SDBS #26: Complete Story of the Stealth Premine
To celebrate the end of 2019, and to commemorate the full depletion of the Stealth premine address, today’s blog post presents the premine history, including how it was created and how it was spent. I finish up by describing how the balance of premine address was disbursed to the community by presenting the transaction IDs of the Junaeth testnet competition awards.
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Stealth Mining at Launch
Stealth launched to public mining on Tuesday, July 8, 2014 4:39:25 AM GMT. Mining was fair by the standards of the day, with a ten day pre-announcement period (“pre-ANN”) and four hours of very low block rewards of 16 XST each. This launch protocol allowed what was practically the entire altcoin mining community to participate in launch. Not only was the community alerted well in advance of launch, they had four hours to ensure their mining rigs were working efficiently, ample time for the tried and true X13 mining algorithm used by Stealth.
Although this launch process may seem unfamiliar to the 2017 altcoin arrivals who witnessed absurdities such as a year long ICO, Stealth launched in practically the fairest way known in the early days of alt history, when the community was small and constantly on the watch for new coins to mine.
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The Premine at Launch
Shortly before launch, the team mined the so-called premine, which amounted to only 1% of all coins scheduled for emission by mining. By today’s standards, 1% is a “tiny” premine, but at the time it was substantive, though not unreasonable. A premine consists of a number of coins that the dev team mines before they launch a coin. Upon launch, it becomes possible for the public to also mine. The intent of the Stealth premine was to fund development, and to that end the premine served its purpose well.
The premine consisted of the mining rewards for blocks 1–10, mining to three different addresses. Each block yielded 23,300 XST, for a total premine of 233,000 XST (1% of the scheduled 23.3 million). Shortly after launch, all of these address balances were consolidated to the premine address (S8knUucS6iFwAt1S8BmRpiTykqQfRLcape) in a single transaction.
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Premine Accountability: The Ledger
To promote accountability, over the years we have recorded every spending transaction from the premine address on a public spreadsheet ledger. (Of course all transactions are recorded on the Stealth blockchain, albeit without descriptions.) By the end of 2014, we had spent 246,997 XST from the premine address, effectively spending all of the original mining yield. However, several large donations to the premine address, and Stealth’s high rate of staking return has meant that the premine address has remained well funded over the years.
In fact, because the years of 2015 and 2016 saw low cryptocurrency valuations across the board, we essentially forgot about and ignored the premine for all of 2015, 2016, 2017, and most of 2018. In other words, no XST was spent from the premine for this three-and-a-half year period. The entire time, the premine grew at the staking return rate of 20% per year plus compounding, and even benefitted from several small anonymous donations.
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Getting the Premine Address Balance to the Community
In 2017, when cryptocurrency valuations went up dramatically, the team found itself with the question of what to do with the balance of the premine address. We essentially procrastinated and let it stake.
Lately, however, with cryptocurrency valuations much lower than at the peak, we have decided that now is a good time to deplete the balance of the premine address, and get it into circulation. From mid 2018 to mid 2019, we spent a little on legal, management, and marketing help. We also had a StealthNode naming contest. This year, to finish off the balance of the premine address, we decided to award the remainder to the community via a merit-based competition. To this end, we offered 150,000 XST to 15 Junaeth testnet participants, supplementing the balance with 13,000 XST from our personal holdings to achieve the total. The transaction IDs are given in the table presented below.
With the conclusion of the testnet competition and disbursement of the rewards, the Stealth premine address is now officially emptied. Don’t worry, development will continue, using funding from other sources, but this funding will not have the psychological price pressure of an imagined threat of a premine dump. The community members who were awarded from the premine address earned it by maintaining nodes and giving valuable feedback for developing the Junaeth consensus protocol. To these participants, we owe our gratitude.
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Testnet Competition Award Transaction IDs
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Hondo
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