Whatever Happened To Mintcoin?

A span of a few months is a long time in the world of cryptocurrencies. If you were around in February you probably remember the euphoria surrounding Mintcoin. This ‘energy-efficient‘ coin caught the attention of the mining and speculator communities because of a fresh approach to altcoins.

The coin’s name helped the marketing. After all, ‘mint‘ isn’t just a green, arromatic plant or a peppermint candy. Mint also refers to the a place where currency is made! Minting is how coins are made so the Proof of Stake concept played in very nicely to the overall marketing scheme. Mintcoin caught on because of its promise of big rewards to early adopters.

Mintcoin was launched on February 6th. 2014. Now that we’re almost in June, it’s a great time to look back and see if this project has accomplished its stated goals. A review of the Mintcoin ANN thread shows the biggest claims were in relation to the short mining time and the 20% first year annual interest rate that was to be paid based on the coins ‘staking’ during the Proof of Stake phase.

“As an investor, you will be glad to know that holding your coins in the long term will result in tremendous rewards. MintCoin is also designed to be widely spread amongst population all over the World, and so is available in a large quantity.“

With a total supply of 70 billion MINT produced over a five week mining period, the problems of inflation were destined to befall this altcoin. 23 exchanges trade MINT so the coin has been widely distributed to speculators. Let’s take a look at other aspects of the project. With a current price of under 10 (less than when the mining ended), this claim does not appear to hold water. There hasn’t been a ton of benefits in holding Mintcoin, at least for now.

• The Mintcoin.cc website must have been wiped out at some point. Currently it’s ‘Just another WordPress blog‘ with no design elements.
• A brief glance through the list of vendors leads to many broken links and pages.
• A brief review of the additional services section turns up many more 404 pages and broken sites.
• The Mintcoin sub-reddit shows some activity, most of it based on complaints about the declining nature of the price and the cryptocurrency itself.
• The Mintcoin Github shows activities, so technical issues are being addressed.
• The Mintcointalk forum is as dead as a proverbial doornail.

All in all it’s a relatively mixed bag of results. This is common with most coins as time goes. All coins will experience decay in services because people who work for bounties will often lose interest in maintaining their service for months at a time. Still, an active team edits the crap out of their ANN Thread on a regular basis so information is not outdated for those who are researching the coin. People who currently research Mintcoin as a possible investment are going to find tons of dead links and a dead website. What’s the chance they’ll want to push their BTC into Mintcoin in that condition?

The Current Low Price Makes A Comeback Harder

Mintcoin is now facing what almost all altcoins encounter. After an initial burst of enthusiasm, real life settles in. When the coin price drops, the money that was once attracting community ‘volunteers‘ also dries up. With this, enthusiasm wanes.

Now a new crew of people will need to step up in order to keep the Mintcoin dream alive. The coin is already on most major exchanges. MINT is being used by vendors. Many of the right moves have been made, but the project is looking like its losing steam. With a doubling of commitment from the true ‘core‘ of believers, this altcoin should be able to find progress. Unfortunately, ‘shiny object‘ syndrome afflicts EVERYONE in Altcoin City. New ‘toys‘ keep on being released every day and they demand a huge share of attention from the average miners, enthusiasts, and speculators. Mintcoin will need to re-capture some of that attention in order to establish itself as a serious crypto with real long-term possibilities.

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