a couple months from launch, so this coin does not disappoint in these terms. However, the premine is hard to grapple with. Donation actually publically announces it's premine on it's own website, unlike 90% of the altcoins here 38). It's a doozy, however, at 18 million coins out of an expected 90 million coins in total 39), a full 20%. This is the convenient way to count the premine/instamine, but for the investor it's better to look at the total coins in production. The coins will be dispensed so that 13,500,000 coins are sent to charities that get their wallet set up and openly advertise the fact that they accept donation coin. The rest of 4,500,000 coins are for the developers to use for their purposes, presumably giveaways, bounties, etc. We can see from the block chain there are 17,400 blocks and counting. Other than the 18,000,000 coin premine, every block has generated 50 coins. 17,400 x 50 = 870,000 coins. UPDATE 6/13/14: Donation coin has changed their strategy for dispensing their coins. Instead of sending the lion's share to American Red Cross, they will be sending 250,000 DON to any charity that accepts their coin. (From a logistical standpoint one can see how in planning phase they wanted the big charities but in reality they have to take what they can get.) Thus far they have sent 250,000 DON to one charity and you can expect more to come on this model as it's practical. Even at the current update, block number 49,173, there are only 20,458,650 DON in existence. Considering 18,000,000 were instamined, that leaves 2.45 million on the market. Our position still stands that this coin stays in the extremely cautious section for investment purposes. The reality for this coin is that it all depends on whether people will hold a coin that supports donations out of the goodwill of their heart. But is they are good people wanting to do goodwill, shouldn't they just give the coin to a charity instead of holding it? Feel free to use Donation Coin to send donations if you so choose. But with 18,000,000 DON planning to be dispensed in quarter million chunks to charities who will have to unload these Donation coins on the market of 2,500,000, we wouldn't recommend being a bag holder.

ECC

After seeing a plethora of rapidly PoW —» PoS coins like Yellowcoin, Darkcoin, Blackcoin, Asiacoin, Cinni, Zimstake, Whitecoin, etc, ECC is actually a breath of fresh air. All of the aforementioned coins received the worst rating in this article for rapidly mining a large amount of coins via the PoW method. ECC basically still does this, although not nearly to the obscene proportions of the other coins. ECC has a random coin generation per block of 100,000 to 300,000. On the good side, the coin never halves during the PoW phase. On the bad side, the PoW phase ends after a mere 45 days. Again, this looks good in comparision to the days or a couple weeks of other coins, but the creators gloss over the fact that this is actually a fast mine. 18,000,000,000 coins will be created during PoW. There are 50,000,000,000 coins that could possibly be created…which means the month and a half PoW phase will produce 36% of the total coins. This author doesn't see why a PoW only coin could prouce a full 36% of their coin in a month and a half would be called scammish and and PoW/PoS coin wouldn't. **This is a fast mine. Being a PoS coin should not shield this coin from that description.** In addition, the website lauds ECC as a “fair” coin 40). While they beat their bone headed competition, this coin still gives a large advantage to the people who mined the coin in the first 6 weeks. Not only that, this coin continues the tradition of not informing the public of their premining practices. Their website, despite having a “fair” section, is mum on the topic of the premine that occurred with this coin. The bitcointalk.org thread mentions a .99% premine. Of course, they are using the 50,000,000,000 total to reach this amount, which means the first block was half a billion ECC for the developers. That is around 5% of the toal coins in existence today. Not too bad, again in comparison to others, but still something an investor wants to know.

Feathercoin

type of alogrithm:scrypt PoW only Feathercoin was created on April 16th, 2013 and within 96 hours there were nearly 4,000,000 ftc created. 41) A little more than one year later, there are 40,000,000 ftc in existence. This means that at this day, April 22nd 2014, a full 10% were created in the first 4 days in comparison to the next year. This rate is simply too fast to ignore. A lot of people prefer the “old school” alternatives versus the newer versions out today. We say that feathercoin's early mining data does not inspire one bit, so it doesn't matter whether old school or new, this is a coin not to use.

Fluttercoin

type of alogrithm:scrypt PoW/PoS/PoT (proof of transaction) Fluttercoin is a PoW/PoS hybrid that provides a unique form of block generation for its first two block generations. They provide a random coin generation between 500-5000 Fluttercoins from block 1 to 3263 42). The next block period, from 3264 to 22000 blocks, would generate a random number of coins from, 1000-10000 Fluttercoins. The lesser amount for the first adopters is rather surprising and does encourage the investor somewhat that this coin is not about enriching the early adopters. The website further reveals, however, that there will only be 200,000,000 Fluttercoins via the PoW formation, at which point the PoS takes over at 5% interest. The first block occurred on March 4th, 2014 43). By April 16th, Coinmarketcap showed fluttercoin having nearly 100 million coins created 44). A mere 13 days later, April 29th, shows Fluttercoin having 182 million coins in existence 45). The supposedly slow start has now rushed to the 200,000,000 limit in almost 2 months. At a 5% PoS interest, the maximum to be created once 200,000,000 arrives will be 200,000,000 x .05 or 10,000,000,000. Rather conveniently, the coin generation goes from 200 million for initial miners to 10 million for the later investor. This does not inspire. Fluttercoin purports to have produced something innovative in their Proof of Transaction addition to their coin's protocol. The white paper informing of this incredible new innovation 46) is an incredibly unmotivating 2.25 pages long. This sort of falls outside the scope of this research but if we may comment briefly…it seems as though this innovation simply encourage people to send fluttercoin's for no purpose but to hopefully hit the lottery and win a bonus PoT award. Even with their parameters in place to limit the spamming of the blockchain with pointless transactions, one can still expect people to send Fluttercoins back and forth just for the hopes of getting lucky. Hardly an innovation that is revelant to the bitcoin revolution…

Goldcoin

type of algorithm: scrypt PoW only Goldcoin is another great example of a bad coin to invest in if you take evidence that the coins are not fairly distributed as reason for being extremely cautious. Using our www.cryptometer.org site, we can see that Goldcoin follows the same pattern. They appeal to the sense of money and wealth storage in the form of gold and yet their technology couldn't have had a worse start for someone wanting to perserve their wealth. 47) This shows 9 milliong GLD coins being created in 30 hours. www.coinmarketcap.com shows 30 million GLD coins in existene since its inception on May 14 of 2013. Nearly one third of the coins were created in one days that were created in a year! Somebody is a massive benefactor in this situation, and it isn't the average joe who buy a few hundred dollars worth of BitBar in the hopes of seeing appreciation. There is a high level of danger that someone holds a ridiculous amount of coins and they have done so in a unscrupulous and unsophisticated manner. They could sell their coins and completely crash your investment. Not mention, it is the principle of the matter…who wants to look back twenty years from now and see that a revolutionary currency had such a shitty and unfair start? How would that be any different than what we have today? It doesn't have to be this way if you simply don't use Goldcoin and encourage others to do likewise.

