Did you know Batman is a ninja?
After the initial failure because of unforseen difficulty of the block hashing, it was relaunched a day later with a 30 minute heads up with their "experimental / unproven consensus and beta software." A few people said to heck with it at that point, but there were a few others that stuck around and several more that showed up later on. There was an open invite to a Slack chat too, which I have no idea how many people were actually in or on.
Being that it was experimental and they really had no idea how it would all go down, the communication between the development team of the software and the community trying to mine outside of Steemit personnel, was a bit slow. Especially considering you were only able to comment once every six minutes over there at the time. Upon going through the thread, and not being a master coder myself, I presume I could have had a miner up and running in roughly three hours, if not less, based on the information given.
I wish I had.
Most people are pointed to this thread where a lot of animosity is contained because ten days of mining had already passed and they were just shit out of luck to get in on the 'early bird gets the worm' difficulties.
Did Steemit have every intention of mining a good chunk? Heck ya! They sunk some money into the hardware to do it. They had some big plans.
Did they foresee it being as popular as it is? I actually think they were pretty disappointed. Nonetheless, it was a success, because many have joined and are still here, but in no way was there any secrecy involved with this. The fact is, at the time, and the same applies to Bitcoin (does anyone know how much Nakamoto has?) - nobody really cared.
They (Steemit) even gave away HALF, yes HALF of what they mined. Maybe they felt they got too much? Maybe they were hoping for more developers and newcomers to come on board and help mine some of their openly announced, non-ICO, publicly visible coin? IDK. I just know what I read.
