If all he wants is for users to be able to send kudos back and forth, he could make the difficulty trivial, mine a few million/billion coins on a network of 1, and then distribute as he sees fit.
Hike the difficulty, how? Hard fork? And even if you could hike difficulty with consensus, then you'd be locking yourself out of mining any new blocks, and your blockchain would stall! An altcoin is not a good solution for the proposed use case.
More energy would be used up by the ethereum network to verify this token rather than an individual hackspace miner, so it should be cheaper than buying ether.
Another choice is PoS; one of the tutorials I listed is for a PoS coin. Yet another choice is instamining/pre-mining.
But I could set the cost of mining low enough to make it feasible no? Seems like the attraction of creating an altcoin vs using Ethereum is that it's a simpler system. If I am not interested in leveraging the existing networks, that might be a better way to go?
Haha, yeah, I've been thinking that too. I was kind of more looking at interesting applications of blockchains but it seems like this isn't really the best use case.