Infinite Coin

type of algorithm: scrypt PoW Initially 524,288 coins generated per block 48) block 1: 2013-06-05 04:47:22

block 1000: 2013-06-05 09:53:52

block 5000: 2013-06-06 22:32:01

block 10000: 2013-06-08 16:23:24

block 30000: 2013-06-15 16:36:36

block 50000: 2013-06-22 18:25:26

block 75000: 2013-07-01 14:41:58

block 85000: 2013-07-05 01:57:41 At block 85,000, Inifinitecoin was still generating 524,288 coins per block. We did not search for the precise point of halving, but it is somewhere between 85,000 and 100,000 blocks. 524,288 Infinitecoins multiplied by 85,000 blocks is 21,614,480,000 Infinitecoins. As of April 2014, there are around 90,000,000,000 Infinitecoins in existence, which means in one month over 20% of the coins were mined to this date. This is not nearly as bad as some of the more obvious scams out there, which makes this coin merely a questionable investment.

Ixcoin

type of algorithm: SHA1 PoW only We highlight this coin first as a reminder that even if the mining data looks good, you still may be in for a scam. Ixcoin has an apparently great start with a very slow mining speed at the beginning… The 90 day graph over at www.cryptometer.org begins to churn the questions, however… Why the flatline? Then the 3 year graph shows a boost in production from 400,000 IXC to 1,600,000 IXC in one week and the rest of the time a mostly straight line of production… What is going on here? Ixcoin is a Bitcoin clone with very little changed. The first block subsidy is 96 Ix coins instead of 50, like Bitcoin. The intention was for Ixcoin to reach 21 million coins (the same as bitcoin) by 2015 instead of 2033. The code was intended to practically “mirror” bitcoin for possible cross contamination of merchants and other goodies that Bitcoin earned. The creator, one supposedly named “Thomas Nasakioto”, posted an announcement of Ixcoin on Bitcointalk forums on August 10th, 2011. Yet both www.cryptometer.org and Ixcoin's blockchain show the start of the coin as May 07th, 2011. This is a big no no…essentially, from the coin's start until it was publically announced, only “Thomas” and his inner circle would be able to mine the coin. “Thomas Naskioto” is also an anagram of Satoshi Nakamoto. This person's name is likely fictional and just an attempt to use Satoshi and Bitcoin's fame for a clone to cash in. The coin was quickly outed as likely a scam for the same reasons pointed out here on bitcointalk 49). The coin went nowhere until recently a new dev has come on and wants to revive the coin. Don't bother with this one, the first publicly known leech in the crypto community.

Leafcoin

type of alogrithm: scrypt PoW only Leafcoin is the classic example of a coin primed for the super fast pump and dump. If you look at their bitcointalk thread, they are obviously scheming to get coins mined, and fast. They list openly that a full 7,500,000,000 coins will be mined in 10 days 50). That represents a full 1/3 of the coin. Naturally, this information is downplayed and basically ignored on their website 51) in favor of the “environmental” focus of the coin. Leafcoin states that the first 100 blocks are premined, but apparently they went with the randomized block subsidy up to 1,000,000 per block. So if we take an average of 500,000 Leafcoins created, that a 50 million premine. In actuality, that isn't too bad considering there are 15 billion leafcoins in circulation now. That isn't compliment, however, because the fastmine that minimizes the premine makes this coin less attractive to invest in. Leafcoin advertises that they are partnered up with the World Wildlife Foundation 52). However, there is no indication from the WWF that this is the case. The bitcointalk thread states they will find a worthy foundation to partner up with eventually…we shall see if that ever happens. Here is how Leafcoin is perfect for the pump and dump. They have the image that they want and they have the instantly mined coins that they want. Leafcoin began being monitored on Coinmarketcap on February 2nd. By late morning of that day, Leafcoin had already generated over 7.8 billion of the total possible 21 billion coins 53). They went to market at a very high price, saw action immediately, and then dumped. This is why you don't want to follow the hype of a pump and dump. You may think you have the opportunity to double your money easily, and then the currency slices in half. You hold and hold, more and more desparately so, until your expected double up becomes an evaporation of money. Don't bother with Leafcoin, the pump is already over. With nearly 3/4 of the coin already mined, anyone jumping into a revival of this coin clearly has not looked into the information here. Also, wouldn't proof of work mining not really make sense for an environmentally friendly currency? Just saying.

Limecoin

type of algorithm: scrypt PoW only As requested by a reader, we will investigate the Limecoin blockchain. The first block reveals a 500 coin block 54). block 1: (2014-04-22 05:00:44) –Coins generated per block: 500 block 999: (2014-04-22 05:27:04) –Coins generated per block: 500 block 1000: (2014-04-22 05:27:05) –Coins generated per block: 250 block 1999: (2014-04-22 05:47:57) –Coins generated per block: 250 block 2000: (2014-04-22 05:47:59) –COins generated per block: 125 block 3000: 2014-04-22 07:27:05) –Coins generated per block: 62 … block 8999: (2014-04-30 20:56:12) –Coins generaaed per block: 1.9 This pattern appears to continue. While looking for a website, there is none to be found. Even by searching bitcointalk.org forums, where this author could locate a central thread for Limecoin (LC), there was stil no actual website listed. The thread page confirms that the block halving occurs every 1000 blocks in an orderly fashion like that above… The bitcointalk.org thread says that only 1,000,000 Limecoin will be mined into existence, which poses a problem for anyone interested in investing. The first 1000 blocks, at 500 coins a pop, yields 500,000 LC. All in under 27 minutes. **This is over half the total planned coins in under half an hour**. Incredibly, the dev and others call this coin a “fair” mine and people are defending it. Hopefully, reason can speak for itself here.

