Yep, I'd raised concerns about these claims before myself.  Funny, I also checked the references, but I didn't realize the whitepaper was supposed to be that old (I'd missed that the document was backdated).

It's more than just the history that is fishy, though.  The proof of work algorithm appears to be a pretty nice bit of insurance against people forking the system, since it was clearly purposefully deoptimized— and contrary to the design claims provably reasonably GPU friendly (and, likely, very friendly with larger 28nm FPGAs— a suspicion supported by the hashrates of the systems based on this pow, including monero).

Might not want to overstate the amount of cryptographic review the approach has had. I've spent some time on it but haven't personally worked through any proofs of its properties. It takes a long time to gain confidence in a cryptosystem.  (Though sure, I do think the ring signature system is very interesting— that rest? well). Oh well, honestly, I think that this sort of stuff is more ethical than the altcoin presales (Esp the ones that don't ever deliver anything).


:-/