Wow, that is a ton of information! Thank you for this! This will be my daily reading for this week, whenever I get the chance....
With Monero you can do the same intense investigation (as I and much smarter people have done). You will find that as far as complaints against Monero itself, there are no substantial ones. The launch and all major decisions were handled as fairly as possible by a slowly growing community on top of revolutionary technology. The only *real* criticism I can think of is that no one really knows where the hell this "cryptonote" came from. Despite some people trying to downplay how big of a deal cryptonote is (calling it simple and flawed code in its original form), it is obviously the culmination of a lot of talent and effort.
Ok so I have one question for everyone here including you americanpegasus, I saw this in the link that owm123 posted above:
Monero will effectively mine out a lot of their currency relatively fast. As you can see from the mining data posted here, within one month the number of Monero generated decreased from 17.59 MRO to 16.85 MRO, a decrease of .76 MRO in a month. Obviously, there is a formula that determines the amount of MRO created and we shouldn't assume a purely linear relationship from here.
and
On one hand, a 4 year plan to produce 85% of the currency is waaaay better than 90% of the coins on this investigation. In comparison to bitcoin, we see that from its inception from January of 2009 to today, May of 2014 (roughly 5.5 years), bitcoin has produced around 60% of its expected coin totals 163). In that sense, Monero isn't too much of a divergence.
Why is this a good thing? I would think that mining a currency would need to be a very low and steady thing over the course of time to always ensure miners that there will be profit to be made when mining coins... Why would you want to produce 85% of your coins in 4 years? That doesn't make much sense to me.
For more technical explanation you need to wait maybe for someone more knowledge to answer this. But, maybe here you can find some of the answers:
"The same consideration are given to the emission curve. We believe (and we are not the only ones), that relying only on transaction fees won't be enough of an incentive for miners (remember: the core of the blockchain is to rely on an economic incentive, because it is not possible to solve the Byzantine Generals' problem with math alone). This is why Monero implements a "tail emission" that will kick off once the main emission is over, in less than eight years."