Karma (formerly Karmacoin)

We give props to the Noblecoin founder who foresaw the mining power and unscrupulous developers heading towards an “ethical” generation of coins, which would merely be another pump and dump scam with the veneer of doing good. Karma is that coin in a nutshell. The Karma website gives no indication of the specs of this coin 55) but there is plenty of information about what karma is and why you should know about it. When we visit the bitcointalk.org forums, we see that the coin already has a suspicious block generation scheme 56). The coin supposedly generates 10,000 coins regardless of the block number; the catch is that there are randomly assigned “bonuses” to each block up to a certain amount. Blocks 1-10000 get up to a 1,000,000 Karma bonus; blocks 10001-25000 get up to a 750,000 Karma bonus; blocks 25000-50000 get 500,000 coins; blocks 50001-100000 get up to 250,000 coins; blocks 100001-200000 get potentially 100,000 coins; block 200001-300000 get up to 25,000 coins; blocks 300001-400000 get 10,000 coins, and then the rest of blocks get no bonus generation. This is deceptive on a few levels. One, they list the block subsidy cutting in half after 2.1 million blocks (expected to be 4 years). Normally this is commendable but considering the bonus coins…this fact doesn't matter one bit. Two, according to the blockchain this coin began on February 4th. The first bonus period ended on February 11 57) with block 10001. February 22nd saw the ending of the second block generation bonus period with block 25001 58). This trend of a week to two weeks a new lower coin coming is reminiscent of block halving way too frequently in other scam coins. Three, the first 58 blocks were mined by one account 59). You can find on the bitcointalk thread for Karma a number of people complaining about a questionable start. Four, upon searching the blockchain one sees that the specifications listd on the bitcointalk thread are incorrect. The above 58 blocks show a number of random coin generations, some of which are as high as 2,000,000 coins, not 1,000,000. What is the cause of this discrepancy? With enough digging you can find the truth. Originally, the Karmacoin plan was for the first block series to have up at 2,000,000 coin bonus, then a 1,500,000 bonus, then 1,000,000, 500,000, 200,000, 100,000, 50,000, then finally a 20,000 bonus 60). This is effectively double of what is advertised on the front page of their sponsored thread. Their blockchain also reveals that about 2,000,000,000 coins were created per 2,000 blocks up to 10,000 blocks…meaning over 10,000,000,000 Karmacoins were created between February 4th and 11th. As on the beginning of May, this represents 20% of the total coins in creation. The fastmining practices are bad, but the deceptive nature of hiding the actual bonus coins generated per block is especially worrisome. This is a coin to avoid.

Mastcoin

type of algorithm: X11 PoW/PoS Mastcoin wants to impress with better than usual instaPoW/PoS mining data, but it effectively follows the same super benefit for the first couple of weeks with some parts designed to look good. If you are into the instaPoW/PoS coin, Mastcoin looks a lot better than the rest of the shit out there. InstaPoW/PoS is a new form of coin that we are noticing and it seems to be designed to generate more coins faster for the early adopters, something we interpret as bad (see here 61)). If anything, this coin is a better version of instaPoW/PoS. The bitcointalk thread notes that Mastcoin has 88 block subsidy during its PoW mining phase (of 25,000 blocks) and it doesn't cut it in half at all. Not only that, they provide a “super” bonus of double the subsidy, or 176 MAST for block 1 to 2880 for the early adopters and blocks 22120-25000 also have a doubled block subsidy. This is supposedly for the “late comers”, but that clearly is a short sighted reference to the concept of late comers. The coin started on May 22nd and the “late comer” bonus started on May 29th, a week later. We would hardly call that a late comer bonus. Indeed, from May 22nd to May 30th there were around 2.4 million coins in existence. The PoS minting actually occurs at 15%, to some a high interest rate but in some sense it helps ease the unbalance a bit between the gluttony of PoW coins. If all the coins were minted in one year at 15%, that would produce ~360,000 coins. 360,000 coins/year vs 2.4 million coins/week stil is an ugly ratio of 1 to 346. In other words, there were 346 times more Mastiffcoins being created during the PoW phase than was is even theoretically possible in the PoS stage. In other words, this coin is just a slightly prettier but still shitty instaPoW/PoS. And to be slightly better than shit is to still suck. This coin also has slightly more than a 1% premine, which appears to be only measured at the stoppage of PoW minting, which is 2,455,692 coins. Because of the weird structure of instaPoW/PoS coins, it's actually quite helpful for the devs to list their premine percentage counting from the end of PoW instead of some distant end of coin production 20 years down the road with PoS. Since the coin reached 2,455,692 coins via PoW quickly, the premine is not significant and the way they advertise the premine is genuine. We appreciate the honesty. Mastcoin, previous Mastiffcoin, is developing in many ways beyond its InstaPoW/PoS mining data. Feel free to check out their coin recycling technology and more at their website http://mastcoin.co We don't go into specifics about coins unless it relates to mining data. We identify Mastcoin's mining history as in a kind of category that generates a lot of coins quickly and then puts on the brakes hard, which we call instaPoW/PoS. Its definitely better than Whitecoin, Blackcoin, Orangecoin, and all of those claptraps. But we must give the Extreme Caution grade for its general data. Perhaps you will find enough value in how the rebranding of Mastiffcoin into Mast will be worth investing in. Remember, as it was stated in the beginning of this wiki: A COIN BEING PLACED in the extreme caution section DOES NOT mean you cannot invest in it. There could be any number of different aspects to a coin that you really enjoy, and the fast mining of the beginning may not be enough to stop you. We suspect with the way Mastcoin is changing its focus and image, you may find some reasons to jump in. For the purposes of this wiki, it is in the extreme caution section.

