Tenebrix and FairbrixTBX
The first scrypt coin (Tenebrix, September 2011, heavily premined) and its low-premine relaunch by Charlie Lee (Fairbrix, October 2011), days before Litecoin.
The wiki's angle: Litecoin's lineage runs through two failed coins in three weeks — Tenebrix for scrypt, Fairbrix for the low-premine lesson — and Charlie Lee ran the second before launching the third.[4][5]
Tenebrix
Lolcust announced Tenebrix on Bitcointalk on 26 September 2011 as “a CPU-friendly, GPU-hostile cryptocurrency” built mostly by ArtForz, with Lolcust contributing “the name, some minor tweaks and the logo”[1]. The post gave “1 block per 5 minutes, retargets every week, no upper bound on mining and 25 coins per block”, and admitted “I premined 7 million coins”[1]. The Bitcoin Wiki says scrypt proof of work was “Originally introduced as part of the altcoin Tenebrix (TBX) by ArtForz and Lolcust”, and that the aim of keeping only CPU mining profitable “completely failed in that goal”[2].
Fairbrix
Fairbrix was first announced on 1 October 2011 by michaelmclees, who soon warned that a config error had caused “all blocks past 100 mined to generate 0 coins”[3]. On 2 October 2011 coblee relaunched it as “a GPU-unfriendly coin based on Lolcust's Tenebrix” that “does not come with 7.7 million premined coins. In fact, only 100 blocks were premined”[4]. The two posts disagree on the size of the Tenebrix premine (7 million and 7.7 million)[1][4].
Litecoin
The Litecoin Wiki's history table lists Tenebrix (26.09.2011, Lolcust & ArtForz) as the “First cryptocurrency using scrypt, premined”, Fairbrix (02.10.2011, coblee) as “Tenebrix without premine”, and Litecoin (13.10.2011, coblee) eleven days later[5]. coblee is the Bitcointalk handle under which Charlie Lee announced Litecoin[6].
References
- primaryLolcust, “[ANNOUNCE] Tenebrix, a CPU-friendly, GPU-hostile cryptocurrency”, Bitcointalk topic 45667 (26 Sep 2011) [archived]
- secondaryBitcoin Wiki (en.bitcoin.it), “Scrypt proof of work” (Tenebrix redirects here) [archived]
- primarymichaelmclees, “FAIRBRIX - Announcement - CPU friendly - GPU hostile - Tiny premine”, Bitcointalk topic 46478 (1 Oct 2011) [archived]
- primarycoblee, “[Announce] Fairbrix relaunched!”, Bitcointalk topic 46528 (2 Oct 2011) [archived]
- secondaryLitecoin Wiki, “History of cryptocurrency” (Wayback Machine copy, 11 Jun 2016)
- primarycoblee, “[ANN] Litecoin - a lite version of Bitcoin. Launched!”, Bitcointalk topic 47417 (opened 9 Oct 2011; launch noted as 13 Oct 2011 03:00 GMT) [archived]