Although they are selling some BTC, they're mainly not dumping, but paying people in BTC.  However many of the people they're paying might (probably are) selling some or all of the BTC.

Full details here:

https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/08/08/announcement-on-planned-exodus-withdrawal/

According to that, the absolute maximum they will withdraw from their wallet is 5000 BTC (but probably only 4150 BTC).  And a chunk of the coin they withdraw will continue to be held as BTC anyway.  Some will be sold.  And the biggest chunk will be paid to third parties as BTC (who of course may hodl or sell).

Doesn't sound like enough to really move the market, IMHO.

roy

Failing and scamming are not the same thing.  Indeed, in a venture as speculative as this, it would arguably be a scam to claim that the project will definitely succeed, when we all know it might not.  (And BTW that statement is probably only in there because the lawyers insisted on it - you shouldn't read too much into it.)

I have no horse in this race, though, and no strong opinion on Ethereum one way or the other (because I don't care about it enough to research it thoroughly).

roy

Sure, this is all speculation.  But I'm suggesting that the white paper and the ideas behind it are probably the work of one or more academic cryptographers (or at least professional cryptographers of some description - but I'm guessing academics).  It's not impossible, of course, but I think it's far, far less likely that this was the work of amateurs.

So if I'm right and this is the brainchild of one or more academics, then we're left with two possibilities: either the academics are behind the premine scam or, for whatever reason, the academics can't or won't come forward to discredit Bytecoin.

Obviously both are possible, but I find the latter easier to believe.  Perhaps, as I said earlier, they fear it might compromise their anonymity to weigh in here and maybe they fear that being associated with this project would damage their academic reputation.

roy

By CryptoNote team I meant the people behind the white paper and original design, not whoever is now running cryptonote.org.  I was just finding it hard to believe that the gifted academic(s) that came up with this were in on the scam.

I think we're in agreement here?

roy

Oh, interesting.  I don't know what a 'coin mill' is as I don't really follow the altcoin scene except for Monero.

I hadn't considered the possibility that the cryptographers sold their work, but yes, that fits too.

Oh, sorry, my hypothesis is this:

The Cryptonote people designed the crypto, wrote the v2 paper, and gave the paper to the Bytecoin team (quite possibly as a LaTeX document) together with supporting documentation, proof of concept code, etc;  and the cryptonote team then stepped back and let matters take their course.

And the entire web presence, including both bytecoin.org and cryptonote.org was stagemanaged by the Bytecoin team.

Sorry, the cryptonote.org web site doesn't ring true.  It doesn't look like the site that a LaTex-using academic would put together - I take it to just be a promotional exercise by the Bytecoin team.

I'm not sure what the signature proves.  Nicholas van Saberhagen is just a pseudonym, anyway, and there's no way of knowing who put that name on the paper, nor who created the certificate that was used to sign it.

EDIT: Note how the Acrobat screen capture in the OP says "Signature validity is UNKNOWN" and "The signer's identity is unknown because it has not been included in your list of trusted identities and none of its parent certificates are trusted identities".  Or, in other words, the signature proves nothing.

Oh, and thank you, rethink-your-strategy, for all the hard work you've put into exposing what many of us already suspected.

roy

I don't think the fake dates prove that the Cryptonote team were in on the scam.  It's quite possible that the Bytecoin team had a copy of the (as yet unpublished) white paper - perhaps having convinced the Cryptonote team that it would be better to delay publication until the launch of the coin.  In which case all fakery could easily be down to the Bytecoin team.

If that were the case, and the fakery was not done with the consent of the Cryptonote team, then it does raise the question as to why the Cryptonote team haven't come forward to cry foul, but there are a couple of possibilities:

• They figure it would be pointless, as it would be too difficult to substantiate that they really were the Cryptonote team
• They wish to keep their anonymity and fear having their cover blown - perhaps the Bytecoin team know their identity so they don't want to pick a fight with them

BTW, for convenience I'm refering to the people behind the text of the white paper, and the ideas within it (including the cryptographic design) as "the Cryptonote team" and the people behind the software implementation and the launch of the coin as "the Bytecoin team".  In reality, though, I strongly suspect that the original intention would have been to call the coin Cryptonote, and for whatever reason it was renamed prior to launch.

roy

The first two are reasonable positions to take IMHO, but I don't buy the third one.  I no longer consider there's any plausible scenario where BTC goes to zero, let alone one with 25% probability.