Megacoin

type of algorithm: scrypt PoW only As of today (late April, 2014), there are 23.1 million Megacoins in existence. The following data from www.cryptometer.org demonstrates that Megacoin had a significantly fast mine in its first 96 hours… 62) …producing 3 million coins in 10 hours (more than 10% of today's totals) and 4 million coins within 50 hours of inception.

microcoin

type of algorithm: scrypt jane N Factor PoW only One almost wants to give this coin a lot of credit. Unlike the slew of coins above it that hide and obfuscate information in regards to the mining protocol, this coin is quite up front 63). There is no premine. The first 10,000 blocks are a fraction of a microcoin for testing purposes. Blocks 10,000-160,000 equal the number of coins created; in other words, on block 25,592, there will be 25,592 microcoins created. After block 160,000, the coin generation drops 1 coin per block. After block 310,000, the coin generation drops .01 per block until it finally reaches 1,000 microcoins, were it will stay in perpetuity 64). All of this checks out on the blockchain 65). Unfortunately, the coin distribution by this method is rather poor and bluntly favors the first 90 days. One cannot hesitate to call it a clever fastmine. The website says there is a 100,000,000,000 cap on coin creation. By May 6th, there were roughly 27 billion coins already created, meaning that from the creation date of January 10th, means that 1/4 of all coins to be mined were mined in a little more than 4 months. Imagine if Bitcoin reach 5.5 million (roughly the 27% equated above) coins mined by 4 months. In reality, bitcoin was at 610,000 in 4 months 66). Most people would call that a fast mine. We call microcoin one, too.

Mintcoin

type of algorithm: scrypt PoW (closed)/PoS We don't have a www.cryptometer.org graph. We do, however, have evidence via their own blockchain 67) that their was a poorly nanounced preine occurring on the first block. 700 million Mintcoins were minted on the first block68)!!! There are around 19 billion Mintcoins in existence as of this writing, representing around 3.5% of the current totals. This is lower than some of the other fastmined and instamined coins in this category. One transaction, the first, created 3.5% of all the coins to date. That is worrisome. The coin started on February 6th and the PoW period is already over (as of at least May 6th and likely earlier). There will be 70 billion coins as an end cap, making this 3 month period capable of producing 27% of the total coin supply. Where can we learn about this on their website? It is nowhere to be found. If you knew to visit the bitcointalk.org forums, you may read about a “1%” premine. Except when you make that premine calculation early on, that percentage is not valid to an incoming investor. It will be more accurate 4 years down the road.

Mooncoin

type of algorithm: scrypt PoW only Mooncoin has the tall tale signs of enriching the early adopters (without earning it). The block is one of those bizarre ones that is “random” from 0 up to a certain limit. The first reward halving goes from 2,000,000 for the first 100,000 blocks to 1,000,000 up to block 200,000. After that, the block reward begins to halve faster; at block 250,000 (600K Mooncoin), then block 300,000 (350K Mooncoin) and block 350,000 (175K Mooncoin). This shortens the block generation period in half, which quickens the rate of coin generation to a smaller amount. This process accelerates as block 375,000 ends a quick 25,000 block generation period of 100K Mooncoin. A mere 9,000 blocks, up to 384,000 blocks, brings about another block halving to 50K Mooncoin. After this, the rest of the coin generation is a tepid 29,531 Mooncoins per block. Bitcoin's block halving is simple and slow. From 50 BTC per block, to 25 BTC, to 12.5 BTC, and to 6.25 BTC per block over 16 years. Mooncoin was started on December 30th, 2013. My March 26th there were 58 billion Mooncoin, which was about 15% of the total expected production 69) 70). By May, there were 98 billion Mooncoins in existence, representing 25% of the total expected production. This isn't a sneaky or hidden fastmine. The story is in the data provided by the coin mining statistics. If got got to mine the coin in the first few months, you should use this coin. If you didn't get to mine it, well, that will be up to you if you want to benefit the first adopters or not.

Nautiluscoin

type of algorithm: scrypt PoW Only coming soon…

Noblecoin

See below

Novacoin

Peercoin fork type of algorithm: scrypt PoW/PoS Novacoin was created on February 09th, 2013 and within 96 hours, 210,000 NVC were created… 71) One year later, there are 610,000 NVC in existence, meaning this coin generated around 33% of coins in 4 days that it would generate in over a year.

Netcoin

type of alogrithm: scrypt PoW only This coin is a fork of Litecoin that adds superblock bonuses every hour. The first block was to mint 1024 coins and it was to be halved around every 3 months. “In order to encourage use”, the coin actually provided 5 times 1024 coins for the first 2880 blocks 72). The first block was created on September 2nd. The 2880th block (and **14.75 million Netcoins** later) was September 4th. From block 2881 to at least 5750 73) was the creation of 3072 coins per block, thus equalling **8,813,568** coins generated in that period (5750-2881= 2869…and 2869 x 3072). That time period lasted from September 4th to September 6th, 1:00 pm. From block 5750 (again, slightly conservative) to block 1050 shows double generation at 2048 coins per block. That produced some **9,625,600**. This period went from mid day September 6th to 6 pm on September 9th. …**Please note**, these estimates do not figure in the supposed “8x bonus” every hour, so these estimates are a little low. Thus, from the coins inception on September 2nd to the evening of September 9th, this coin generated an estimated 33,189,168 Netcoins. That represents about 10% of the total coin production ever, listed at bitcointalk as 320,000,000 Netcoins 74). This is a moderate fastmine. One can also tell that the coin was mined fast simply by look at the inception date, September 2nd, and the date of this writing (May 09, 2014), and see that 266 million coins are already created. This means in 8 months, Netcoin has created ~80% of its coins. This coin doesn't have a ridiculous instamine or any other shady shannanigans, it simply was mined fast.

Neutrinocoin

type of algorithm:scrypt PoW? (website hints at PoS also) Neutrinocoin burst onto the scene out of nowhere. One of the few coins that completely ignored bitcointalk, the most popular bitcoin and alternative cryptocurrency source for these bitcoin clones. Chances are they did this purposely to mine the coin themselves and hit the ground running in a timely fashion. Looking at their blockchain 75), we can see that they were pumping out 3992 neutrinos per block in the beginning. How convenient, they didn't really tell anyone about this coin yet! Go ahead and scroll through the blockchain 76) by 2000 blocks a page and look at the difficulty. **It's zero. The difficulty is non existent for the first month beacuse only the dev's were mining it**. That means the developers were just scooping up coins without difficulty, hell probably on laptop miners because they kept their launch quiet. After pumping out 209 million coins at 3992 coins per block, the block subsidy shifts down to 10.987 at block 52,598 77). The design of this coin…minting 3992 coins per block in the dark…then switching to something 300 times less JUST as the coin is being put on www.coinmarketcap.com …stinks of a scam. It's hitting on coinmarketcap because the developers are hoping to grab a few innocent joe's while they dump what they can on them on insane prices. These cool looking guys mined their coin in private and now they want you to pay them for their scam! Why don't you help them out, they look professional! …but seriously, definitely don't bother with this one.

