Smooth makes solid points, but as I already argued upthread, nobody is willing to actually navigate the illegal/evil marketplaces on the deep web to check for BCN's presence.
If BCN is in fact used for black trade (snuff films, illegal pornography, etc.), how much of that do you think would really surface to bitcointalk?
I wasn't specifically talking about bitcointalk. I have seen plenty of third party reporting about the deep web stuff and never was it mentioned that they are using this new thing called Bytecoin, or even some unknown anonymous payment technology. Bitcoin is frequently mentioned. Stolen credit cards, botnets, and other items of value are sometimes mentioned. Nothing like bytecoin has ever been mentioned. You can go and look at this reporting yourself if you want, that doesn't require visiting kiddie porn sites.
It could have been known in some (very) small circles, but it is certainly not being "widely used" on the deep web. And as I said before, the difficulty was (and still is, but definitely before) much too low to be consistent with any kind of widespread use. This theory does not hold water.
As I said before, I think the most likely explanation is that the developers bumbled around with it for a long time but never really went anywhere with it
in terms of usage, causing 80% of it to be mined even with essentially zero user base. Maybe they simply dropped the ball on getting out there, or maybe they did not understand for a long time that a secret coin can not ever have value. When they realized what had happened, instead of throwing away their worthless devcoins and doing a rerelease so the coin could actually get some users before being 80% mined, they decided to try to pump and dump them here.
Other explanations are possible. I find that to be the most likely.
Man, could you please mine mro not posting your opinion? Its very anoying. You don't look like a clever guy, but like a parrot, repeating same things hundreds times