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Comment by aaronhayes | Hacker News Reader

There were no pre-mined bitcoin distributed. Satoshi mined his coins in the early days but crucially anyone could participate and mine at the same time.

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I know that in USA legal system there is concept "spirit of the law" and afaik there were cases when a person was intentionally abiding the "word of the law" but breaking "spirit of the law" and was penalized for this.

So anyway, Satoshi solo mine and anyone else's solo mine, is not technically a premine, but in a spirit - it is. Saying that solo mine is not a premine is true, but you know, I know, everyone knows that essentially it is exactly the same as premine.

In a premine, developers hard code coin balances for themselves into their own ledger prior to public mining becoming available. Satoshi clearly didn’t do this. It’s that cut and dry.

The definition of a premine isn't as clear as you put it. Or at least isn't always used in the same way.

With your definition, Ethereum only had a 16% premine.

“Premine”: previous to public mining, coins were distributed.

Satoshi absolutely didn’t premine Bitcoin.

And yet, Satoshi has huge holdings just as if premined.

That's because the other 7+ billion were not smart enough to compete with him for nearly a year, despite it being made public at the time Satoshi began mining.

The "pre" in premine means "before," as in, they mine themselves the coins before they publicly release the knowledge required to begin mining. Satoshi didn't do this. There was no premining of bitcoin.

Premine means coins were distributed prior to a public mining phase. If public mining was available, and no coins were distributed prior to that, the coin wasn’t premined.

Despite the definition of “premine” being extremely clear cut and objective, apologists for premined coins often liberally redefine and butcher the definition for financially-motivated, self-serving reasons: “See, Bitcoin is premined too. XYZ did nothing wrong.”

Just to understand how ridiculous this is, if we’re going to redefine premine to mean “any coin perceived to be unfairly distributed”, then we might as well not even use the word at all, because biased investors will use the term to describe every cryptocurrency they’re not invested in.

Ninja mining is no different than premining

Ninja mining, cripple mining, and instamining are variants of post-launch infidelity. N.B. explicit, out-in-the-open premining can be considerably less of a faux pas, assuming it isn’t obscene.

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