What is Firstcoin?

There are no technical white papers explaining the technical decisions
nor any form of community developing this cryptocurrency except:

• 1 minute block targets
• subsidy halves in 2.5M blocks (~5 years)
• 110 million total coins
• 6 confirmations
• 1 Satoshi per block

Most important (and missing in this description): 109,999,999 coins are already mined.

Bad design or Fraud by design?

FirstCoin has a supply of 110,000,000 coins. I suspected the mining algorithm is similar to Bitcoin, where the number of coins generated per block is set to decrease with a 50% reduction every 210,000 blocks (Starting with 50 Bitcoin for the Genesis block).
Bitcoin has chosen this decreasing-supply algorithm because it approximates the rate at which commodities like gold are mined.

But things are different in the world of Firstcoin: The reward is fixed to 1 Satoshi (0.00000001 FirstCoin) for every single block to be mined!

If you wonder how the supply of 110M coins can be reached: There is a special case for block 2 coded in the GetBlockValue function:

int64 static GetBlockValue(int nHeight, int64 nFees)
{
    int64 nSubsidy = 1;

    if(nHeight == 2)
    {
        nSubsidy = 109999999 * COIN;
    }

    if (nHeight > COIN + 1)
    {
        nSubsidy = 0;
    }

    return nSubsidy + nFees;
}

So there is only 1 Coin left to mine and the inventor of Firstcoin sent the 109,999,999 to
himself.

This is obviously not the way a healthy cryptocurrency should be designed. There is no incentive to mine because there is actually no reward. This is also reflected in the current mining difficulty: 0.0042.

There is no mining software available for download (nobody would use it anyway) and I suspect only the inventor keeps mining blocks to keep the network alive.

So taking over the mining (to prevent transactions to happen or reverting history) should be easy.

FirstCoin.Club: Ponzi at work

Funnily you can invest in Cloud-Mining and other fake packages to get monthly rewards (between 3% and 7.5% of the invested coins) in the so-called FirstCoin.Club.

The reason Firstcoin increases in value is the fact, that still people get fooled by the Firstcoin marketing to buy Firstcoins at the LiveCoin exchange to "invest" in FirstCoin.Club.

Most likely the promoter/inventor of Firstcoin will vanish once investment slows down and the scheme collapses. He will have made enough profits selling some of his remaining 109,900,000 Firstcoins!