Of course, if that's just a euphamism for BTC going down a lot - say to double figures - then sure, that's possible.  Although personally I think the probability of BTC hitting double figures for any length of time (anything more than an intra-day low) is much, much lower than 25%

roy

I've never understood that one.  The Apollo astronauts left corner cubes on the moon (or retroreflectors, to give them their more complicated-sounding name).  You can tell they're there (well *you* probably can't, but people can) by shining powerful lasers at the moon and measuring the reflection.  It's an experiment that has been done many times, in order to measure the movements to the moon (which is why they were left there).

Now, granted, the Russians also left corner cubes on the moon, dropped from an orbiting spacecraft (the Russians never landed).  But the American corner cubes work better, because the astronauts could line them up properly and point them facing the Earth.

So yes, I can't *prove* that the Americans weren't lucky, and that their corner cubes didn't just happen to fall on the moon facing exactly the right direction.  But at the very least we can prove, in a relatively easily reproducible experiment, that there is artificial equipment present on the moon.  And it's funny how the people who claim the moon landing was faked almost never talk about this stuff.

roy

If Bitcoin can be replaced by a competitor, then it will almost certainly have failed to act as a store of value.  At that point, why would anyone have confidence in the replacement coin not to be itself replaced in time.  If this scenario were to play out, I think it would damage confidence in cryptocurrencies for the foreseeable future.

No, the developer documentation says "the most difficult chain to recreate", but I really don't know why we're arguing about this.

It is actually being done this way.  Why do you think otherwise?

Not a link to the code, I know, but the developer documentation says "Assuming a fork only contains valid blocks, normal peers always follow the longest fork (the most difficult chain to recreate) and throw away (orphan) blocks belonging to shorter forks." https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-guide#block-height-and-forking

Let me turn this around.  Everyone is telling you it is done this way - why are you somehow convinced it isn't?

I don't think there's any plausible scenario in which the death of Bitcoin is somehow an opportunity for some altcoin to take its place.  The death of Bitcoin would be the death of cryptocurrency.

It's a thought experiment, so by definition it's naive.  The purpose wasn't to demonstrate a real attack scenario - it was to try and help motivate why this is a better way to define the longest chain.

Yes.

Here's a thought experiment for you.  Imagine that the day Satoshi launched Bitcoin someone forked the blockchain, right from the Genesis block.  He's been mining, on a tiny computer, since that day.  On his chain, the difficulty never went much above 1, because he's the only miner - but his chain still produces one block every ten minutes.   He's been doing this since day 1, and his blockchain is about the same length as the real one.  It varies from time to time - sometimes his chain is a couple of blocks longer, sometimes a couple of blocks shorter.

Today, his chain is a couple of blocks longer than the public chain.  Today, he broadcasts all his blocks to the world.

In a naive world, his 313631 blocks would be considered longer than the official chain of 313629 blocks, and every client on the planet would immediately have a block reorganisation, and accept his chain as valid.

But Satoshi wasn't naive.  In the real world, his chain is worthless, because a block mined at difficulty 18 billion is considered to be 18 billion times more work than a block mined at difficulty 1.

Of course, there are all sorts of other reasons why the attack wouldn't work - you can never have a block reoganisation that goes back past the last checkpoint, and anyway, the average block interval on the public chain is significantly less than 10 minutes due to rising hash rate (so in reality the public chain would be longer in terms of block height anyway).  But I hope this example helps you see why Satoshi designed it this way.

roy

I don't think GABI is buying yet.  They're accepting cash from investors, but I think what they're saying is that it will be September before they start buying BTC.  (Of course, that could just be what they want us to think....)


http://www.coindesk.com/market-monthly-stable-bitcoin/

Maybe it should count as a donation in the Monero Hall of Fame, too?

roy

I really don't care what point you think you're trying to make, that's a pretty misogynistic way to express it.

roy