Quote from: Varuna on December 20, 2016, 10:55:52 AM

Think about it. You have a software which is running on thousands of devices and contains code created with the legitimate purpose of coordinating nodes...
May that code be diverted from its legitimate use and used instead to attack a vulnerable target? Attacks of this type have already been directed against well known exchanges like Kraken, Coinbase and BTCChina. The attacker could ask for big money for stopping the attacks.

I run don't run the daemon often enough to see a threat in this.
And since it's a publicly available code, I trust the developer and crypto community that if somebody would be indeed this fishy, it would have come up already.

Monero has enough haters that want it badly to fail, so they would have shown or have exploited it already. And if that happens, some know and tell.
Really, if such botnet system would be in Monero and somebody would have activated it at least once, we would have known in a matter of minutes.

Quote from: Varuna on December 20, 2016, 10:55:52 AM

I did not say that Monero should not be paying for those analyses. Whoever does them, though, should possess enough credibility in the field of cryptography and/or botnets.
His identity should, therefore, not be hidden and be, instead, verifiable.

While I agree that the auditor should be somebody KNOWN, I would say that if this is paid by Monero team, it could still not be credible enough. After all, money corrupts.

And something I've missed:

Quote from: Varuna on December 19, 2016, 10:46:25 AM

- Every time Monero team answers to people asking about CryptoNote, they simply end their sentences with "every CryptoNote-based coin, except Monero".
I don't see strong evidence for excluding Monero from the group of CryptoNote-based coins.
Their code is not significantly different from that of CryptoCoin and my suspect is that they do not "own" the code, just like me and other people who attempted to read it.

From what I know (while I don't deny I like Monero and Cryptonote coins, I don't follow them that strict and I don't know them that well) Monero team has made quite a lot of fixes and changes in the original code and that's why they use to claim that Monero is quite a lot different from the original Cryptonote. After all, there are CN coins with wallet already; if it would have been easy, that wallet would have been forked for Monero too, I guess...