One of the most important things for MaxCoin was to achieve a fair launch. MaxCoin had a zero % premine, proven by the timestamps of the first blocks in a block explorer, and have attempted to combat low-difficulty instamining with a fast retarget rate up until block 200. At block 200 the Kimoto Gravity Well implementation took over the retargeting.
After the show was filmed, it was decided that releasing the coin binaries and source at show's airing would be unfairly beneficial to those also in the timezone, and those living elsewhere or had simply yet not heard about the coin would be disadvantaged. For this reason a hard deadline was set for the release of the MaxCoin clients at 7.30PM GMT on Thursday the 6th February 2014 to allow the news of the coin's launch to spread, and to provide a fair chance for everybody to prepare and mine at official start time.
Keccak is of the SHA-3 family, winning a 5-year long competition to create the successor or an alternative to SHA-2 (Bitcoin uses SHA-256, a member of this SHA-2 family). Keccak is pronounced like "Ketchup".
