Steem currency 80% pre-mined? Is this true?

Since joining Steemit I've been reading up a bit on the Steem cryptocurrency, and came across an interesting discussion in an announcement thread. In the announcement post, the following is stated:

"We have secured ~80% of the initial STEEM via mining. Our plan is to keep 20%, sell 20% to raise money, and give away 40% to attract users / referrers."

Am I right in thinking that this means that 80% of the Steem currency was mined in advance by the developers? And if so, what are the potential effects on the Steem economy, aside from making the devs very very rich if Steem gets as big as Bitcoin?

I can understand why premining is a temptation to cryptocurrency developers. After all, if you're going to build a currency you might as well make sure you profit from it, but 80%? that seems a bit... excessive.

Anyone more versed on cryptocurrencies and premining want to chime in on this? Is this a problem? business as usual? maybe even a good thing in some way I'm not seeing?

#steem #steemit #cryptocurrency #premine #economics #question

It was premined 80%, and we kind of just have to trust that they are going to at some point redistribute that in the ways you mentioned. Worst case scenario @Dantheman / @Dan and @Ned sell everything, destroy the price of STEEM and stop hosting Steemit.com, but I think people would figure out where they were and stuff. And I don't think they would do that anyways.

If they did a referral system that would be cool, and any way they decide to redistribute is going to be good for everyone that adopted early. And worst case scenario they could use it to fulfill contract payments for Steemit.com. So they might like hire people to do projects for Steemit.com and make Steemit better, or more secure, etc. And then you would do projects to get paid by them if you could get the RFP, and they would eventually start doing RFPs and have a whole staff dedicated to Project Management, and using Software like Enterprise Architect, or JIRA, etc. to manage the Steemit Corporation.

I'm not sure what they are going to do with the 80%, but I assume that they are using it for good stuff right now, it doesn't look like it all went to their accounts, but some of it did. But without that, their wouldn't be any whales as big as they are now, and it would be months or years before there were any number of whales. But since they can give like $40+ in a vote or maybe even hundreds by now, they are making it where other people earn.

And that is just one thing they have done with it. They probably hired the people they said they hired for Security stuff using the 80% fund, and they will probably do various other things with it. And probably some kind of promotional thing where everyone on Steemit Beta can earn STEEM when they invite people to the new Platform when the full Steemit Platform launches.

They probably won't cut and run, but worst case scenario, say they did. Now STEEM and Steemit's source code can be copied by anyone, just like how Bitcoin can be copied by anyone because Satoshi released the code for everyone to use. So it Dan and Ned disappear, someone could always create a new Steemit and new STEEM, with a new name and a new logo and a new CEO, etc. That might happen anyways, anyone can copy coin codes, and anyone can use Blockchain technology. STEEM is just the beginning of this kind of Blockchain use.