Quote from: Rough on January 21, 2015, 11:58:15 AM

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.

This is possible. Many of the bitcoins that were mined during its early days are now lost forever.

Quote from: fluffypony on January 21, 2015, 01:26:22 PM

As to whether or not they've dumped their premine, given the unbelievably low Bytecoin exchange volume I simply think they haven't been able to. In order to dump a premine you have to have buyers, otherwise who are you selling it to? Leaving aside HitBTC, which is known to be untrustworthy and filled with fake trades (1 2 3), Bytecoin does about $2/day in volume. The most heavily traded day was June 21 when they did around 1.5 BTC in volume at a price of around 10 satoshi per Bytecoin. In the 245 days it has been listed on Poloniex, even if they were at peak every single day they would only have been able to dump 3 675 000 000 Bytecoins of their stash of 147 882 114 539 Bytecoins, which is 2.49%. Given that they're not at peak, the best they could have achieved over the past 245 days is a couple of hundred USD.

Strange to see that HitBTC has 99% of the volume while Poloniex has so little. Didn't realize their numbers were inaccurate.

I understand that the Bytecoin and CryptoNote teams had a very close relationship with the other until there was a split. Supposedly the BCN team wanted to focus on implementing the technology via Bytecoin while the CryptoNote team just wanted to focus on the core technology itself. The fact that the early adopters of BCN have profited so little suggests that this is something other than your typical scam. After all, who would go through all the trouble of helping to develop and implement an entirely new and truly innovative protocol just for a couple of hundred USD? Very odd.

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Edit: forgot to add, the only coin "rankings" worth looking at are CoinGecko. If you're merely looking at market capitalisation then you also need to use CoinMarketCap's non-mineable/premine filter, but frankly there's not much value in market capitalisation metrics without taking other things into account (eg. market momentum, trade volume, etc.)

I remember BCN used to have double stars (and so did NXT) suggesting a premine but it was taken off after a couple of weeks. Thus BCN still shows up when you use the non-mineable/premine filter.

Quote from: fluffypony on January 21, 2015, 03:18:43 PM

There's no propaganda in the facts above. They are not skewed nor twisted, and replicating my searches of the Silk Road 1 forum or of the various 4chan archive sites is a trivial exercise for the reader.

Most threads on 4chan don't make it to the archives. If the thread was posted on /g/ then it would stay up for a week or so and then disappear forever.

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We absolutely do give kudos to the mathematician(s) behind the CryptoNote cryptography (and who we'd love to have on the Monero Research Lab panel), and credit does also have to go to the developer(s) who produces the CryptoNote reference code in the 7 months at the end of 2013 / beginning of 2014. If the original Bytecoin developers were involved in the creation of the reference code, then those kudos and credit extend to them up to that point, but we absolutely do not give credit for their attempt to fleece the cryptocurrency community.

I've read the CryptoNote whitepaper and it seems likely that the devs had some academic background. Or perhaps they were one of the cypherpunks that were involved in the early days of Bitcoin. If they were academics, then it's also possible that they weren't too concerned about profit and just kept their miners running while testing the code. Then perhaps word got out and a few people in the deep web found out but it failed to form a substantial community.

I'm not too familiar with Monero development these days. Is most of the development done by the CryptoNote/Bytecoin devs with the Monero team merging these changes into the code as required (such as in the case with Linux Mint being based on the latest Ubuntu release) or have the codebases completely diverged? And to what extent do the Monero devs understand the code behind CryptoNote? (I realize this is a tricky question to answer). Since the Monero devs didn't actually write the code behind their coin, I wonder if the task of maintaining it is beyond their technical capabilities. I know there is another CryptoNote coin called Dashcoin which tries to be a 1:1 mirror image of Bytecoin and thus circumvents the risk of inexperienced coders messing up while still avoiding that pesky 82 percent ninjamine.