42. The answer to life, the universe, and everything… Except what the maximum amount of coins issued for an altcoin should be. 42 continues the trend of attempting to differentiate itself through the use of gimmicks, rather than adding something of value. The way most of these new coins are marketed is like showing up at an interview wearing a clown suit. It’s funny, novel, whatever you want to call it… But it doesn’t bring lasting success. Gone are the days of new coins adding something of value, or attempting to fix a problem. Welcome to the new world of altcoins.

42 price

42 is only only getting acknowledgement from me due to it’s seemingly high price point and prominent position on cryptsy. Naturally, this coin suffers from a lot more pressing issues than a gimmicky presentation. It had a “small” 1% premine associated with it (.42 coins) which currently represents about 50% of all coins in existence, and is valued at over 300 BTC at the current price. This should throw up a huge red flag, and begs the question as to why anyone would anyone would ever invest in this garbage when there’s so much downward pressure on the price.

As for the coin itself, the design of it is exceptionally poor, even by the low standards set by it’s predecessors. A planned total of 42 coins means that you’ll always be dealing with stupidly small fractions of a number, something that humans are poor at interacting with. Can you imagine going to the store and purchasing something for 0.00000569 42? Me neither. To add insult to injury, 42 only has the standard 8 bits of decimal precision. For a coin dealing with such small units, 12 or 16 bits of precision would been beneficial. But of course, this requires the developer to have some small degree of competency with the code that he is editing, so this feature was naturally left out.

On the subject of developer incompetence, the author claims there is a max of 42 coins ever to be minted. This is not true, as one can look at the source and see that the 0.000042 block reward continues forever, with no end programmed in. However, this coin will be long dead way before it ever approaches 42 total coins, so I suppose it really doesn’t matter in the end.

42 altcoin

As with all gimmick coins, and especially with coins that have a premine, the long term price outlook for this coin is poor. It won’t be long before people get bored before they move onto the ‘latest and greatest’ coin.


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