How Would One Premine an AltCoin?

Question

Looking to create an Altcoin for fun and I heard about premining. Can this be done to premine all the coins without leaving my computer mining for days?

I followed a guide here: http://andarazoroflove.org/how-to-create-alt-coin-scrypt-clones-for-fun-and-profit-bitcoin-litecoin-secrets-exposed/

Thanks

your link does not work. 404 not found. I am curious and want to see. — creator, Feb 07 '18 at 03:41

score 6 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 15 '14 at 00:10

6

If you create the coin, you get to make the rules. Nothing stops you from patching the software to make your premining as easy or as hard as you want. For instance, you could set the difficulty schedule so that the first billion coins require very little or zero proof of work to mine; then you could mine them all at once and award them to yourself.

Of course, the hard part becomes convincing anyone else to use a currency that's so obviously slanted in your favor.

answered Jan 15 '14 at 00:10

Nate Eldredge

22,970
3
39
80

5

You could just inject a coinbase transaction in the genesis block if you wanted to. – David Schwartz Jan 17 '14 at 04:29
@DavidSchwartz I thought the coinbase in the genesis block was unspendable: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block – JBaczuk Jun 08 '18 at 02:06
1

@JBaczuk: That's true for Bitcoin because of a specific bug in the original code, which now has to be kept in order to avoid a hard fork. But if you're making your own coin, you can fix that bug. – Nate Eldredge Jun 08 '18 at 03:23
@NateEldredge could you share some link – rahhh Jun 20 '18 at 10:48
@rahhh: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/37559/how-to-make-genesis-block-transaction-spendable https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/10009/why-can-t-the-genesis-block-coinbase-be-spent https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/35760/is-it-true-the-genesis-block-reward-cant-be-spent-forever?noredirect=1&lq=1 – Nate Eldredge Jun 20 '18 at 14:02

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 01 '14 at 23:03

The rules for setting the rewards in the blocks can be as simple or as complicated as you want. Most Bitcoin derivatives have followed suit with fixed mining block rewards that are halved after some amount of time, just changing such amount and the time after which it gets halved.

Others, (as Lucky, Doge, Cat coins) have a random block reward whose mean value is reduced after some amount of blocks. Plus, some coins (42 and formerly Doge) have a random "superblock" where reward is much higher than usual.

Primecoin and its derivatives have the reward dependent on the difficulty of the network, and there are some other, weirder models.

The "premined" model is usually achieved by defining the rules so the genesis block yields an incredibly high amount of coins and the next blocks give out a more "normal" distribution with a normal decay of reward. That way the creator of the coin, just by the act of creating the genesis block, automatically becomes the owner of a significant amount of coins.

"Insta-mining" is similarly, defining the yields so the first blocks give a very high reward which then decays extremely rapidly - so creator of the coin and the very first miners (usually the creator's associates) end up with most of the coins. Quarkcoin was highly criticised because of this, in the end was more or less accepted by the community after its novel approach of multiple proofs of work was deemed interesting.

How Would One Premine an AltCoin?

2 Answers2