are you able to debunk these (current) claims?

Let's take a look at the first 5 h of Darkcoin (XCoin at that time)...

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421615.msg4589219#msg4589219
Edufield said (after failed launch) that he will wait the next day to launch DRK (XCoin at that time) it is 11 pm.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421615.msg4591407#msg4591407
Edufield disregard windows wallet and daemon and hurry up his launch, presumably to not have windows miners on board.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421615.msg4592827#msg4592827
Edufield say he added four nodes for the launch at 4 am (5 hours later, despite his promise to wait). The 4 nodes from Edufield are 3 amazons AWS + another unknown (whois IP). Launch started at 3h54 am.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421615.msg4593601#msg4593601
Edufield said the github version was not updated, nobody could compile and only Edufield was able to mine until that time. It is 5.09 am and Edufield instamined alone 1153 block at 500 DRK + 60 block at reward 277 = 593120 DRK for him alone in about 1 hour.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421615.msg4593987#msg4593987
No windows wallet confirmed at 5h47 am, despite a user attempt to make one avaiable, that Edufield dismissed quickly.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421615.msg4594096#msg4594096
Illodin, understand dev has instamined alot of coin.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421615.msg4595573#msg4595573
From this list of nodes, at 8h34 am (4h40 after launch) there were 50 Amazon AWS node and 50 microsoft cloud computing instamining DRK (checked using IP whois service). This is 100/124 nodes using cloud computing to instamine DRK. We are at block 2870 and block reward is 500. From block 1153-1729 block reward is 277. After that it is 500 again hence 2294 block at 500 + 576 at 277 = 1306552 DRK (worth about 13M$ now) were instamined in less than 5 hour by Edufield and coworkers using about 100 cloud mining instances. Edufield himself instamined in not even 5 h from 600K to 1169K DRK ((1306K-600K)*100/124 + 600K) depending how many of the 100 cloud mining instance were its own. All this while having purposefully set the difficult ridiculously low and block reward 100 times what it is now.

~2mn coins were issued in the first 48 hours due to problems with the difficulty readjustment. That represents approximately 10-15% of the total money supply that will ever be issued.

The majority of these coins were distributed through the market in the following weeks and months at very low price levels* (0.0000x BTC per DRK to 0.000x BTC per DRK) and a lot of them were also absorbed in the April/May 2014 price increase.

• Examples of prices and selling action almost two weeks after launch:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421615.msg4861558#msg4861558

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421615.msg4889177#msg4889177

No. This is a classic case of spreading FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) by supporters of other cryptocurrencies who perceive Darkcoin as a threat to the coin they support.

The coin has been well distributed through exchanges since early February 2014 – almost 15-20 days after the coin's launch. One could buy as many cheap DRKs as they wanted, with prices of 0.0000x per DRK or 0.0001x per DRK. This can be verified by historic charts of c-cex.com and poloniex.com of early Feb 2014. These two exchanges were the first that adopted DRK. Huge buy orders of 20-30-50k DRKs were being filled by early miners who were dumping their coins for pennies, not really appreciating the coin they had in their possession due to the “abundant” way in which they mined it as people do not really appreciate what they are given in ample quantity.

Miners who “instamined” large quantities never foresaw the huge price increase and as such sold over a million coins at prices from 0.0000x up to 0.002 – with the first large batch being sold after DRK hit the exchanges and the next large batches being sold from February 2014 to April 2014 @ 0.0015 BTC price levels. In fact, many coin holders were complaining* of all the “dumping” by those who held cheap coins from the start that kept the price at artificially low levels for 2 months straight.

The dumping ended, due to tremendous market demand, when a “pump” was initiated by “whale” buyers that swallowed millions of USD (in DRKs), raising the price from 0.0012 to 0.017 within a few weeks.

• During this dumping period there were certain individuals who spread FUD about how the coin will never rise in price due to the instaminers dumping continuously. These are typically the same people who are claiming that the 50% instamine distribution affects the coin distribution today. However it is impossible to simultaneously claim that the coins were being dumped and that the 50% instamine holds true today. It's either one or the other. Since the coins were being dumped, the 50% instamine distribution was gradually reduced with each dumping wave. Blockchain analysis indicates a well distributed coin, reflecting the fact that the dumped coins were evenly distributed through the market. Early distribution is not currently an issue as huge buyers have been reshuffling the "rich-list" in their favor, buying millions of dollars in Darkcoins during May 2014. Late distribution through aggressive buying is currently more of a concern than early distribution.