NXT

100% PoS NXT is a 100% Proof of Stake coin, the first of its kind. Anyone with a modicum of understanding about how coins are generated will then ask, how do the people obtain coins fairly? For the coin to be truly Proof of Stake, they must be **generated somehow** in the beginning. Who gets to hold the first NXT? Was the coin creator focusing on making a fair distribution? Let us use a metaphor to more aptly explain what happened with NXT. Your buddy is about to create a house that, if it sells well, will probably be replicated and used many times over and make your buddy a lot of money. He wants capital and some investors to spread the risk. You can't give him much but you want to help, so you send him .01 BTC. A week later, your friends ask you about the house idea and you explain it to them. They think its innovative and they want to invest in it, too. You call your house selling buddy but he informs you that the investing period is over. Oh well, they can buy shares from you individually, he said. Now, the hype around this house is building (hehe) and people are becoming very interested. It's appearing like you could sell some of your stake at a premium. How much should you sell some your stake for? a) a small premium, 1.5x what you paid for it, or .015 BTC b) double your money, 2x what you paid for it, or .02 BTC c) 5x your investment, this is about to get big, or .05 BTC d) 50x your investment, or .5 BTC If you chose “d”, that is the answer that apparently played out 78). And the investment premium only skyrocketed **further**. NXT had an “IPO” for their coins, for being 100% PoS, they had to distribute their coins somehow. If you send them BTC, they would give you a certain percentage of the coins, that percentage determined by how many people donated by the end of the IPO. The coin creator, BCNext, left a loosely labeled start to the coin at January 3, 2014 and loose instructions that the IPO would continue up until that point. This didn't happen. The IPO was closed around November 18th 79), a full month early. Only 73 people were in the official IPO list, meaning NXT's 1,000,000,000 coin instageneration was distributed amongst these people. What happened next was absolutely fabulous for those 73 investors. NXT went to the market in a huge way. In under a month, NXT reached a market cap of $80,000,000 or 8 cents a coin (December 26th. Plus it went higher a few days later). When you look at what .01 BTC got you in the IPO, some 500,000 NXT, you begin to grasp what an enormous price jump NXT went through. NXT reached $80 million market cap on December 26th. Bitcoin was worth around $700 on the same day. At .01 BTC, which is $7 at that time, you could have gotten 500,000 NXT 80). **500,000 x .08 = $40,000. …all from a $7 investment…** if someone finds a better profit margin in around the same time frame (1-2 months), notify us. We're pretty sure this is the quickest and best performing investment of all time, especially when you extrapolate the actual value of some of the BTC invested in early November and October (~$120 per BTC. And this wasn't even the top of NXT's growth. It's one thing to profit 2x-10x of your original investment. If you double your money, you should get a pat on your back. If you get 10x your money, you should buy a round for everyone at the bar. What if you do 5,000x better than your investment? You should check your math because something is very wrong. What does this mean to the investor now? Well, those 73 original IPOs investors are kings of the world, that is for sure. Except now they hold all of the NXT, and if no one uses NXT, the value will go down. So the original holders began **giving away NXT** by the thousands in an attempt to better circulate the coin. Just ask yourself if you were an original NXT holder and you make over 5,000x your initial investment. Would your plan be to sell it all, hold it all, or somewhere in between? Considering there is no other example of an IPO in history that has performed this well, only an idiot would continue to hold if they could. **The original investors are looking to sell**. Who is going to buy? We are not. This post is simply pointing out that a product held an IPO, that IPO ended after ~ 6 weeks, and then within two days, people were selling their ipo stake for 50x. Then 100x, 200x, and even further up. To see that kind of price increase, the product must've have improved in usage or utility tremendously. Do your own due diligence to find out if the price increase is warranted. Edited to add: One does struggle to combine what we know about the initial NXT start and it's impressive ability to not implode on itself. NXT hit a top of around $90 million market cap and has sunk below $20 million. Recently it has slowly inched its way up around $50 million market cap. On one hand, if enough of the original holders sell their coins until they are satisfied, the currency could reach a nice buoy point where the initial investors no longer want to sell and hold for potentially more gains (crazy, I know). That could've been reached around the $20-30 million market cap area and months after the initial bubble top. There was plenty of time to sell some of the initial stake. Regardless of the future of NXT (annals of crypto fame or the dustbin), the initial IPO will be regarded as equivalent to a lottery winning. Congratulations, early adopters!

OrangeCoin

type of algorithm: scrypt PoW (ended)/PoS This coin is clearly a copy of the previous PoW/PoS coins that happened to have a color as it's name, like Blackcoin, White, Redcoin, Yellowcoin, etc. Nothing in the details should get you excited about this coin as an investor. The first two weeks will mine at 5000 coins a block, yielding some 50,000,000 coins. The first year of PoS mining produces 20% interest, following by 10% the second year, then 5%, and eventually a perpertual 2.5% interest. Their bitcointalk page even lays out in plain detail how well this benefits the PoW early miners. After two weeks and 50 million created, the **yearly** creation of coins starts at 6 million, then 3 million, and weaker and weaker. When you expand the rate of creation from two weeks to a year, we see that the PoW 2 week bonzana would've produced 1.3 billion coins in a year. The reduction from that PoW mining period to the first and highest PoS minting period **is over 200 times less** (1,300,000,000 / 6,000,000 ~ 216). When we see that kind of data on pure PoW mined coins, we wince. WWe apparently haven't developed a facial response or emoticon to a fast PoW/PoS coin that does the same effective thing. No need to bother with this coin.

