My First PALcoins

Many communities are creating their own tokens (similar to coins) inside the STEEM blockchain, including the PAL (Peace, Abundance, and Liberty Network, also known for the @MinnowSupport project) with its new token, the PALcoin.

The claimdrop (distribution of free coins) began a few days ago and will run for a month. They had stated that they would distribute PALcoins to those who had interacted in their Discord server. Since I'm not into chatting on Discord and all I've ever done in their server was use the command to get the MinnowSupport bot to vote on my posts, I had thought I wouldn't get anything, and wouldn't even bother checking if I had coins to receive. But the claiming process was easy enough, and I ended up checking. Much to my surprise, I logged in to Steem-Engine.com (the website with all the tokens in the STEEM blockchain), went to the wallet, and there were 105 PALcoins waiting for me. I have no idea whether this is too little or not, but it sounded like a good amount to start off.

Image source: Openclipart

With PALcoins, we can:

• "Stake" them and transform them into PAL Power (works like STEEM Power/SP). This will make our upvotes also award PALcoins in addition to SBD and SP. The more PAL Power we have, the more PALcoins our upvotes will be worth.
• Earn PALcoins from posts. If our post uses the #palnet tag, every time someone with PAL Power votes on our posts, it'll also earn PALcoins in addition to SBD and SP. As long as the post has the #palnet tag, it can be made from Steemit, Busy, Steempeak, eSteem, or any other frontend of our choice. Or we can post via their frontend, Palnet.io, and the tag will be added automatically.
• Earn PALcoins with curation (the same way we earn SP on Steemit), by upvoting other people's posts that use the #palnet tag. Rewards are split 50% for the post author and 50% for the curators.
• Trade PALcoins for other tokens or for STEEM on the Steem Engine market.
• Buy upvotes from @MinnowSupport. I'm still not sure how to do this, but I know that the "$upvote" command on their Discord won't work anymore, and the new way to get MinnowSupport upvotes will be to use the PALcoin.

To check our PALcoins balance, stack them or transfer them, we can login to their frontend, Palnet.io, and the wallet will show our PALcoins and PAL Power (but not STEEM, SBD and SP, just the PAL things).

I staked ("powered up") 25 of my PALcoins. Again, I'm not sure if this is too little or not, but I wanted to at least have some PAL Power to be able to award PALcoins to other people's posts, and also keep some coins to be able to buy MinnowSupport upvotes (I still have no idea how much they'll cost).

For more information on the PALcoin token, read the official whitepaper. For more details on how to take part in the claimdrop to get free coins, read their tutorial post.

Edit: it was brought to my attention that there's a spreadsheet with the usernames of everyone who may claim PALcoins. It shows the PALcoin amount, and goes from the users who got coins the most to the ones who got the least. The file has 28,848 lines, and my username is on line 9,084. Not bad...