Sigh, I'm a bit tired of seeing the same talking points from the DRK FAQ, etc., but just once I will respond because I think in general AlexGR you are pretty sincere.

You are missing the point.

First of all, on the matter of redistribution:

You don't know 90% of what happens in the markets. You can say "coins traded at such a price" but you don't know who was on each side of that trade. If I were trying to legitimize my instamine, the first thing I would do is trade it around, move the coins between wallets, and generally create an appearance of distribution. To contend that there are not pump groups, whale groups, shady coin developers and others who engage in manipulative and sham trading of altcoins is absurd to the point of ridiculous. This is not the New York Stock Exchange (even there, you probably shouldn't trust everything you see). There is simply no way to know that didn't happen or if it did how much of the activity it represents. This applies at both low prices and high prices.

I will grant that if the coins were traced a theft at Mintpal and then dumped, that was probably legit distribution; I don't think the Mintpal scammer was tied to the DRK instamine scam (but you never know with these things; scammers gonna scam). But best that was a minority of the instamine (and wouldn't early instaminers and other adopters logically have had their in masternodes by then?)

Now I agree it is certainly fair to say that the coins might have been redistributed or could have been redistributed. I would not object to that at all. But to present this as fact is unsupportable and effectively fraudulent.

Second why is the instamine described as happening over 48 hours when in fact:

1. Within the very first hour over 500,000 coins were mined

2. Within 8 hours over 1.5 million coins were mind, which is most of the instamine.

On the matter of the instamine itself, you are ignoring a whole host of extremely shady practices that surrounded the instamine.

3. The Evan misled people into thinking that the launch would not happen for days (and specifically not in hours), then it happened in a few hours. Considering the 500K number in the first item above, the effect of this "ambush" was enormous.

4. The stated reason for delaying the launch for days was to do more testing and fix bugs. Yet when the coin was lunched it still had a "major problem." Why was the rushed ambush launch done in this manner, at a time that corresponded to late night in the US and very early morning in Europe?

5. Evan withheld information about the purpose, features, and goals of he coin development until after the instamine was complete. It was absolutely impossible for you to have any reason to mine this coin unless your strategy was to mine 100% of new coins that were launched, you just happened to stumble into it, you were friends with Evan, or you were Evan. In effect it turns the instamine into a premise, because the coins were mined before the coin was properly announced.

6. Various changes have been made to rewards, etc. multiple times., always in the direction of reducing/restricting/locking up supply, to the benefit of existing holders. The latest version of this is masternode payments, which look very much like a HYIP.

Now it is possible all of this was an accident. If so, you are asking us to believe in a string of extraordinary coincidences all apparently (by sheer luck) benefiting the same party or parties.

If it is not an accident then it is evidence of deliberate fraud on the part of the person or persons still involve with running the project. That is certainly relevant and troubling information, even if the nature of circumstantial evidence (even strong circumstantial evidence) is that it can't be 100% proven. Things might be different if there were a complete and transparent change of leadership (as for example with BitMonero->Monero, and probably some other coins). But that is not the case. The person who did all this is still there.

None of this proves it was not an accident, but given the fairly strong circumstantial case, I'm going to not only stay away, but advise other people to stay away. Quoting Nassim Taleb (author or Black Swan and Anti-fragility): "If you see fraud and don't shout fraud, you are a fraud" (credit to opennux for the quote). I'm shouting (at least potential) fraud.

As for the satoshi comparison, it's fairly absurd. Let's review (using the numbers above):

1. The rate of Bitcoin mining followed the published schedule. There were no extra coins mined at the beginning (in fact I think some of the early blocks were quite slow). It took 2-3 months to mine 500K coins, not one hour

2. It took the better part of a year to mine 1.5 million BTC, not 8 hours.

3. The Bitcoin launch was announced well ahead of time, the code was reviewed by several people who help finish it, and it happened on schedule. No misleading statements were made about the time of the launch.

4. There were indeed bugs in the code, and some mined coins were even lost to fix them, but none of this involved a "major problem" right after launch when an enormous number of coins were mined.

5. satoshi did not withhold information about the features and goals of the project. He engaged in a detailed and extended discussion about how it would work and what it was attempting to accomplish before it was launched.

6. No changes were made as satoshi made it clear that to have legitimacy as a decentralized system, the parameters needed to be "set in stone"

One more thing to add. The part of this that is (probably) fraudulent is not that Evan got a lot of coins, its that it was held out (and in many ways continues to be held out) as a public open distribution process, when in reality what happened was in effect more of a premine (see items above esp. #6), and I believe at this point that was very likely the intent. If he had forthrightly presented it as a premined coin, one might think that was a bad idea, but there would be no claim of fraud, at least not by me. I've never claimed that an openly premined coin was a fraud.