Hm? No I'm not. I've mined exactly one bytecoin block, last weekend— as part of fooling around with it, and I've used that to make some transactions and try it out. I'm also not especially equipped for cpu mining any more, and as you may note I basically don't do anything with altcoins (except sometimes point out their technical mistakes).  I wasn't aware of bytecoin until Adam Back mentioned it (well I _heard_ about it but thought people were talking about the crappy bitcoin clone).  If I'd been involved earlier perhaps there would be fewer really awful design flaws (including the way it appears to have been launched, which I agree is screwed up). Where my opinion differs is that I think its foolish in the abstract to create separate currencies for things which are just more transaction features (which doesn't mean I may not use them, but I do not consider them virtuous). I also think some of the forks (and perhaps all of them so far) have been launched in ways which are only minimally better and also created a huge advantage for their early participants.  While I think what BCN has done is a bit crazy, relative to the forks I do think it at least has the moral high-ground of having at least been the original authors— to the extent that anyone ought to get a windfall it ought to be them.  The lack of good initial calibration is even less excusable for the forks since they knew going in what the demand would be.

(were I ever to launch some altcoin— among many other things— I'd figure out a reasonable target for what the difficulty will be once it has basic adoption, and when the difficulty is below that level I'd have it scale the subsidy that each block takes by the difficulty so that the very earliest miners wouldn't get a windfall— effectively the income per hash would be ~constant until the hashrate got above some threshold. I'd also never create something with such a costly to validate POW, or set things up so that sketchy deoptimizations games were needed.)

The cause for my interest in this technology is pretty well established, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=279249.0  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=321228.0  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=277389.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=398041.0 etc.  I've been developing cryptocurrency tech for personal and philosophical reasons for eons (in cryptocurrency time) and perhaps you're too busy with sleezy speculative activities to notice that there are some other people who are involved for reasons which are unrelated to making a quick buck.  There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreampt of in your philosophy.

(As an aside— you probably should be pretty happy that I went and pointed out this tech in discussions about ZeroCash, regardless of which forks you support I'm sure you benefited from it whereas I did not (in fact, I've not even managed to get any real thoughtful tech discussions out of it— few to none of the people posting here seem to actually understand the tech, and instead everyone is just flinging poo about their favorite forks).  Perhaps in the future I should not forget to add the caveat that while the tech is neat and deserves more attention, like most altcoins the community is full of speculators who actively repel technical folks with wild accusations stemming from an apparent inability to understand that not everyone is so desperately greedy...  It's doubly hilarious, in that it's so thoroughly counter productive— I don't approve of the pump behavior and won't try to encourage it, but I certantly could bring a huge amount of attention to this space by pointing how how powerful the technology is to people— but I'm certantly less inclined to do so when simply speaking my mined gets me accused of being one of y'all coin pumpers even by the selfsame folks who would benefit from it.. I mean, wtf are you thinking? Were you raised by wolves?)

Yea, well the darkcoin thing was pretty offensive to me in general, I feel that it commercially exploited my work promoting coinjoin— itself not so bad, but it was frustrating that it was also stupid: the attraction of coinjoin— for all its limitations— is that you don't need a new coin, it's already just part of Bitcoin.  I've been continually disappointed by the level of hype around Zero*, especially when it comes at the expense of attention to other techniques which are very interesting themselves.