That seems pretty well demonstrated at this point.


I'd say it is up to you as a coin participant/user/investor to decide.

Now that you know who and what you are dealing with, if you think this is a good opportunity for you, go for it!

I happen to think you are insane if you do that, but to each his own.

I pretty much thought I answered your questions has to how they are going to scam you:

1. They actually put very little time and effort into the development. It's all smoke and mirrors, and someone (who is probably, behind the scenes, "developer" of many coins) showing up every once in a while to post a shallow or meaningless message but not actually doing any real development. In other words, this whole charade costs them very little, but also accomplishes very little besides keeping the coin alive so it can occasionally get pumped.

2. Asymmetric information. Which is a fancy way to say that they know when they are going to abandon the coin and let it die and you don't. You can be sure they will have cashed out all their coins by that point (or at least as many as they decide it is worth cashing out), and you won't have (unless you are very lucky).

But good luck with it.

I'm interested in OP's opinion on this though. Although I've been skeptical of Bytecoin almost from the beginning and doing a little digging here and there, he's obviously put a lot more time into researching it all, especially the clones.

OP seems convinced but I'm not sure. He didn't mention Boolberry in the web hosting stuff and just looking at the web site I would guess that it did not come from the same coin mill. Furthermore it doesn't really fit the pattern of minor changes or no changes from the reference code that characterizes the rest of the crop.

Personally I found it interesting that crypto_zoidberg knew exactly what he wanted to change and how to do it within just a few weeks of the first public disclosure of the code. On the surface that seems unlikely for an independent developer.

So at this point, to me, Boolberry is a bit of an outlier. It has some apparent connections, but not as many as the others.

This is true and in the future we will try to break out new downloads vs. upgrades. However, in this time frame there was no new version released. The current version is still 0.8.8 from June 11.

No I'm referring to a particular combination of icons that were chosen. For example, some sites use a Apple icon, some use a Mac OS icon. All of the cryptonote-related coins use the Apple. Some sites use a Linux penguin icon for source downloads. I'm not even sure what that icon they are using for source code is -- looks like something related to HTML -- but no other sites I can find use it. There is an actual github icon, which other sites do use; they don't.

I clicked around to several other coin sites that I'm pretty sure don't come from a coin mill and I could not find any that used the same combination of icons. Yet all the cryptonote-related coins did.

Furthermore, as I suspected there are appear to be other notable commonalities between the sites. On IRC someone reported that they are all using the same provider and had something else in common (something about how they use Google Analytics). That is not really my area of expertise so I'll leave it at that.


Then why are there only 36 cryptocurrency-related projects listed of which 4 are cryptonote-related? That is out of a thousand or so altcoins and many other cryptocurency-related projects.

I hate math but I'll let you figure out how likely this is if the projects using sourceforge were chosen at random from the universe of cryptocurrency projects. Not very likely.

A coin mill is what you get when you have hundreds and now approaching thousands of altcoins. People naturally begin to specialize in creating coins and turn it into a business and then into a streamlined process. You didn't really think that all 1000 altcoins were each created by inspired individuals who think they are the next Satoshi. In fact many are cranked out by well oiled machines.

To run a coin mill you make small variations (or sometimes exact clones), create a marketing plans for each one, create a pretty web site and sometimes a "white paper", figure out what you can get away with when it comes to premines/instamines/etc., pump them up using shills, PR campaigns, etc., and then dump for some net profit before winding down your involvement as the coin spirals the drain. The net profit on each coin doesn't even need to be that large, because you can do lots of them easily.

With respect what the other guy said about variations and survival of the fittest, that is certainly going to happen, and you are free to make your own guess about the eventual winners. But as a buyer you had better beware when you are buying one of these coin mills' coins because almost by definition they are pump-and-dumps.

In my view the OP really believes he is warning people, not telling people, not to get involved with these scams (and that is certainly where I'm coming from). If you choose to ignore the red flags, do so at your own peril.

Oh okay, we agree on this almost if not 100%. My previous post was a theory somewhat along these lines (before I saw yours).

That is a good question and we don't know who created it or why. One theory I've come up with recently is that whoever created it sold it to the coin mill, either because he didn't want to release it himself, or because the coin mill made a good offer for it, and he decided to go with that rather than try to release himself into a crowded and tricky altcoin space. Or maybe just gave it to them because he wanted it out there but not with his name attached.

I have no evidence for it, but it does logically fit. I don't see a coin mill really having the skill set or frankly culture and disposition to develop something like this themselves, and it is pretty apparent to me we are dealing with a coin mill, so they must have got it from somewhere. There are other possibilities though.

I agree with you that the cryptography itself should stand or fall on its own without regard for where it came from. (I think the OP said this in the first paragraph, right?)

It's on the cryptonote web site, not the bytecoin web site.

So your theory is that cryptonote created the document, gave it to bytecoin, and then bytecoin gave the (fraudulently signed) copy back to cryptonote, which put that copy up on their web site. 

I find this not a credibly likely explantion.

Furthermore, even if cryptonote people didn't realize the papers had bogus signatures on them, why would they put up an obviously fake "V1" paper at all?

 

No that doesn't fit. Although the dates on the signatures are bogus, and the V1 paper was clearly not created in 2012 (references from 2013), the signature itself is valid, and is signed by "Nicholas van Saberhagen", which is an identity directly associated with cryptonote, not bytecoin. In otherwords, it was "Cryptonote" that faked the signature dates, not "Bytecoin."

