Gaelcoin

Gaelcoin is a digital currency officially launched on 7 March 2014 as a cryptocurrency for Ireland.

Gaelcoin is based on a fork of Litecoin.

Since its initial release in March the coin received criticism by members of the cryptocurrency community for having a higher difficulty set that most other currencies. The creator of Gaelcoin stated however that the difficult is high to avoid interest in the coin by pump and dump miners over inflating the value of the Gaelcoin Currency.

1% of the maximum 650 million Gaelcoins to be issued were "premined", or created prior to public release of the software, to be used for promotional purposes. Developers explained that this would put the currency into more hands overall, rather than select early adopters, and planned to give 50 free Gaelcoins to each Irish citizen, "in the Republic and the North".

Since it's release Gaelcoin has been briefly mentioned in media like The Guardian and RT for it's policy of giving the currency to Irish citizens. In a podcast interview by Technology.ie the founder of Gaelcoin was asked why the Gaelcoin currency is different that all others crypto currencies out there on which he responded "Gaelcoin is different because it's a difficult coin to mine and has only 1% of premining, this is to avoid developers owning a controlling share of the currency."