the above said, here is a quote from dan on bitcointalk
After we launched a new term was introduced 'ninja-mine' which I presume means "sneeky"... but we admitted at launch that that was our intention. ...
im going to research a little now because im curious, but i have to say that quote and youre below seem at least a little at odds with each other. theres a difference between complete openness and ninjas, wouldnt you agree?
It was not mined by a closed community in any way. It launched for everyone to mine. However there are MANY coins that are mined into existence. Steem obviously wasnt considered valuable enough by many people. It is their fault and now they are jelly?
also this
We didn't announce this on BitShares earlier because we figured this community would better understand the value of what we are doing and make it
difficult execute the strategy bytemaster recently blogged about:
^ (thats from ned aka thereverseflash)
the blog in question was basically how the best way to raise money for a startup crypto without getting into compliance trouble was to mine that currency with little competition. Basically the strategy it reccomends making a low key, UTR announcement then basically mining in secret so theres no computational competition.
So at the absolute very least, the founders went out of their way to keep this "open" mine of yours a secret from those they believed would compete with them to mine early coins. Good bad or indiffernt, thats a far cry from
It was not mined by a closed community in any way. It launched for everyone to mine. However there are MANY coins that are mined into existence. Steem obviously wasnt considered valuable enough by many people. It is their fault and now they are jelly?
I don't think its a terrible strategy, and like i said im not a huge crypto guy i actually agree with dan that the BTC talk ppl are kind of shooting themselves in the foot with a bunch of arbitrary rules that don't make sound business sense.
But glastnost it was not. And trying to rewrite history to make it seem like it was is ultimately worse than just being honest about what happened.