The "dev" who launched Monero is thankful_for_today: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=233561

Thankfully when we (the current Monero core team) found the purposefully obfuscated code we immediately fixed it and made the fix freely available to all. This is what smooth means when he describes the Monero launch as fair. As dga says, at most thankful_for_today would've had a week of advantageous mining, but as our difficulty retargetting worked just fine and we didn't have crazy high initial block rewards there was very little that the scammer thankful_for_today could've made off with.

Note that these are all facts, directly observable by comparing increases in difficulty (ie. network hash rate) with the improved hashing code submitted to github. It does not require trust, it does not require anyone to take our word that coins have been sold or distributed, it is not based on hope. It is absolute, truthful, factual, verifiable by all.

We could have kept the fix to ourselves and just mined away, amassing a fat stash of XMR. We were under no obligation to release the code for a faster miner, we weren't even in a position of stewardship of the Monero project, we were just a bunch of enthusiasts. If we'd mined for a year with the improved miner we could easily have controlled 90% of the hash rate between us (the improved miner was 12x faster than the original) and mined several million XMR. We could've thrown a flashy GUI together, made wild promises of all sorts of stuff we were going to create (with screenshots) and slowly dumped our stash on an overexcited market.

The 7 members of the Monero core team could be USD millionaires today if we had done that. If I had to throw some numbers out, we'd probably have been able to accumulate around 5.5 million XMR, so 785 000 XMR each. At the current spot price thats only $345 000 for each of us, but since we'd be pumping out screenshots and other flashy nonsense I'm sure we'd be trading over 0.01 BTC, which would put our stash at a cool $1.73 million for each of us (and the total stash would be worth $12 million).

Something to think about.