What do you do if the price of your cryptocurrency is too low? Well, if you’re the developers of Maxcoin, you simply make fewer coins – A lot fewer.
The original technical specifications of Maxcoin (MAX) promised a block reward of 96 coins with a total supply of 250 million coins. But the hard fork will take that reward down to 48 and choke the supply to 100 million coins. The developers hinted that if necessary they would fork the coin again.
Max Keiser, who is well versed in economic theory, predicted in a tweet that this newly devised scheme would cause the price to double over the interim.
While Maxcoin developers are tinkering with their coin output, several users on bitcointalk said they think that Goldcoin (GLD) could be the next cryptocurrency to see its popularity soar after its developer discovered a solution to the 51% problem, an inherent weakness in bitcoin that Satoshi was addressing before his disappearance.
Maxcoin was first launched in early February 2014. Prices quickly skyrocketed to over $25 per coin as speculators rushed to buy MAX on mcxNow, which at the time was the only exchange trading in the currency. However, since that time the price has been in a state of constant decline with an average market price at press time of around 12 cents, according to coinmarketcap.com.
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