As I said, I found it through a Google search looking for Bytecoin[BTE] although I may of
made a mistake on the year. It was shortly before or after I started mining Darkcoin and that was in January of 2014. I truly must be a scammer since I mined both projects.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421615.msg4810924#msg4810924The earliest web archive puts Bytecoin's snapshot in February of 2014 not March, but I could of sworn I found it much earlier than that.
Yes, the end of February. It is quite possible that you mined Bytecoin starting around March of 2014 (or possibly very late February) which was more or less the same time it appeared on this forum and the rest of us started mining it, by which time it had already been fraudulently 80% pre-mined with a phony backstory dating to 2011.
So if your (latest) story is to be believed you 'made a mistake' about the year and fall into the useful idiot category.
To me, it looks like they tried to cover links to their real names before releasing Bytecoin/Cryptonote to the general public.
Covering links is one thing, and done by many in crypto who remain anonymous. A hidden 80% premine and a host of other (known; I'm sure there are many unknown too) sock puppet projects all of which turned out to be scams is something else.
According the research from
https://www.reddit.com/user/MR_CHNYD Alan Miers seems to be the chief architect of Cryptonote although his original repo doesn't have a snapshot. "Johannes Meier" is listed on Cryptonote.org as their chief cryptographer so one can safely assume it was his alias. Maybe the whitepaper was altered to remove his github link and name from the Cryptonote whitepaper. He also created cryptonote.me, most likely to introduce plausible deniability of his involvement in the project. Additionally, he was also a founding member of the Stanford University Bitcoin Group (
https://angel.co/cognitohq/jobs). That doesn't strike me as someone who is looking to scam people with a pump and dump.
Explicitly denied on this thread. Maybe he's lying who knows. I do respect his privacy so I'm not going to dig into it further.
Alain here from the Stanford Bitcoin Group. I am not related to the CryptoNote project at all, nor is the Stanford Bitcoin Group. I started an open source project called Cryptonote (
https://github.com/alainmeier/cryptonote) in May 2013 and then was approached in March 2014 by someone from the CryptoNote cryptocurrency project who wanted to buy the domain, so I sold it to them. It's just an unfortunate coincidence.
What does appear to be the case is the original scam group liked using bogus references to famous universities (e.g. Princeton) as polish to bolster their own reputation. It is possible the similar name was used to imply some connection to Alain Meier and/or the SBG (and they apparently knew of him since they bought his domain).
Who is this "MR_CHNYD" BTW? Someone credible with a reputation, or yet more sock puppet social engineering (or perhaps useful idiot; who can say)?