What is a premine and instamine? How can a altcoin dev benefit from...

A pre-mine is when the development team deliberately mines the coins in a private network before releasing it to the public, so taking advantage of the low difficulty. They run the mining algorithm for a while in an environment where they control how much hashing power goes in which means that since there is no other miners joining, the difficulty remains stable and low and
mining can proceed at a very rapid pace many many coins can be mined in advance and then when it becomes public usually the difficulty Rises quickly but in the meantime the development team or whoever's being doing the premine already controls a significant part of the coins.
An instant mine is when either the algorithm is tweaked or the software is run in such a way as to make the difficulty zero and mine a lot of coins either in the Genesis block itself or in the very first few blocks and essentially spend no time mining at all just immediately pre-mine a big chunk of coins.

This clip is a excerpt from "MOOC 7, 6th Live session with Andreas Antonopoulos (Alternative Uses of the Blockchain)" streamed live and published under a standard YouTube license on 22 Mar 2017 by the MSc in Digital Currency - University of Nicosia YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/user/MScDigitalCurrency

For more information and how to register for the Free MOOC or the MSc in Digital Currency visit https://digitalcurrency.unic.ac.cy/

RELATED:
Why does the Bitcoin core team like to use segwit? https://steemit.com/dtube/@btc-central/red3grxe
What is the difference between sidechains and lightning network? https://steemit.com/dtube/@btc-central/r76g6bhm

Andreas Antonopoulos is a technologist and serial entrepreneur who has become one of the most well-known and well-respected figures in bitcoin.

Support Andreas by becoming a patreon: https://www.patreon.com/aantonop
Follow Andreas on Twitter: @aantonop
Visit Andreas's website: https://antonopoulos.com/
Check out Andreas's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/aantonop
Support Andreas: https://antonopoulos.com/donate/

Want to hear more about Bitcoin and blockchain technology?
Follow me on Twitter: @BitCoinBoy https://twitter.com/BitCoinBoy
Steemit https://steemit.com/@btc-central
DTube https://dtube.video/c/btc-central
YouTube: youtube.com/c/BitCoinBoy
SoundCloud: unofficial aantonop https://soundcloud.com/unofficial-aantonop
https://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:244699000/sounds.rss

Andreas is the author of two books: “Mastering Bitcoin,” published by O’Reilly Media and considered the best technical guide to bitcoin; and “The Internet of Money,” a book about why bitcoin matters. Andreas has also co-authored with Gavin Wood the book 'Mastering Ethereum: Building Smart Contracts and Dapps' due for release 28 Feb 2018 and is also published by O′Reilly Media.

Get Andreas's books: The Internet of Money: A collection of talks by Andreas M. Antonopoulos: http://amzn.to/2rCGXT9
Mastering Bitcoin: Unlocking Digital Cryptocurrencies: http://amzn.to/2tzu4FP
Mastering Ethereum: Building Smart Contracts and Dapps: http://amzn.to/2smthIS

Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.

► Watch on DTube
► Watch Source (IPFS)