Skycoin has premined all of their coins, and people have been wondering why that is the case when they are pushing their product called the "Skyminer". However, this is nothing but bad phrasing from their end. The skyminer will not actually be a miner of the coin, but rather a rerouter of traffic to enable their Mesh net.
The price of a "Skyminer" is set at 1 BTC, however, as is obvious from their website, the machine only costs about $600. The remaining funds from the 1 BTC will be distributed to the buyer in the form of Skycoins based on the current market price the day of delivery. They motivate this because of supposely great demand, and they want to make sure serious investors who will run the machine for an extended period will be the ones who purchases it. Even though this may be seen as a bad marketing ploy, or even a scam, its not unheard of. Considering the coin requirements to host a masternode is often put a lot higher than the tasks it perform should motivate, Masternode hosting coins motivate it with "wanting to attract serious hosts of the masternode, who will no sell off at first sign of trouble".
The lack of confirmation on the team. This is one of the more serious concerns I have with this coin since no outside confirmation on the authenticity of advisors and/or some of the developers have been communicated from exteral sources. Such as the CEO and Founder of Qtum being an advisor. Doing some careful analysis of the Skycoin/Skywire/Skymessenger GitHub repository does however confirm that over 40 people have contributed code over the long period of Skycoins existance. 26 of these have been all somewhat very active in their contributions.
The copy/paste gig on their multiple white papers. Their white paper(s) uses material which is not solely produced by Skycoin, they do however make it very clear that its the case. Even though I think they could have done a better job with this, its not unique to Skycoin in doing so. Every single Cryptocurrency out there uses already existing encryption techniques (doing othervise creates FUD, look at IOTA for instance), this is due to the fact that proving the security of an encryption technique + algorithm takes time to prove. The same goes for the ensuring of Byzantine Fault Tolerance, something you cannot detect before thoroughly tested for an extended period. The case can however be made that they use many of the cliché phrases of a shitcoin such as "Third generation crypto".
This addresses points 3 and 4. Skycoin has been around for years, meaning that when some of the material written in the White paper can be argued to be the Original Cliché. Additionally, only recently have most coins gained the authenticity requirement of having to publicly post extended confirmation on developers behind the coin. Even though I agree that more confirmation is needed from their side for the +100 million market cap to be motivated, its not uncommon for older coins to be lacking in this area
I think we can all agree that they have done a shitpoor job of handling their online pressence by banning people and not answering concerns by community in a pleseant manner. A lot of the concerns raised have been easily debunkable questions due to the somewhat unseen tech that Skycoin is trying to develop.
The promotion videos they have recently started spamming on YouTube gives raise for legitimate concerns, since they are obviously marketing ploys to try pumping the coin and gaining notice from the public for the "possiblity of great returns". With them even saying they the possibility for growth is awesome, something which should have every investor concerned.
There exists multiple extended interviews with the lead developer Synth where he thoroughly goes over the different aspects of their project. This type of informtion is almost completely unavailable for all coins below the 1bln market cap. I do think that their project is completely legit and has been thought out, but still concerns regarding the online communication + marketing as of late is what has caused the real concern for me.
Concluding remarks: I think there is a valid reason for concern, but not for the same reasons most people; which is mainly because they think that Skycoin is an exit scam due to the Circulating supply / total supply ratio combined with the fact that all coins are premined.
