The old BCN website newsfeed contains references to "V.Hugo team", "The R guy team", "Dante" and "Einstein":
07/14/2012 "V.Hugo" team are with us now.
11/10/2012 "The R guy" team is onboard since today.
11/29/2012 "Dante" has started working.
07/15/2013 "V.Hugo" is back, be ready for increase.
09/13/2013 Updated "Einstein" is now ready for working in the new regime
An old BCN user confirmed the existence of mining teams at the beginning of the Bytecoin era. The teams are similar to mining pools. Every team is an isolated group of miners and users with their own interests. Every team has its own website on deep web. And each team (pool) has its team leader who communicates with BCN devs and pass important info to his group members.
Later the BCN blockchain messages were found. Now we know BCN blockchain contains quotes from different authors: a quote from Neuromancer (by William Gibson), quotes from Victor Marie Hugo, Dante Alighieri, Friedrich Nietzsche and Galileo Galilei.
It was assumed that each team marks founded blocks adding a message to blockchain. So we know about 4 teams from the news feed and about 3 other "quote" teams from the blockchain. So there are at least 7 mining teams (pools).
However other types of messages were also founded in the BCN blockchain. They are: links to the articles, the Cyphernomicon, strange riddle and coordinates. Supposing every type of message belongs to one team we may conclude there are at least 10 BCN mining teams.
It was said there is no rule for a number of members in each mining team, so we can set 15 as an average one.
But it should be admitted the number of "marked" blocks are negligible comparing to the whole blockchain. So the mining teams (pools) are undoubtedly only a small part of the BCN Community.
And there are some calculations for you: 10 teams with 15 members each -> there are at least 150 "identified" BCN stakeholders Just like in the Bitcoin. + a lot of those who can be "identified" anyhow.
So should we be still afraid of centralized dump?
http://www.reddit.com/r/BytecoinBCN/comments/27gk62/bytecoin_bcn_mining_teams_20122014/