Premining and instamining (where they just start the coin with x coins in the devs wallet) are fairly common practices among new cryptocoins. They are usually frowned upon by the community but not always as the coin developers will sometimes keep a 1-2% for use promoting and developing the coin. Which most people consider fair. An 80% premine like bytecoin is ridiculous.
It is very easy to tell if a coin has been premined by checking the state of the block chain for the number of outstanding coins. The coins with large premines are usually outed withing an hour of their release.
Please forgive my ignorance, but how do alternative coins work? Who uses them? I've only recently noticed Bitcoins being relatively widely usable, so how does the process work with alternative mineable coins? Do you convert them to dollars at some point or just mine and trade them for good/services?
If I were them I'd mine unpopular coins hoping that they go up in value during a general bull run in the future. That way you're quite likely to end up with a decent number of coins.
Most alt-coins are thoroughly uninteresting and far less secure from 51% attacks than Bitcoin itself. It may be better to use the concept of "colored coins" on top of the Bitcoin blockchain to transact in other currencies.
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