That may be true. It certainly seems that no one on BCT forums knew about Bytecoin. It may have been a few people but if many of them were like me, they didn't know the Bytecoin devs and didn't have an account with BCT. I only knew of two others on the 4chan thread where I got my binaries and they were both English and also, as far as I could tell, like me, not really into crypto at the time. You can't say it was 'shielded' from the world - someone at the IPExpo in London showed me the link with the binaries!

I am guessing that a hell of a lot of coins mined early are either lost or forgotten about. I only recovered mine after I joined BCT and got help with my wallet.

Anyway, thanks for an interesting and measured (for Bytecoin topics!) post.