Particle

type of algorithm: blake, groestl, bmw, keccak, skein, jh PoW only Particle is a great example of a coin that took one look at Bitcoin's slow block halving and realized they couldn't get their early adopter benefit quick enough. Here is Bitcoin's projected halving. Notice how miners were getting 50 BTC a block for 4 years…and the next 4 years get 25 BTC…and the next 4 years get 12.5 BTC…and the next 4 years get 6.25 BTC a block. This is the gold standard, to use a phrase, for how a coin should break down it's subsidy over time. Particle's website shows no information about how the coins generated per block halves over time 81). Someone, presumably a developer for the coin, did post the relevant information over at www.bitcointalk.org… As you can see, Particle took a much faster approach to dividing the block subsidy. The first 10,000 blocks generated 50,000 coins. According to their blockchain, that period took from December 31, 2013 at 6:51 82) until January 3, 7:23 83). So the first period of halving occurs a mere 3 days later. That's almost considered par for the course nowadays…what happened since Bitcoin and now? The opportunity to make more money, of course. Not to be outdone by their 3 day block halving, the bitcointalk forum post reveals that the halving amplies to every 2,500 blocks. So block 10,001-12,500 produced 25,000 coins a block (that period lasted from January 3rd to midddy January 4th), block 12,501-15,000 produced 12,500 coins a block (from midday January 4th until 11 pm the same day), block 15,001-17,500 produced 6,250 coins a block (from late January 4th until 6:50 pm January 5th), and block 17,501-20,000 produced 3,125 coins per block (from evening of January 5th to 3 pm January 6th). So the first 3 days saw the highest round of coin generation, and from January 3rd to midday January 6th, the block halved 4 more times. This means that the initial block generation had the advantage of receiving 50,000 coins. Not even a week later, the coin was producing a mere 3,125 coins a block. Do you see the problem here?

Peercoin

see below

Primecoin

type of alogrithm: cunningham chains PoW Primecoin is another of Sunny King's inventions, following in the wake of his wildly popuar Peercoin. Not surprisingly, the same kind of graph appears for both coins. 84) Notice the well defined curve that shows a high amount of minted coins in the first two weeks of minting. 1,200,000 million coins by day 18. By April of this year, there were only 5,300,000 XPM in existence.

Reddcoin

UNDER CONSTRUCTION type of alogrithm: scrypt PoW (and PoSV?) A previous edition of this wiki was quite harsh on Reddcoin. The author instinctually checked the blockchain of the coin (not knowing anything about it and noticed the usual premine that is seen in many of the unsavory coins. However, Reddcoin did have a publicly announced IPO (or IPCO) and the premine was actually for investors who fronted BTC, not the developers. The developers could use the BTC to make endorsements, advertisements, literature, paying programmers (likely some of themselves) while a group of investors shared in owning 5% of the total Reddcoins. This is actually a preferred method in comparison to the straight premine, which lacks the investors and simply takes the coins for the developers at the coin user's expense. In addition, the IPOs of coins like NXT and Qora pale in comparison to Reddcoin. In case you weren't aware, NXT is a coin that is fully Proof of Stake, which means no coins are generated from mining in the traditional Proof of Work sense. Staking receives money from a block's transaction fees, which means the amount of coins in NXT never increases. Thus, all the coins that NXT will need were created on the first day. NXT choose to have an IPO via the bitcointalk message board and with very little press or presentation about what they were doing. The IPO ended weeks early. To top it all off, there is evidence to show that the initial investors began to sell their NXT at 50x markup immediately! The coin struck gold by going live just as the November/December cryptocurrency gold rush of 2013 set in, and NXT vaulted past its absurd markup. Initial investors were able to turn 100 bucks into six figures in under two months. Qora is a sort-of-clone of NXT and they also did an IPO. Their IPO followed in the same suit, where investors put up money and the initial sale of the coins on market places shows that the amount they were selling for vastly exceeded what the investors paid for, but not quite to NXT levels. This is suspicious because one usually requires investors to provide capital, and that capital is provided under the assumption of risk. These operations showed hardly any risk and ridiculous gain. Those kinds of characteristics fit the model of scam more than an IPO. Reddcoin, on the other hand, had a perfectly reasonable IPO. One can view the IPO result page in the links provided here 85) The IPO closed on February 1st 86) and the price of bitcoin was around $825. If we look at the results page, investor ID number 562 donated exactly 1 BTC (unfortunately it does not say when this was sent so we shall use the value of the BTC at the moment of closing). They received 14,445,728 Reddcoin for their investment. When Reddcoin was first tracked at www.coinmarketcap.com, It appeared at a price of 5 Satoshi's, dropped quickly to a price of 3 satoshi's, spiked up to 12 satoshi's, and then trended back down towards 5 satoshi's until July 87). $825 x .00000005 (or 5 satoshi) = 0.00004125, this gives us a rough value of one Reddcoin at both Reddcoin's starting price and initial trending price. 0.00004125 x 14,445,728 = 595.88628. This means that the initial value of the coins, given our assumptions, was actually lower than what the investor's paid for when they started. Now, we cannot get too specific here because we don't know the value of the 1 BTC sent by investor 562, but we can at least see that Reddcoin is in no way like the scam appearing NXT or Qora IPO. To put it bluntly, those coins seem to be created to get investor rich real quick. Reddcoin certainly is not of that category, as the investor's money was break even or less for months for the Reddcoin price. We can conclude that the IPO was fairly launched, reasonably priced, and well executed. A previous edition of this wiki also lambasted the developers for “hiding” the IPO and IPO results. This assertion still stands as one can see that the website update doesn't provide a link to the IPO results, however the IPO web address still exists…if you can find it. 88) 89) The same website image can be seen on the web archive for March 7th 90) (a picture doesn't do justice as the archived page requires a bit of scrolling…follow the link). However, the assertion that the developers are hiding the IPO is not completely true, as a link has been provided at the Reddcoin FAQ page ((http://www.reddit.com/r/reddCoin/wiki/faq)). Reddcoin was still mined quite quickly, and while this wiki is under edit, it is possible it will be moved to a questionable standing once all is said and done. UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Shibecoin

type of algorithm: scrypt PoW/PoS Shibecoin runs on the energy of Dogecoin…although it can't run for long. The PoW stage is a mere 5 days long, where they intend to mine 300,000,000 coins. The annual stake will be 10% interest. There was also an announced .5% premine, which should come out to 1,500,000 coins. They do not appear in the beginning of the blockchain 91). The coin is mined so damn fast that the premine is hardly the problem! Per usual with our explanation of EVERY PoW/Pos hybrid that mines the coins really fast, there is no good reason why someone who didn't get to mine the coins would use them. 300,000,000 coins are created in 5 days. From that moment on, if every single coin is put into staking, you will only be able to make 30,000,000 coins annually. Chances are only half or so will actually use the staking method and its more likely the number is closer to 15-20 million. The rate at which coins were created at PoW just don't compare to the PoS method. It looks and feels like a waste of time. This could couldn't be more designed to benefit the first adopters, and those first adopters occur in the first five days of the coin. This mining data earns an extreme caution warning.

