Regardless of CryptoNote being a scam or NOT, you should be commended for your analytical skills and the amount of effort you put into this.
I agree - this is a mountain of information to go through:)
OP, I'd like to thank you for confirming the suspicions many of us involved with Monero have held for quite some time. There are a handful of things I'd like to comment on.
Those two obvious sockpuppet/shill accounts also take delight in bashing Monero in the Monero sub-reddit (here are snippets from
WhiteDynomite and
cheri0). Literally the only thing these sockpuppets do, day in and day out, is make the Bytecoin sub-reddit look like it's trafficked, and spew angry bullshit all over the Monero sub-reddit.
I'm a moderator in the subreddit, and I can confirm that this happens on a daily basis. There are around 60 separate sock-puppet accounts we've found posting in the Monero subreddit. The creation dates are all between the 23rd of Jan and the 9th of Feb this year.
Monero is streets ahead, partly because of the way they're developing the currency, but mostly because the "core devs" or whatever they're called are made up of reasonably well-known people. That there are a bunch of them (6 or 7?) plus a bunch of other people contributing code means that they're sanity checking each other.
The core team consists of 7 people, and we hail from all over the world and are multi-faceted in our knowledge. This does mean we're sanity-checking each other, to be sure. Pretty much all of us have been around for well over a year, which I'm sure contributes as well. We try to keep our development as transparent as possible, and we publish all of our development efforts and links to dev branches on github in our weekly Dev Diary (part of the Monero Missives).
Thank you for the vote of confidence and for the effort you put in to uncovering this.
