Quote from: smooth on June 27, 2014, 11:20:40 PM

Quote from: sorryforthat on June 27, 2014, 08:18:32 PM

Only one person really said the blockchain was bogus and that was smooth and this was just some words. Smooth is a Monero dev mind you and for a while would come here spreading much FUD

1. I never said that it was bogus, I said that the dates it in could have been faked and the chain could have been mined in a much shorter period of time given that less than 10 computers would be required to mine it in two years. Simple math shows that if 10 computers could mine it in two years than 120 computers could mine it in two months, or 1000 computers (say on EC2 or in a lab) could mine it in a few days. I also said that there is no verifiable evidence of anything related to this coin existing prior to late 2013 or early 2014. There was certainly no public launch two years ago. If you don't want to call that a premine, call it something else, like a private mine.

2. I think you will find that my skepticism of the story behind this coin and the blatant campaign of sock puppet accounts (some stupidluy created within minutes of each other) promoting it predates the existence of Monero. It was my comments that in fact helped encourage others in the community to start Monero as a clean public launch (I joined later).

3. Comparisons with bitcoin because you personally may not have known about it are totally off base. Bitcoin was publicly launched and I have provided links that verifiably prove that bitcoin existed and was public when it claims to be. No such proof has been offered for BCN (almost certainly because it doesn't exist).

4. There is at least one other person who has said the chain may be bogus (in fact I think he said it more strongly than I did). It was someone on the coinmarketcap thread. I have no connection with that person or account and I don't know who it is. Whoever it is came to his own conclusions that matched (or even go beyond) mine.

I was interested enough in this mystery to look at the blockchain myself. Unlike bitcoin, this blockchain does not provide much information about payments other than an unlinkable transaction id - by design, so all I could really look at was the timestamp. Here is what I found:

Code:

1st block 2012-07-04 05:00:00
2nd block 2012-07-04 05:00:01
3rd block 2012-07-04 05:00:02
4th block 2012-07-04 06:00:05
5th block 2012-07-04 05:00:06
6th block 2012-07-04 05:00:08
7th block 2012-07-04 05:00:09
8th block 2012-07-04 05:00:10
100th Block 2012-07-04 05:02:46
101th Block 2012-07-04 05:02:47
1000th Block 2012-07-05 07:28:26
1001th Block 2012-07-05 07:28:27
10000th Block 2012-07-18 01:42:01
10001st Block 2012-07-18 01:44:00
10002nd Block 2012-07-18 01:48:13
100000th Block 2012-11-22 20:29:40
100001st Block 2012-11-22 20:30:35
200000th Block 2013-04-16 12:54:29
300000th Block 2013-09-06 12:34:16
400000th Block 2014-01-25 02:54:02
500000th Block 2014-06-12 01:26:32

The blockchain could be fake, and it has some strangeness: switch from 1 sec blocks to 2 minute blocks somewhere between block 1001 and 10000. Timestamp for block 4 anomaly.

I also checked the way back machine and verified the bytecoin.org page was online by 24th Feb 2014. URL existed earlier but for an apparently unrelated project. The page looks so cheesy it could almost be real. Whatever the status of the blockchain, it is clear this coin was mined (or fake mined) for nearly 2 years worth of coins in secret by one or a group of individuals who have never been revealed. Call it a premine or not it has the same outcome.

The symbiosis between cryptonote and bytecoin also draws my attention. Cryptonote calls bytecoin their reference implementation. Bytecoin code has crytponote copyright and licence at core, but there is no other public repository for the cryptonote code that I could find. My intuition tells me they are not the same person or persons since they seem to have different objectives by the artifacts they have published.