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.
I'm going to back smooth up and validate his claim that it wasn't just insiders. I mined tons of bitmonero during the first week well before the name change to monero. I think there were only a few of us mining. Noodledoodle, mickeyminer, and myself likely got the most. I ended up selling what I mined for about 80 btc total in the end. I sold most of that off when btc was around $600. I don't have a single monero now but it was the coin that made me love cryptocurrency. Talk about being in the right coin at the right time. Nobody was mining it because it wasn't the standard coin. People looked at it and dismissed it. I'm glad they did.
I know for a fact that thankful_for_today released bitmonero fair. Some of us mined it but most just ignored it. What happened after that and the way that they took the coin from thankful_for_today is questionable. But the launch was fair and the coin was basically ignored while some of us mined it. It wasn't until the questionable takeover happened and an exchange was made to trade it that the value went crazy. But as far as the launch is concerned it was a fair launch and anyone had a chance to mine.