some more monero launch info....
Two points:
a) It's becoming obvious that the Monero trolls live in a glass house. Monero had its own issuance problems, with one guy receiving between 50% and 90% of all the coins in the first three months. Is it the current Monero team's fault? No, probably not. They inherited the broken miner and fixed it as soon as they were able. Did it ultimately affect the early distribution of the coin? Yes.
Let's not let facts get in the way:
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.
By the 14th of May, we were 45% of the total hashing power on the coin. .. I think we exceeded 60% of the net hash of the coin at a few points
In the end, our game continued into July -- almost two months
We spent over a quarter of a million dollars renting cloud compute time
I don't personally own any, nor do I hold any Bitcoin - I mine and sell for the most part, to minimize my risk exposure.
Summary:
1. NoodleDoodle's commit was May 7, so the start of dga's mining was
after May 7, or 19 days after launch. We know his hash rate reached
4045% by May 14, or 26 days after launch. i.e. during most of the first month he wasn't mining at all.
2. Clearly his hash rate was below 50% for much of the time and only rarely (and not even with certainty) above 60%. There is no evidence it ever reached anything close to 90%, and certainly it wasn't close to that for any consistent period.
3. "Almost" two months, not three months.
4. He kept none of it.
This allows us to narrow down the maximum amount of coins mined by dga and his backers pretty closely:
Months 2-3 total coins mined was 1.37 million. Their likely overall share of roughly 50% makes that 685k. It could have been a little higher but we know from the above quote that they mined for
less than two months so this seems a reasonable estimate. Which comes to right around 6.85% of the current supply.
If anyone thinks that a group of large miners and smart coders spending >$250K (plus a lot of coding work) to mine and sell 6.85% of the current supply during the second and third months of a coin launch is a disaster, then yes you should stay away from Monero.