It was early 2014, I had just bought my first BTC and was a classic starry-eyed newcomer to cryptocurrencies. I had a tiny (but balanced) portfolio of the classics: peercoin, namecoin, litecoin, bitcoin, but I was ultra-bullish about cryptocurrencies and I was looking to diversify. Unfortunately, I had very nearly bought in at the top of the 2013/2014 crypto bubble, so in retrospect I was pretty much out of luck (actually, I should have just thrown all my savings into AGS and then sold the resulting BTS right now for millions, but you can't win them all).
In my search for diversification, the first coin that caught my eye was Memorycoin.
"Memorycoin?" you ask. "Wasn't that coin a total disaster/premine/scam?"
Well, the premine was indisputable. The disaster is more or less evident from the chart:
The scam is a matter of hot debate, but I always came down on the side of not scam, just poor decisions made by devs. Do the research and decide for yourself.
So. Why Memorycoin?
Memorycoin (particularly the 2.0 variant) was the first cryptocurrency that directly paid people to do something other than mining or staking. One of their early slogans was "the blockchain is hiring." Bitshares later stole that slogan for themselves, but don't let anybody tell you that the Bitshares "worker proposal" thing was the first of its kind. Memorycoin did that in 2013!
It was a system that toed the line between crude and elegant. You'd create an address that started with one of 5 different strings: MCEO, MCTO, MCMO, etc using a vanitygen key miner. Then you'd ask people to vote for you, and there was a very simple system of voting by sending various amounts of satoshi to the address you're voting for. Then, if I recall, every 10 blocks or so, the top-voted MCEO (and MCTO and MCMO etc) addresses received a portion of the miner's reward.
I looked at that, and I said "this is the coin. This is the one that will overtake bitcoin." I didn't think too hard about it, but it looked like MMC was the first coin that was taking a serious crack at the incentive problem. And the executive salaries were high! I think something like $300 per day early on, before the bottom fell out.
Unfortunately, it was too mired in premine accusations and the baggage that dev FreeTrade brought with him to go anywhere, and the price seemed to be locked in an inexorable downward slide.
But here's my cute MMC anecdote: Thanks to Memorycoin, I can say that I was once a sponsored athlete, and the only one I know of who was sponsored by a blockchain. In 2014, I was training for an ultramarathon, and I posted this on the memorycoin forum:
To my great surprise, the MMC CEO (Delinquency) decided to go for it!
So, for the next several months, I was paid $40/week in MMC. Due to the declining MMC price, the MMC amount of my sponsorship went up and up and up. I ended up holding on to about half the MMC I had been paid, and now I think I own something like 0.5% of all the MMC in existence. I can't really check this easily, because I don't think there's any block explorer available and my copy of the blockchain is far out of sync.
But thanks, MMC, and thanks Delinquency. You were the first coin I loved, and getting paid to run was a truly beautiful experience.
And, I've just learned, there are murmurs of getting MMC going again:
If, for some reason, you're interested in checking out this little gem of a coin, applying for an officer position, or spreading scam accusations, you can visit the forum here: http://mmc-forums.com
And Memorycoin is still listed on a single exchange: https://novaexchange.com/market/DOGE_MMC/