who ever holds more bytecoin maybe relevant or irrelevant. Depends on the nature of the substrate I would think.
We have no idea what the substrate is, if there even is one. With regard to the bytecoin development community, so far I've seen one fix from monero get pulled back to bytecoin, and little if anything going in the other direction. If there are stores, exchanges, etc. for bytecoin, then let's hear about that. Failing that,
there is no substrate. It is all a mirage.
But like you I am mining both and taking a wait and see attitude. I think monero has just a whole lot more legitimacy and transparency at this point, and that counts for a lot. Just the fake cicada 3301 references are enough to convince me there is an element of scam to bytecoin, but those could possibly done by someone with no real connection, so we can't be sure. It smells bad though.
If bytecoin is a scam, then it's a damn elaborate (and frankly, elegant) one. More likely BCN is a very distributed network that "smells bad" not because of suspicious "premine" activity, but because of the nature of its usage. The developers know that an anonymous currency such as BCN must first succeed in the markets where it is necessary. That is why they are so secretive. They do not want to be linked to the abhorrently evil shit that BCN is used for on the deep web (and you know exactly what I'm taking about).
It sounds like you're talking about the "deep web" while not knowing how it works. BCN has not been used on the deep web in any such elaborate way. The only thing secret about the deep web is the identity of its users.
You give two choices, asking which is most likely:
1. Write an entirely new cryptocurrency from scratch, incorporating an unknown (at the time) but rather brilliant cryptographic technology to secure privacy, all for the purpose of pre-mining the coin for 2 years.
2. Knowing that your product will fill a much needed demand in a very questionable market and choosing to remain anonymous and not promote it until the network is very secure.
The most likely choice is #3: It has been mined for 2 years for testing and development purposes. BCN was certainly near-worthless during this time.
While this may not be a "scam" on purpose, it might as well be one from our perspective. If something is able to remain hidden from the inevitable indexing by deep-web and clear-web search engines, the distribution of the currency's probably suboptimal.