Mintcoin - minting the future

Mintcoin was launched on febuary 6th and is a coin with Proof of Work distribution and Proof of Stake security.

So what does this mean. This means that in the first 5 weeks most of the coins get mined through Proof of Work, as you know it. After every week of this phase the block reward halves and less coins get distributed. After 5 weeks, the PoW payout will be fixed at 1 coin per block. But how do we secure the network you might ask? This is when Proof of Stake comes to play. I quote wikipedia:

When generating a proof-of-stake block, the user sends some money to themselves, consuming their coin age in exchange for a preset reward. This minting transaction becomes more likely to succeed over time until a valid block is found, generating a new block on the blockchain and a payout for the proving user. This process secures the network and gradually produces new coins over time without consuming significant computational power.

Wiki: Proof of Stake So essentially what will happen is that the coins network security in five weaks will move from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake. So whats the big deal about it? Many coins get created these days and some of them, for example vertcoin, are said to be the successor of maybe litecoin, because they are ASIC-blocking. Mintcoin will also be ASIC-blocking because it will not make any sense in three weeks to mine it with hardware. All you need to do is buy some mintcoins, store them in your wallet and leave it there. Now here is the thing. The longer your coins are unspent, the more powerful your stake will be, so you as an investor will help securing the network by actually be doing nothing The best thing about it: As any miner you will be rewarded by securing the network. I quote the official bitcointalk thread:

MintCoin also adopt a variable PoS rate, which gives the highest payout at 20% the first year, then decrease 5% per year until the 4th year it reaches annual interest rate of 5%, then it will remain at this rate.

Of course you will not need to wait a full year to receive a 20% return by mining the coin. After 20 mintcoin days destroyed you will get your first earnings in your wallet. Where do I trade it? Right now there are three exchanges trading the coin:

Cryptsy: http://cryptsy.com/

Coins-e:http://coins-e.com/

Bter: http://bter.com/

I can definitely recommend you mintpal.com. Its based in the UK, has an awesome coin voting feature and is fast as hell. Is this the right time to get in? I probably is! Right now, all coins are getting distributed. Even if you are not interested in trading your money into mintcoin, you could also mine it. Mining right now is also pretty profitable. Even with some shitty hardware, I have a ATI HD4870 and I mined about 1500 coins in about 2 hours. Just think about it this way: The coin cost 6 satoshis right now. Even the shittiest coins with less then 0,5 BTC Volume a day made it to more then 100 satoshis. Feel free to look it up on cryptsy yourself: http://cryptsy.com/ . Mintcoin is traded at mintpal.com at 72.926 BTC Volume. So it is most definitely the best time now to buy your coins, get active in the community and do stuff.

source: http://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoMarkets/comments/1xw2qw/mintcoin_is_pretty_cool_and_you_should_know_about/

Mintcoin - minting the future