I've heard many people say that Bytecoin (BCN) was 82 percent premined. Technically it wasn't a premine but something called a "ninjamine". A premine would be visible in the blockchain and the code. You would see something like "Initial block = 100,000 coins". Instead, it's a ninjamine because very few people knew about it during its initial mining phase when most of the coins were created in 2012 and 2013. Bitcoin was arguably also ninjamined because most of the initial mining took place within a small group that was shielded from the outside world. Bitcoin became known to the wider public in 2011. Bytecoin in 2014. Hence why Satoshi has almost 1 million coins. Bitcoin's small group was a cryptography mailing list frequented by geeks. Bytecoin's small group was the deep web.
If Satoshi was a scammer who was intent on destroying the reputation of his coin, then he could have dumped all his coins on an exchange and made a lot of fiat in the process. But Satoshi wasn't a scammer, and Bitcoin wasn't a pump and dump scheme. Six years have passed since the creation of Bitcoin and Satoshi could have dumped his coins at anytime during this period but he didn't. Thus those 1 million coins are still untouched to this day.
If the Bytecoin devs were scammers, then wouldn't we have witnessed large dumping of the coin by now? Does anyone know if the 82 percent ninjamine was left untouched just like Satoshi's stash is still untouched today or have the coins moved? We know that the value of Bitcoin won't come crashing down to zero because we know that Satoshi is a benevolent character who won't destroy his creation for a quick buck. And six years of blockchain data proves this. After 10 months has passed with no evidence of a scam, perhaps we can begin to say that the same is also true for the Bytecoin devs?
Disclaimer: I own both BCN and XMR and a few other CryptoNote coins. I decided to post this because I saw that BCN has recently overtaken XMR in the coin rankings which is a bit surprising although I guess the ninjamine probably helps. IMO competition is good for all coins.
If Satoshi was a scammer who was intent on destroying the reputation of his coin, then he could have dumped all his coins on an exchange and made a lot of fiat in the process. But Satoshi wasn't a scammer, and Bitcoin wasn't a pump and dump scheme. Six years have passed since the creation of Bitcoin and Satoshi could have dumped his coins at anytime during this period but he didn't. Thus those 1 million coins are still untouched to this day.
If the Bytecoin devs were scammers, then wouldn't we have witnessed large dumping of the coin by now? Does anyone know if the 82 percent ninjamine was left untouched just like Satoshi's stash is still untouched today or have the coins moved? We know that the value of Bitcoin won't come crashing down to zero because we know that Satoshi is a benevolent character who won't destroy his creation for a quick buck. And six years of blockchain data proves this. After 10 months has passed with no evidence of a scam, perhaps we can begin to say that the same is also true for the Bytecoin devs?
Disclaimer: I own both BCN and XMR and a few other CryptoNote coins. I decided to post this because I saw that BCN has recently overtaken XMR in the coin rankings which is a bit surprising although I guess the ninjamine probably helps. IMO competition is good for all coins.
The thing is, Satoshi didn't cripple Bitcoin with unoptimized code, nor did he have a 82 %(around 80) premine/ninjamine/w.e. Read that again, 80 percent of all Bytecoins are owned by a handful of people. 80%.
Enough said.
The original premise of my thread proposed the possibility that those coins may never be dumped at all. Perhaps those who mined them did so while testing the coin and never bothered to save the private keys. Or perhaps they wanted to "do a Satoshi" and mine a ton of coins and then leave them permanently untouched as a keepsake or for reasons unknown. Satoshi initially mined to keep the network running when there were very few other miners and nodes. From reading his earliest posts, the potential for profit seems to have been more of an afterthought.
Yes, the BCN distribution is horrible and a huge impediment to its success. 10 percent? Fine. 50 percent? OK if it's innovative then sure. But like you, the fact that it's 82 percent does leave me wondering if it is a fatal flaw. Then again, NXT was able to survive despite 73 people owning 100 percent of the currency in its early days. If BCN has just 50 people owning 82 percent then it could survive too. However, I suspect the bulk of this 82 percent is owned by the devs. While a mass-scale dumping of the coin would be disastrous, if they had chosen to follow Satoshi's example then it also means that we'd be missing out on a good, high-quality coin.
A third and IMO better long-term scenario would be if the early adopters who control the 82 percent sold off their coins slowly to the market. The demand for BCN would have to rise significantly for the market to absorb this and it would probably take many months or even years for the distribution to improve but at least it would remove the permanent uncertainty of a massive and catastrophic dev-initiated dump that's currently hanging over the community.