SilkCoin

type of algorithm: scrypt PoW/PoS If you have read this coin page enough now, you know that a scrypt PoW/PoS hybrid is going to be suspect. Thus far, numerous coins have come out that rush through PoW and get to PoS, seemingly as a means to increase the ease of obtaining coins while late comers pile in (see here 92)). Does Silkcoin buck the trend. In a word, no. The bitcointalk thread describes a strange back and forth between hybrid PoW/PoS and full PoS. Initially there is a 10,000 block period of 5000 Silkcoins being produced per block for PoW and people can also mint coins via PoS at 2% during this time. Then from block 10,000 to 50,000 there is a PoS only phase. You will notice that after the first 10,000 blocks there were almost 30.7 million coins created. The PoW mining started on May 9th at 7:30 pm and block 10,000 occurred on May 14th at 1:41 am 93), which means these 30 million coins were made in less than 4.5 days. When we look at the blockchain at 50,000 blocks, guess how many coins were made during that PoS period? **Only some 26,000 Silkcoins**. This is a sign of things to come… Now you can see how a coin that gets all of its PoW done early is a get rich quick design to pump out all the coins quickly (into the hands of ready and powerful miners). At the time of this writing, the third stage from block 50,000 to block 60,000 is still in operation. At around 57,000, the coin is up to a total of 39,700,000. The maximum amount of PoW coins will be at 45,000,000 (so probably in 48 hours), at which point 2% PoS takes over the coin creation. Block 50,001 started on June 10th and if this second hybrid period is anything like the first one, it will reach block 60,000 in 5 days, for a total of 10 hybrid PoW/PoS days. This has been discussed ad nausem (see this 94)) but to put it simply; fast mined PoW/PoS coins are grossly in favor of the PoW miners and screw the PoS minters. It took (presumably) 10 days to mine 45,000,000 coins. If everyone minted at 2% for an entire year in PoS after this point, the maximum amount of coins that would be created in one year would be 900,000 Silkcoins. 45 million in 10 days. 900,000 in one year. If you can't see how this PoW/PoS crap is slanted so heavily towards the miners and not at all towards the average joe who uses the currency, we cannot help you anymore. Just stop reading. Don't use this coin.

Supercoin

type of algorithm: x11 PoW/PoS Supercoin comes in the lineage of PoW/PoS coins. Does it buck the trend and produce a coin that might actually appeal to a non mining investor? Initially, yes. After it's all said and done, definitely no. The bitcointalk thread associated with Supercoin indicates that there will be roughly 18.2 million coins, and then the total maximum during PoS only is 50,000,000 coins. Right off the bat, the blockchain reveals that there was a 2,500,000 premine on the first block 95). How does the bitcointalk post describe this? “Zero Premine”. 96). Apparently that is the IPO money. Measuring from the very end of the coin, 2.5 million IPO is 5% of the total possible. The PoS structure is 100% the first year, 50% the second year, and 1% the third year. Relatively speaking, the first couple years of PoS minting compare better to the PoW mining versus other coins in the same instaPoW/PoS genre. Normally we see 400x-5000x decrease in coin creation once PoS takes over. Indeed, at 512 coins per PoW block and a max PoW production of 18,200,000, the coin could be cranked out in a week or so but it's not. The coin started on May 26th and we are at 11.3 million coins on June 14, which means there are still 7 million coins to be mined via PoW/PoS hybrid. To look at how Supercoin compares to other PoW/PoS coins 97), we will lay out some guesstimates as to when PoW/PoS will end and compare the rate of coin creation in that period to the maximum possible to be created in Year 1, 2 and 3. 98) If PoW/PoS mining reaches 18.2 million 2 months from the launch, that means PoW/PoS mined coins 6x faster than what the first year could possibly mine, 6x faster than what the second year can mine, and 200x faster than what the year 3 can mine 99) If PoW/PoS mining reaches 18.2 million within 3 months from the launch, that means PoW/PoS mined coins 4x faster than what the first year could possibly mine, 4x faster than the second year, and 133x faster UPDATED TO ADD: You can see here that the coin halves is PoW block subsidy every 10 days 100). This means the coin largely benefits the immediate adopters, something we are keeping a close eye on in this wiki. Frankly, these numbers for the first two years are downright great in comparison to Blackcoin, Cinni, ZimStake, Boostcoin, and all the rest of the instaPoW/PoS. However, when we see bitcoin halving every 4 years and we are using that as our initial guide for judgment, having your PoS model produce at 1/6 the rate of the initial PoW production is less than stellar. And in particular, it is clear this coin is not designed for the long term when it drops off to 1% in the third year (and every year after). Now some of you may take the fact that this is the best looking instaPoW/PoS coin out there on paper and want to see it in the Questionable or Okay categories (we don't). In addition, the coin's main feature is a concept called the “superblock”. In a pattern reminiscent of Jackpotcoin, Supercoin provides super block payouts randomly. Every 3 hours there will be a block that had quadruple the payout; every day there will be a block that has 16 times the payout; every 5 days there is a massive 128x block. This sort of “block gambling” is no surprise in the bitcoin world. Some of the highest revenue businesses currently are gambling. We don't see Supercoin's innovation as bringing anything new to the market. From an investor's perspective, you are investing in a casino coin. Don't expect that coin to change the world. When we see PoW only coins who have an inital rate of production between 5-10x faster in the first few months in comparison to after the first year, we pretty consistently vote those coins in the extreme caution section. This is like having a coin with an initial 100 block subisdy and by the end of the first few months, it being cut down to 20. It took Bitcoin 4 years to cut in half. It took Supercoin a few months to cut their rate of production anywhere from 4 to 6 times as much 101). While better than all the other instaPoW/PoS coins, we still see reason to avoid this coin. It is designed for the first two years of use and then a paltry 1% comes in. The structure of the PoS made an effort to minimize the PoW benefit, and that is commendable, but dropping off year 2 of PoS only from 50% to 1% puts it back into the league of Cinni and all the rest.

