I'm not a Bytecoin supporter I have invested only ten dollar in Bytecoin I prefer other cryptocurrencies however Bytecoin whatever thing you can say about developers sincerity, that very likely have lied about the date, was easily available both for free with faucets, with hilariously low prices and easy to mine even with an home PC...
The problem is fundamentally that if there's a whale that owns 80% of the stash, he can manipulate it in just any direction. No coin, "however cheap" for the rest of the 20% that is available, is believable if someone owns 80% of it.
This is also the problem with DASH: most probably half of the stash is in the hands of Evan Inc. And a smaller but similar problem exists with ETH. With bitcoin, if Satoshi has still his keys, this is a problem too, but most probably, these coins are dead.
I had the impression that there are no monero whales of that size. That there is a power distribution of possession is normal: all assets are power-law distributed after a while. But there should be an upper limit to the amount that is in the hands of a single entity, so that it cannot entirely manipulate the market. Pump and dump, sure. Unavoidable. But not at a level that was the case with Bytecoin.