Invest or don't. Or just stick around to see what the innovators/cypherpunks who brought the world the very first crytonote coin (and maybe cryptonote itself) have for us next in 1.0.6 (multi-addressing for RPC Wallet to get rid of payment IDs and crypto improvements)
It was always about the anon. And it always will be.
The problem is for Bytecoin that the anon may be broken. You have been posing many questions about Bytecoin's/Cryptonote's history for the last several weeks/months. Although you seem to come down on the side of believing they Bytecoin dev(s) story about mining on the deepdarkscarynet for two years, many others are skeptical, such as myself, acdc, and NASdaq. If you think there's a possibility that one person/entity controls ~80% of the coins/UTXOs, then the anonymity afforded by ring signatures is broken; see here for gory math details:
https://lab.getmonero.org/pubs/MRL-0001.pdfThe "broken anon" problem is a theoretical vulnerability in ALL cryptonote coins wherein an individual/group/entity has a certain probability of de-anoning transactions which increases with the more coins they own. Curiously there is only one way to protect a CN coin from this kind of vulnerability - by ensuring a large amount of coin never gets traded. Govts and 3-letter orgs have more than enough resources to accumulate large stakes in any CN coin save those they cannot buy or mine enough of (like bytecoin). Of course coercion of developers and large stakeholders by govs could also lead to de-anoning transactions, that is assuming these stakeholderrs and developers are known entities and maybe even if they're not.
Scams are not usually associated with true innovation. Bytecoin is a groundbreaking anonymous crypto-currency and the first of its kind. Radically different to Bitcoin, Bytecoin is arguably the most significant crypto-currency advancement since Bitcoin itself. I wanna see what anon tech they develop next for the betterment of man. You dont have to invest in bytecoin to reap its rewards. Just ask monero. People study the history of bytecoin when its history is still being written.
Whether you believe it's a case of perals to swine or pearls from swine they are pearls nonetheless.
I refer you below to my more detailed piece posted in the monero thread yesterday:
To conclude my stint as interloper
Thanks to all of you for your invaluable time and patience. I am quite aware I may have stepped out-of-line from time-to-time but thats what people like us do: step out-of-line. We are all free thinkers or at least should be, and we can congratulate ourselves
I have been reading into the cryptonote, bytecoin and monero story for almost a month and there is yet much reading left. Sufficed to say I have reached no firm conclusions, save one. Most important is the continued development of anonymous digital currencies for the betterment of man. As such I look forward to seeing the next crypto innovations, whoever creates them.
In brief what I found perhaps most surprising in this is that both fluffypony and smooth are convinced the cryptonote team is in cahoots with the bytecoin team. For me this raises lots of questions which I wont bore you with now, save one:
Does monero's attack on bytecoin purpose to destroy the future of arguably the most innovative anonymous crypto-currency ever developed? (especially because the cryptonote and bytecoin teams may well be the same or consist of some of the same members). If so, at what cost?
I'd like to see monero stand on its own without feeling the need to bash bytecoin in order to prop itself up. I read GingerAle's welcome to monero text which was mostly good besides the gratuitous shiv in bytecoin.
There may be an irony in all of this. By the time the world hears about monero it'll be at least 80% mined (if it isn't already). Whist you were "open' about your launch this coin has been mostly mined by small circles of people, perhaps not much larger than those presumably small circles who quietly mined bytecoin. What may be of most significance (or should be) is the security, quality and usability of the product. Their histories may prove not to be as important to those seeking privacy as to those seeking privacy in monero. You may say they might be able to de-anon tx's but their distro is always improving (presumably) and your distro is not demonstrably better. The shift from suspicion of guilt to certain guilt and lynch mobs without hard-proof is unsettling to me and I think monero should consider not firing off the rethink-your-strategy post so liberally when without all the facts at hand even smooth admits is prone to error.
I'll continue to watch both projects (and Shadow) and their development.
Best wishes.