    This is the story of how Darkcoin came about. Recently the community has grown a lot and many people here aren’t aware at all of the early history of the coin. I’m sure you’ll see from the full story that I would have done things much differently, but hindsight is always 20/20.

    So who am I and what do I offer?

    My name is Evan Duffield and I’ve been developing software since I was 15. I also have a history in finance and an interest in economics and machine learning. I’ve worked all over the space for PR firms, creating search engines and machine learning algorithms for financial modeling.

    I’ve have a rewarding career and consider myself lucky to have been a part of many great projects. Also, it’s worth noting when I worked at Hawk Financial Group I got my series 65 (a financial advisor license) and I’ve used that knowledge extensively for Darkcoin.

    The birth of Darkcoin

    I discovered Bitcoin in mid 2010 and was obsessed ever since. After a couple of years in 2012 I started really thinking about how to add anonymity to Bitcoin. I came up with maybe 10 ways of doing this, but I soon realized that Bitcoin would never add my code. The developers really want the core protocol to stay the same for the most part and everything else to be implemented on the top of it.

    This was the birth of the concept of Darkcoin. I implemented X11 in a weekend and found it worked pretty well and it would give a completely fair start to the currency. What I really was aiming for with X11 is a similar development curve where miners would fight to create small advantages much like the early start of Bitcoin. I think this a requirement to create a healthy ecosystem.

    Next I was thinking about changing the reward system. I thought it would be an interesting experiment to add more incentives to join mining early on, driving up the hashrate and protecting the network, that’s when I came up with 1111.0 / ((x+1.0)^2.0), which was the first formula for controlling rewards.

    Launch

    It was January 18, 2014 and I had everything ready or so I thought. I announced the launch of Darkcoin (XCoin at the time) on BitcoinTalk. We launched later and immediately got stuck on block 42, I was new to the Bitcoin codebase and wasn’t sure what I missed so I announced we’d relaunch later.

    When we relaunched we had a rush of miners join causing a huge spike of coin production without it being able to adjust the difficulty quick enough, we just ended up spilling out coins. Retargeting happened every 576 blocks and could only increase the difficulty by four times, so it took about six retargets to get to a difficulty that was near 2.5 minutes per block.

    Later on, after the difficulty evened out we realized that there was a serious problem with the block reward calculation. You can see people discussing the problems here:

    https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421615.120

    I soon fixed this issue at block 4500, but none of us realized the amount of coins that had been issued at the time. At that point we didn’t even have a block explorer yet.

    Growth

    Right after block 4500 is when I started working on DarkSend. I was trying to create a proof-of-concept and eventually I succeeded, I posted about it and our coin started to become more popular by the day. This is when the coin became a serious project of mine.

    Later on we switched to 11111.0 / ((Difficulty+51.0)/6.0)^2), these formulas proved to be much more powerful incentives to drive up the difficulty than I thought they would. Soon after we switched to (2222222.0 / ((Difficulty+2600.0)/9.0)^2.0), targeting a difficulty of about 3400.


    In the end?

    Darkcoin started from a few months of me thinking about ways to create a better coin and a couple weekends of coding. It wasn’t till later that we got established and I really started taking this seriously. Anyone can compare our recent efforts to the sorted past and see things are going much smoother. No one really knew how much this would blow up (in a good way) and how popular it would be, otherwise I would have took my time in the beginning.

    Goals and the future of Darkcoin

    I don’t believe the origins of Darkcoin are too much to overcome, but investors and users are going to have to decide for themselves if they want to support the project. Recently I’ve shifted away from other projects to going full time on Darkcoin. I think with a full time developer and our solid community we’ll be able to make something great.

    It’s only been a couple months and we have a lot to show for it (X11, DGW and DarkSend Beta) and there is more in the works. This obviously didn’t go perfect but I think we have a really fantastic community and I see a really bright future for Darkcoin.