Wouldn't the software only accept a chain that builds on the correct early blocks? And woudn't those early blocks secure the premine to an account whose key was only known to the original developers? Are premines really this badly implemented in all the alt coins that have them?! These are utterly obvious precautions. It seems like this would only be possible if the premine was implemented with mind-boggling ineptitude.
yes and no... some of the things that you said are true, and yes this was a sub-optimal, perhaps lacking in eptitude launch - but we saved it and I'll explain more below.
we?? someone has already said that it was only 2btc and that amount was donated from someone else..meaning not a dev.
please explain...also how much duck was kept...rumored that it was .5
We wanted a
fair launch with nobody on the team having unfair access to the sourcecode. We didn't want anyone getting any unfair mining advantage, the community can spot an instamine and that can taint the developers as untrustworthy. We didn't want to mine lots of blocks, we only mined and checkpointed to block 3 to secure the genesis block.
The coin bandit took advantage of a small window at launch, when a couple of essential things did not go as planned, to
create a new chain with a new genesis block! The premine was secure on the original chain,
but the original chain got replaced. The technical name for what transpired is referred to as an embarrassing clusterduck.
Immediately we scrambled a team of 16 for a 3 hour skype call, including pool owners, miners & other coin core devs. One of our developers was literally just out of the delivery room, his wife had just given birth when The Big Quack happened at ~9:30 PM EST. He was able to take 30 mins to join the skype mastermind session on his cell phone outside of the hospital. Over all I'm proud of the way the entire team came together and worked on solving it. We did not plan for this, but we found a solution and worked well. This had never happened to us before, which is why we did not react as fast as we should have.
We acted slow because we did not want to shut everything down and delay the launch until tomorrow night because we would have lost momentum, which might kill the coin. This may have caused financial loss to the pool owners and miners that worked hard for the launch.
The other option was to use our sizeable hash power to relaunch right away, fork and take control of the blockchain with the miners & pool owners ... but we eventually decided against that as there would be competing blockchains that might never resolve itself, and some miners would have lost out on coins they mined.
While we were planning for a re-launch of the coin, taking down the repo and rebuilding the blockchain, syncing up with the pool owners to make a technical fix, some members of the marketing team took it upon themselves to negotiate with the premine pirate who reached out on IRC.
Our options were to solve it technically, which we were ready to do to save the coin, or give into his ransom demands. The problem with giving into the ransom demands is that the Crypto Catburgler wanted DUCKCOIN. We had to give him duckcoin from somewhere.
Keep in mind that
our only premine compensation is 0.4% of the premine which is split evenly amongst THIRTY people. That's right there's 30 people on the team that have helped get this project off the ground, and will be providing infrastructure, resources, marketing, development, community support etc in the future.
The other 2.6% is for community giveaways and bounties. The final 17% was purchased by the investors. So there was the dilemma, do we steal the DUCK from the community to give to him, or do we steal the DUCK from the investors to give to him.
One of the early investors, aka the negotiator, stepped up and offered his share of DUCK to give to the Genesis Egg Kidnapper in order to resolve the hostage situation without having to hard fork or issue a new blockchain.
The amount that he made off with was 0.5 DUCK, which was equivalent to 2 BTC, which was send by this member for his share of The Big Quack. It's not a total loss for this member as we promised to buy him back 0.5 DUCK with the BTC that was raised once the coin is listed on an exchange. He asked us to do it this way rather than just sending him back the BTC because we will be helping provide liquidity to a miner or another investor by buying it off of the exchange for him.
There's a a couple of bugs left to squash, there's a transaction fee problem that we unfortunately missed, which is causing stuck transquacktions at the pools. This will require a client update hopefully in the next 12 hours. There's also an issue for some duck hunters trying to sync which requires fixing some configuration. This should be resolved soon.
We hope you enjoyed the entertainment, this should go down as
The Great Genesis Egg Heist: The Best Failed Premine In History!