Quote from: fluffypony on April 22, 2015, 04:25:45 PM

Quote from: BlockaFett on April 22, 2015, 02:20:09 PM

Hi Fluffy

This is quite a serious accusation you are making. And because you are the lead dev of Monero I trust that you can back up such serious allegations.

Please can you provide the proof of your 2 claims here so that you can be on the record with the full extent of your allegations:

1. That Evan Duffield "mined 15% of the total currency with his buddies within a few hours of launch"

2. That Evan Duffield is "a scammer" (because that implies fraud)

Thanks

BF

Sure, just reason it through: no cryptocurrency creator launches without some hashing power ready to go. Whilst speculative miners appear quickly, a new PoW invariably delays their ability to rapidly starting mining. You can delay it further with things like not having a Windows miner available at launch. In Evan's case all he needed was 32 hours.

Knowing that it would appear we have two possible options: believing that Evan is a bumbling fool who and Darkcoin was beset by avid speculative miners, in which case Evan would only own a small portion of the blocks instamined in those 36 hours, or he is a manipulative scammer who owns a large portion of them. The evidence points to the latter.

According to Evan's post, "The Birth of Darkcoin", the following occurred on January 18th: "I announced the launch of Darkcoin (XCoin at the time) on BitcoinTalk. We launched later and immediately got stuck on block 42, I was new to the Bitcoin codebase and wasnt sure what I missed so I announced wed relaunch later."

So just so we're clear: he already flopped a launch and had just scrapped it and announced that he'd relaunch later. There was no problem with this, he was "new to the Bitcoin codebase" and introducing a brand new PoW, so nobody held it against him that it didn't work out the box.

He continues: "When we relaunched we had a rush of miners join causing a huge spike of coin production without it being able to adjust the difficulty quick enough, we just ended up spilling out coins. Retargeting happened every 576 blocks and could only increase the difficulty by four times, so it took about six retargets to get to a difficulty that was near 2.5 minutes per block. Later on, after the difficulty evened out we realized that there was a serious problem with the block reward calculation."

Why, at this point, did he not think to relaunch? By his own account coins were just "spilling out", which is clearly bad. Incidentally, he's talking nonsense (purposely or not) when he says that it was a "rush of miners" that caused a "huge spike of coin production". That would have happened even if there was just one miner (it would probably have been more efficient as there would have been no orphaned blocks), the issue was his low starting difficulty and high retargeting window.

He doubles-down with more deceptive talk: "I soon fixed this issue at block 4500, but none of us realized the amount of coins that had been issued at the time. At that point we didnt even have a block explorer yet."

Just so we're on the same page, the first block was mined at 2014-01-19, 3:54am. Block 4500 was mined at 2014/01/20, 12:05pm, a mere 32 hours after launch.

If he'd already cancelled one messed up launch and relaunched the next day, why couldn't he do the same thing a second time?

Additionally, his attempt to deflect the source of the problem and make it appear to be naught-but-a-happy-accident is despicable and obviously false. Darkcoin is cloned from Bitcoin, and since Bitcoin 0.8.3 there has been a CLI and RPC command, gettxoutsetinfo, that tells you (among other things) the total coins emitted. It is a blatant and outright lie for him to claim that he didn't know the number of coins emitted. You don't need a block explorer for that at all.

To confirm that Darkcoin had gettxoutsetinfo at launch I grabbed the Windows binary from this early post on 2014-01-19, and checked it for the relevant function:

It's also nonsensical to reason that he didn't know of gettxoutsetinfo's existence. He'd been knee-deep in Bitcoin's code, and it's not exactly a secret command. If you can change the code that affects the block reward you can figure out how to run darkcoind gettxoutsetinfo and look for the "total_amount" bit.

In other words: we don't need to prove that Evan mined those coins directly to his wallet. The scam is easily proven by his attitude subsequent to them being mined, where either he only owns a few coins and is being purposely deceptive to enrich someone else, or he owns the bulk of them and is being purposely deceptive to enrich himself. The deception and failure to relaunch (when he'd been quite comfortable relaunching the first time round) are the nail in the proverbial coffin, who it most directly enriches is mere minutiae.

Hi Fluffy

Sorry there seems to be some confusion.

You are making 2 claims here:

1. That Evan Duffield "mined 15% of the total currency with his buddies within a few hours of launch"

2. That Evan Duffield is "a scammer" (because that implies fraud)

It is public knowledge that the DRK launch was open to anyone with Linux and on a BCT thread. This means anyone checking the ANN list (as a lot of people were at the time including me) could have mined them.

You are suggesting that you have evidence that Evan and some associates mined 15% of the currency.

In court you have to prove this, supposition doesn't matter, especially as it was an open launch on the most popular forum.

So, last time, do you have proof or not, yes or no? If you are privy to evidence that *Evan and his associates* mined 15% in the first few hours launch, that is worth something. If not, you are someone who throws accusations without any evidence...so where is the actual evidence of ownership of 15% of Dash by Evan and his asssociates?

Thanks

BF