Ultracoin

type of alogrithm: scrypt PoW/PoS UTC is too recent to be found on www.cryptometer.org. A simple search of their blockchain is more revealing than any graph could show, unfortunately… The first block generated on January 31, 2014 was a ridiculous 2,000,000 UTC 102). It would be one thing if the coin generation continues and this particular currency was striving to be one of those high denomination coins with a total supply in the hundreds of billions of “coins”. Ultracoin shows no such sign of being that kind of currency. The next block in the blockchain shows 50 coins generated by PoW. The rest of the early blocks also show a measly 50 coins per block. Currently, they are at 15 coins per block production. Current www.coinmarketcap.com totals show Ultracoin having around 14 million UTC in existence currently. That makes the **first block 15% of the total mined coins almost 4 months into existence**. There is no information regarding this on the website. The bitcointalk forum does describe a 2% premine, however to describe the premine as a percentage of coins that are going to come in time (100,000,000 will take years…) makes the premine look smaller. If you state its a 2,000,000 premine, people will get the idea of how big that is. The bitcointalk thread also lies about the halving scheme of the coin, claiming the block subsidy is at 15 and halves every 990,000 blocks. Except when you actually look at the blockchain, you can see that the **first 239,999 blocks** generate 50 coins each 103). Some may say they updated their bitcointalk page for the current round…that is sloppy, if so. Actually, in a place you wouldn't expect it (the wallet tab of the website), they do describe this cutting of the coin subsidy by more than 3 times its initial amount (an amount that is now hidden from the bitcointalk threads). What was the reason? “…[b]ecause the old model was unsustainable.” 104). That's the best answer you can come up with when you make a change that suspiciously looks like you are giving massive advantage to the first miners?

USDe

type of algorithm: scrypt PoW only What USDe developer's state their mining protocol is and what their blockchain tells us diverges multiple times. This sends up enough red flags that this coin should be used with extreme caution. The website is forthcoming with information but the information does not match what one can find. For instance, apparently there will be 4,000 USDe generated per block until the total coin production reaches 1/3 of the max coin supply (which is 1,600,000,000). There seem to be some slow test blocks up to the first 1,000 blocks as many of the blocks from 0-999 are 100-500 coins. That is a good sign. Yet look at blocks 1001, 2001, 3001; they all give out 100,000 coins 105). Why is this? It appears the 1st block of every thousandth one gives 100x the bonus. In addition, the 4501 block also shows this pattern, a 100,000 coin reward instead of the usual 1,000 coin reward 106). Could it be that there is a ridiculous bonus every 1000 and 500 blocks? Ugh, if you haven't begun cringing yet, now it the time. The 100,000 coin bonus also seems to appear every 100 coins…as seen on block 4401 107), 3601 108), and 8201 109). In addition, there is a 24,000,000 USDe premine that goes unmentioned on their site 110). The deceptive, poorly described block mining plus the unmentioned premine brings this coin firmly into the category of extreme caution.

Vericoin

type of algorithm: scrypt PoW/PoS In the tradition of instaPOW/PoS, Vericoin produces a ton of coins and rapidly transitions to a much slower PoS minting for the rest of its life. The result is that early adopters gain enormous benefit at the opportunity to obtain cheap coins and their wealth is dependent on late coming investors (such as yourself) to make money off of. Vericoin starts with a 2500 coin/block subsidy until it generates 26.7 million Vericoins 111). According to their website it reached this milestone by block 20,160. From the first block to here took a mere 8 days to make 26.7 million coins. The coin will now continue with a flexible, but more or less 2% annual interest. If half of the available coins were staked for the first year, it would only produce ~500,000 coins. One can clearly see that the time to get into this coin would be when they were being produced at 600 times faster rate. If you missed out on all the fun during the PoW phase, don't bother with this coin because you are the sucker holding the bag.

Vertcoin

See below. This coin is likely an accidental fast mine but it is significantly so. Thus the coin could be in either section.

Whitecoin

type of algorithm: scrypt PoW (closed)/PoS The blockchain hides the amount of currency being generated quite well 112). Nevertheless, a simple search of the first block generated for this coin reveals that 2,340,000 WC were created instantaneously 113). The coin does follow a high denomination model, with www.coinmarketcap.com currently showing around 300,000,000 WC in existence. This “one block instamine” doesn't quite compare to Mintcoin and Ultracoin, none the less is shows the intention of the coin designer to give the first block a serious advantage. The following blocks show that the other “intended” first block rate was 30,000 WC. This continues for 9,999 blocks. Simple math suggests that 30,000 WC x 10,000 = around 300,000,000, right where we are today. But shouldn't the next block halving be generating some coins? The initial block payment was 30,000 WC…what would the next one be? 15,000 WC? 10,000 WC? Try 10 WC 114). Go ahead…here is their blockchain… http://wcbe.cipherpool.com/index.php Enter block height 10000 and begin clicking through the “next block” link on the bottom right until you see a simple block with only one transaction. Click that transaction and view the “TX value”. It's 10 WC. That isn't a block subsidy cut in half…it's three thousand times smaller. This author would use the word “scam” for this coin. Take from it what you will…

x11 Coin

type of algorithm: x11 PoW/PoS This coin seems to fit the pattern of a rapid PoW mining period followed by a much slower PoS period. The coin launched on May 08th, 2014, according to their blockchain. By May 15th, the blockchain reveals that X11 coin had roughly 2,226,000 coins in existence by that day 115). By May 27th, the coin had switched almost entire into PoS 116) with around 5.5 million X11Coins in existence. Initially, the bitcointalk.org thread created by the x11 community stated that the total number of PoW coins would be around 16 million coins and that PoS minting would take the expected total to 33 million coins 117). However, the coin developers have sinced changed their mind and shorted the PoW phase until 7.5 million coins are mined. Considering it took 19 days to produce roughly 5 million coins, we can't be far off from the end of the PoW phase and the full blown PoS phase, which returns 3.33 percent annually. The problem with this sort of coin start, from the investor's perspective, is thus: You are going to mine 7.5 million coins in probably 4-6 weeks. From that moment on, the most the **entire network** of X11 users can generate is 7,500,000 x .033 = 247,500 X11coins. When an investor comes along and sees a 100% PoW coin that m