I agree with you they are, in reality, likely one and the same, but the theory that they are separate organizations and the bytecoin people are behind all the shadiness doesn't hold up, for this reason and others.

There is at present to way to buy XMR without BTC. Some ideas to make that happen are in the very early stages.

You need to get BTC.

I'd suggest something like localbitcoins or buying from a highly trusted member on the Exchange section of the forum.

EDIT: to get very small amounts to play with you could mine it yourself but it won't be much.

There are more links.

First, the style of communication on all these coins is quite similar. The developers are absent for days at a time or longer, then make very short posts with questionable (at best) English writing skills. They don't really interact with the community so much as show up occasionally and make prepared statements, then disappear again. (BTW, this reminds me a lot of TFT.)

Second, we know of bought accounts being used for both bytecoin and quazarcoin.

Third, there are major stylistic similarities between all of their web sites. For example, look at the icons used for their download links:

bytecoin.org:



quazarcoin.org:



fantomcoin.org:



monetaverde.org:



old bitmonero.org:



I thought maybe this style of download links was extremely widely used and this could be a coincidence, so I looked at several other coins that are reasonably "hot" now, including DRK, CLOAK, and XC. None of them used this particular style of download links.

In my opinion all of these cryptonote/bytecoin coins (except Monero) are being run out of some kind of coin mill, probably operating in a country where English is not widely used. The public-facing "developers' are really just caretakers who divide their time between appearing to be working a lot of different coins under different names. The web design is done by a common team, which explains the stylistic similarities (close attention to the web sites would probably show more such similarities).

Disliking XMR for whatever reason is perfectly reasonable. Different strokes and all that. But on this...


you are also very much missing the point.

The scam most certainly did not go as intended. Monero (i.e. bitmonero) was not supposed to be turned into a community-run project and suck up (nearly) all of the investor interest in the cryptonote space, leaving only scraps for the scammers at BCN et al. Which explains a lot of the anger, hostility, shills, scorched earth, etc. toward Monero (theirs not yours).

Okay that is plausible. It is actually equivalent in some sense to an IPO-based spin-off from the start; the spin-off matches the current coin holdings.

I wonder what a spin-off version of Monero would look like.

For coins with an IPO it is fairly obvious that you clone and give the IPO coins to bitcoin holders instead and then follow with the same mining paramters thereafter. This gives a direct comparison between the IPO model for initial distribution and the spin-off model, with the rest (mining) kept the same.

Maybe you could say this for a premine as well, although the situation is slightly different. Notably Ethereum has both an IPO and a premine, so this question will need to be answered for æthereum.

But for coins without an IPO or premine, how do you decide on the allocation? It seems like you could more or less arbitrarily decide how much of the coin goes to bitcoin holders and what the mining parameters to use, meaning there is not really one natural spin off equivalent. Or perhaps the natural amount to go to a spin off in this case is just zero (matching the IPO amount, as above). Of course, one can't rule out that a version with some different parameters might do better, but that could be said for just about any coin with or without the spin-off model.

The developers gave their permission to clone and tweak a few config params when they open-sourced it.

Do you understand yet?

Open source is a business model. It has advantages and disadvantages for the developers. You can't take one without the other.

I'm glad you reminded me of that interview because it was one of the most damning bits of evidence against the legitimacy of this so-called cryptonote and unfortunately the OP seems to have missed it:


Really?!

1. A "large number of influential people" knew about this and none of them has ever mentioned it?

2. A "large number of influential people" knew about this and not a single one can be identified now and confirm that to be the case?

3. "It is not in the nature or business of these participants to post on the Web."' In what universe do people in the educational and scientific industries not post on the web? They invented the damn web you idiots.

4. "Mining teams" We know from the analysis of reputable and credible experts (including on this thread) that the mining algorithm was deliberately deoptimized to simulate a fake two-year blockchain. If (and I doubt it, as in I'm virtually 100% sure it didn't happen) the mining actually happened over two years, only a handful of computers (<10) were involved. There were no "mining teams."

After that interview I was certain that cryptonote was a scam. Before that I only suspected. As I posted a few months ago, the more these people keep talking the more they will out their own scam. And they did.

Worth a look:

"Blowing the lid off the CryptoNote/Bytecoin scam (with the exception of Monero)"

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=740112.0

I can't take any pure PoS coin seriously at this time. Get some credible cryptographers to support the model and I'll pay attention.

Until then I consider it careless cryptography (developer thinks it will work but doesn't really know) at best, outright scam (developer doesn't really think it will work but doesn't care because if you keep talking long enough and sound like you know what you're talking about some will believe in it and you can pump-and-dump) at worst.

Both comments seem pretty far off topic for this thread, which has some really important things to say about the extreme shadiness of this whole family of coins, and in a sense the altcoin scene generally (where scams like this can get as far as this one has). Let's not loose sight of that. There are plenty of other places this bloat thing has been covered (for and against).

You probably checked version 2, which appeared first and had a date consistent with the references, but which called into question the claimed two-year history.

Version 1 showed up later, a quick and carelessly backdated edit of version 2, apparently to support the bogus "two years in the deep web" story.