I don't normally reply to these... but monero also had distribution problems. The open source mining code was extremely inefficient, allowing insiders to mine with advantage.
No, it wasn't "insiders" at all, it was an expert computer scientist (dga) and his miner partners, who were able to spend a lot of money and make more money from that, but the overall supply curve was not affected at all. Plenty of other people (including me) were able to mine with the regular miner and still be profitable, which was quite remarkable, but the market was very hot at the time too. It's all well documented (including the non-involvement of the insiders; in fact we were thwarting their efforts as quickly as we could) on his blog somewhere.
EDIT: here:
By the time I got into it, developer "NoodleDoodle" (hey, this is crypto, people can pick whatever names they want -- Satoshi Nakamoto?) had already untwisted the first "de-optimization" with the AES encryption key.
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[in comments, in response to a suggestion he was an insider with a special advantage]
This would be a very reasonable thing to assert if I had anything to do with Monero. I don't. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, none of the people who profited from early optimized Monero mining had anything to do with crippling the code in the first place.
Think of it this way: You step in and inherit a legacy codebase for a promising and interesting new cryptocurrency. You're immediately beset with demands -- fix bugs, release binaries, answer help questions, etc. In retrospect, it turns out that the code you took over had been de-optimized by its original creators. Is that your fault? Of course not. What's the standard that we should hold the Monero developers to? To fix any bugs or deliberate weaknesses as fast as they can after they become aware of it. To get up to speed and review and understand the codebase they inherited as quickly as a reasonable developer can do.