Nonsense - Satoshi released the whitepaper and received commentary on it before he released the code. Specifically, he
released the whitepaper on 2008-11-01, and then he
released Bitcoin 0.1 on 2009-01-09. I have no doubt he had a large portion of the code completed by the time he released the whitepaper, but those 2 months gave him time to refine things after discussions on the cryptography mailing list. This is important, especially with a cryptocurrency or other cryptography related projects, because you cannot have knowledge of all pitfalls
a priori, and discussions with cryptographers and a peer review process at least allows the major ones to be removed.
About the only occurrence I've ever seen of cryptographically sound software being released before the whitepaper was BitMessage where they were both made available within days of each other in November, 2012. The difference is that he knew that no great amount of users were going to have their messages at risk initially, so there was time to fix major pitfalls. Additionally, nobody that got in to BitMessage early had any sort of financial advantage over those that got in later.
Doing things the other way round when you are dealing with people's money is not only grossly irresponsible, but incredibly dangerous. That there is closed-source code not even being made available for review is unconscionable. You should be ashamed of yourself for even thinking that this is a good idea.
Satoshi did that before an entire ecosystem grew up around Bitcoin and its many offshoots.
To do the same now would, as stated, be obviously unethical. I don't need to reiterate why.
As for your remark about releasing closed source code, those who consider it a risk and still invest in XC stand to benefit, and those who don't, do not stand to benefit should XC succeed. That's all it comes down to. "Dangerous"? Of course, insofar as dangerous" implies "risky". Unethical? By no means.
But to assert that releasing closed source code is "dangerous" also implies, as far as I can see, that developers should take responsibility for the risks that their investors make. This is just silly. We've been completely open about our policy on open source and any investor would factor this in when they do their due diligence. Come on. What sort of libertarian-paternalist black swan does this position make you?
You realise that you just agreed with me that releasing the cryptocurrency before releasing a whitepaper is unethical? Because you did.
No I didn't. Perchance you fail to distinguish statements from (your) interpretations of statements?
Releasing a whitepaper detailing the cryptography will NOT get your idea stolen. If that were the case, ZeroCoin would have been implemented by someone else. Their whitepaper was released in May 2013, after all.
XC is
not innovating in cryptography. It's innovating in privacy, scalability, flexibility, and mainstream-friendliness.
We released our Rev 1 mixer code recently. Within two days' time it was copied and implemented in another project. So your claim is empirically on weak grounds, and depends for its defence on a unique case (Zerocoin) where the cryptography is (a) so complex that most people can't understand it, disincentivising cloning, and (b) not working anyway, further disincentivising cloning.
XC's scenario is closer to the opposite: tech that works is highly valued. While our trustless multipath mixing isn't simple, it's not as hard to understand as a zero-knowledge proof system. Therefore the incentive to clone will be very high.
I'm aware of that writeup. It's as badly researched as using the name "X11coin" to refer to XC might suggest. Concerning XC it omits most of the picture and distorts what part it claims to portray.
Next.