The Creative Coin machine stopped dispensing coins two weeks ago. Hive Engine Explorer shows that the last TOKEN CONTRACT action took place 18 days ago.
BTW: I've been using this account 
The Rewards Page shows that I have 600 in pending CCC rewards. I suspect that artists competing for CCC rewards have several thousand CCC sitting in limbo.
HE reports the dollar value of CCC is $0.0004064. My 600 pending CCC is worth a whopping $0.24384 . The daily trading volume of CCC is often under dollar.
I decided to pen a post because as the current CCC coin-jam appears to be a good avenue into discussing the inner workings of #hive-engine .
As I understand, many of the coins are dispensed by a program called ScotBot. I understand that the Hive-Engine team created the program. This is the CCC configuration page.
Is ScotBot open sourced? If so, does anyone know the link to the code repository?
I understand that some tribes use homegrown mechanisms for dispensing coins.
CCC has been trading at 0.001 HIVE. Since scotbot stopped dispensing coins, the price rose to 0.0012. It will be interesting to see how the price responds when scotbot dispenses the rewards.
Is there a page somewhere that show how many coins get minted by the different tribes?
I've seen other coins having problems with the dispensing mechanism. The observation begs the question: what causes the problem? Did the dispensing machine run out of coins?
Peakd shows that 
What happens when the coin owner loses his keys? Would the demise of the key holder lead to an automatic collapse of a coin?
Many of the coins on HE have collapsed. All of the coins on Steem-Engine have failed. How do we know when a given coin has completely failed?
People can still trade the failed coins. The problem is that there are no buyers.
I am an outsider on HIVE. I do not know about the inner workings of Hive Engine. I decided to add #leofinance as a tag on this thread as people on LEO are good about discussing topics related to crypto. A thread about the inner workings of HE should be a valid LEO topic. It might be good fodder for a leothread discussion.
The Best Way to Support HE
As a side note. It appears to me that the primary problem on HE is the lack of volume (also known as liquidity). I think that the best way for Hive Users to support HE is to simply engage in trades.
I often just list the coins at the current buy or ask. This makes life easier for people who want to buy larger volumnes of coins.
Many of the coins have a huge gap between buy and ask. In these situations, i place my bid between buy and ask.
I admit, my primary goal in trading coins is to help increase volume. Since there usually is a gap between buy and sell, I make a few pennies in the process.
The Picture
I snapped a picture of the shadow of rotund individual standing atop a staircase for this post.
I thought about drawing a picture of a person kicking a vending machine, but decided that that would require too much effort. I suspect the thumbnail will look horrible as the thumbnail usually shows the middle section of portrait pictures.
