I can't fully explain the demand for it but the wallet itself was released more or less on time and it used bitcoin line commands (open a separate command window and use those commands
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Original_Bitcoin_client/API_calls_list). If you solo mined early enough you could get multiple blocks in minutes.
Here's some of my experience if anyone wants to give it a shot:
Solo cpu mining with the wallet is the only way to go right now because there's a bunch of problems with stratum that prevents pools from going up. The two that were up pretty much wasted everyone's cpu cycles. The mythical keccak cgminer was probably a scam or troll attempt so you can keep your gpus on doge or whatever.
The standard conf file is here:
https://github.com/Max-Coin/clients/blob/master/example-maxcoin.conf
Pu it into %appdata%/roaming/maxcoin/maxcoin.conf before running the wallet.
Some people had connectivity issues and there was a new version released and some more nodes you can manually append into your conf file here:
http://pastebin.com/ZkVMEuNL that would solve the issue.
To use it, open a cmd window and run it with a --daemon prefix. There's also a --benchmark thing that'll show you how fast your cpu can hash but it's not really that useful now.
Don't force close the cmd window afterwards or it will crash the wallet.
To check your balance, open another cmd window in the same directory as the wallet and type maxcoind.exe getbalance
To send, type maxcoind.exe sendtoaddress <address> <amount>
Also, a huge portion of the problems stemmed from idiots being overeager and not rtfm and not having the correct ports set up (8108 is the correct one that has to be specified in both conf and bat). Once you were connected, everything worked.
The difficulty went twentyfold in less than a day so I don't expect to be solo mining this as soon as there's a version of stratum that works and a legit pool goes up. But still someone did the math that you still have a 98% chance of grabbing a block every 24 hours as of now. Who knows what'll happen by tomorrow.
Oh and coins-e, the only exchange that's trading max is a massive pain in the patella. They queue your orders to the point there's not much point in trying to match the demand since they'll mostly go through a couple hours after the fact.
In any case, for those who got lucky and got some maxcoins, it was pretty damn profitable for half a day. I'm at 2.2btc in the wallet and I still have some maxcoins I'm not sure if I should keep and wait...