Also from memory during the time that I bought, there was an attack or threat of an attack by 'BTCExpress?' and it caused a lot of jitters in the XMR community. XMR has obviously survived, but what was the outcome, if you remember.
Nothing happened. It was all FUD.
My personal theory is that the people behind it (I don't think BCX was working alone) did really think they had discovered a vulnerability in the crypto, but that was due to a misunderstanding of the math on their part. So it turned out to be a false alarm. But that could be wrong, and it may have just been speculators wanting to make money by shorting and FUDding. No way to know really.
It is obvious that whatever it was, it had no long-term detriment on XMR as 2 years on XMR is still here and growing.