Like I said, doesn't the evidence in the code and in the blockchain show that Bytecoin didn't exist until 2014?
I'm sure it isn't. Premines are pretty obvious things that would stand out and be easily noticeable in both the code and the blockchain. You would see a method such as the following in the code:
The problem is that we don't know what the Bytecoin code looked like prior to March 2014, and there's no trust-chain for us to verify the story.
Given that the Bytecoin code publicly released in March had a purposely crippled slow_hash function (recalculating the value of a constant in every iteration of the loop is not accidental, and I hope we are not so foolish to believe that in 2 years nobody noticed such a simple optimisation) we cannot take the blockchain data at face value.
Using ChainRadar's charts we can get an overview of Bytecoin's difficulty change over the alleged period (July 2012 to April 2014) we see that difficulty averaged around the 145 000 mark -
From difficulty we normally estimate the network hashrate by dividing by 120 (BCN has 120 second block times), so we can estimate an average network hash rate of 1 208h/s. This is backed up by ChainRadar's network hashrate chart, where you can see the average is a little below my hover -
If we are terribly generous and round it off to 1 350h/s we can ascertain that if we wanted to fake the whole 21 months of blockchain data in, say, 3 months, we would need 1 350h/s x 7 = 9 450h/s.
Is that achievable in practical terms? Well, my MacBook Pro solo mines at an average hashrate of around 46h/s. ClayMore's GPU miner will comfortably do 400h/s on an entry-level GPU. An Amazon EC2 c3.8xlarge instance does 1 000h/s. So we could reach our target of 9 450h/s with 206 MacBook Pros, a 24-GPU mining farm, or a mere 10 EC2 instances. A c3.8xlarge instance has a regular price of $1.68/hour, but a typical spot price of $0.45/hour. Spot instances are great, because it would have created seemingly "natural" fluctuations in difficulty if you spread them out across regions, as spot instances come on and offline when your spot price is outbid. Presenting fake dates/times to the miner is trivial, and reducing the block time to 17 (actual) seconds within a closed network of 10 AWS instances is equally trivial.
So bottom line is the entire blockchain could easily have been faked in a 3 month period at a total cost of $9 720.