Yes, or less than ten for high end desktop/servers, possibly far less than 10. Fluffypony showed that 10 servers could mine the whole thing in three months. Spread that out over two years and its just one or two servers. A reasonable hash rate for a desktop is 200-300 H/s so that's 4-5 computers. With a mix of smaller computers it might be as much as 10.

So these alleged "mining teams" all over the world had a grand total of <10 computers?

Sorry but no.

The story is a complete fabrication.

I think you misinterpret slightly. The real issue is that there is no basis for trust. Nobody knows the guy, he can't prove anything he has said. Scammers and liars will always claim to not be scammers and liars so that means nothing. To have any value, you need verifiable sources to authenticate these types of claims, preferably multiple ones that can be cross checked for discrepancies and contradictions. Instead there are none at all.

It's a shame though, that many people are naturally trusting and if some anonymous account on a forum says that he mined bytecoin in 2012, a few people will probably believe it, and throw a a little money at a "good" project. That's why these scams persist.


There was no hijack here. THE THREAD WAS ABOUT THE BCN NINJAMINE.

Kudos for the cryptonote design is due for sure. The problem is there has been so much blatant deception, shilling, and scamming that went on with the bytecoin launch and the launch of the scam clones that it is almost impossible to know who in particular deserves it and who is a thieving scumbag.

Not sure where those numbers came from. A lot of BCN traded on polo in the first month. Here's is the daily graph. The first scale line on the vertical axis is 20 BTC.



There were several days above that (most notably the first two days), and many more days in the 10-20 BTC range. You also have to consider the OTC trading, and the pre-poloniex trading on cryptonote.exchange.to.

My guess based on this data is a few hundred BTC of the premine was likely dumped (BTC was worth around 600 USD at the time) in the first month or two, but obviously nowhere near all of it. 300 BTC at 8 satoshi is still under 4 billion BCN. I have no idea how much was dumped in the later months, but once the volume dried up your numbers are pretty much right so no more than a few more billion.

Correct. You need the password to open a wallet file (if you assigned one; it is optional but recommended). You don't need the password to restore from the seed words, because you will be creating a new wallet file with a new password.

If you don't have the password then having the file does you no good, unless you can come up with the password somehow (remember it, brute force it, etc.). At that point you will need to restore the wallet, or lose your coins.

First it asks you for the name of the new (restored) wallet. Give a new name for a wallet file that doesn't already exist.

Second, it asks for a password which will be used to secure the new wallet.

Finally, it asks for the seed words.

Miners will earn only transaction fees.

Not really the right thread though.

Perhaps that is self descriptive.

1. The anonymity works well enough that it isn't possible to answer that question

2. Richlists are a scam. Credit kazuki49: http://pastebin.com/S7aKCDgy

I'd consider replacing the plumbing of the financial system to be disruptive (not something that happens often and creates massive winners and losers). Creating a new asset class would not be disruptive (happens all the time, there are dozens of asset classes already, or far more, depending on how you count).

If banks and wall street strongly embrace bitcoin it will mean that bitcoin is very compatible with business-as-usual, and its effects will be limited. If they keep a close eye on it, experiment with it, create niche products around it, then it might be disruptive. For example, I'd consider an ETF in this category, as it fits with "new asset class." It does not fit within "replace the plumbing of the financial system." At least not yet.

Disruptive technologies are strongly embraced by dominant players belatedly and reluctantly, when new winners have already been established, and it is too late to retain their dominant role in the post-disruption playing field. For example, Google has more advertising revenue than the entire television business, possibly more than all of traditional media combined. That's because big media did not strong embrace the internet; it didn't fit business-as-usual. They all had web sites and so forth, but they didn't and couldn't truly embrace it -- meaning change everything about the way they do business -- the way Google could.

It is entirely normal that disruptive technologies are most useful, initially, on the edge cases where the dominant system doesn't work well, and not at the core use case where dominant system is highly optimized, and large value chains are built around it. Indeed disruptive technologies often cause a dominant system to further specialize on a core market -- ceding fringe markets altogether instead of expending resources to serve them -- where it then becomes even more optimized and successful, for a while (often quite a while).

So yes if bitcoin is disruptive then you would expect to take hold in places like Zimbabwe, remittences to Somalia, online gambling, underground markets, etc.

If the threatened embrace of big banks and wall street goes anywhere beyond the toe-in-the-water stage then you can be sure it means bitcoin won't be disruptive after all (but as tvbcof points out may still be very profitable for early adopters).

We shall see.

It was, but the Bytecoin supporters got the tag removed. As I said, they're pretty clever and professional scammers. There's a thread about it somewhere.

That assumes that reputation as a scammer means nothing. I'd personally not want to invest in a coin where the developers were known scammers, but to each his own.

However, in the case where:

1. It were known that the original scammers had cashed out, and that the buyers were actually widely distributed and not just another (or somehow the same) small group of scammers; and

2. The original developers abandoned the project and someone else took over.

Then sure it could become a totally legitimate project.

The odds of this actually happening are between slim and none.

In a sense, though this is one obtuse way to describe Monero. The original developers cashed out at effectively zero (or whatever they got dumping BCN in the first couple of months) and a new group of unrelated developers took over.

It's certainly an attempt at a long con. Why the hell else are they still at it (while having given up on the other ones)?

I'll agree with you its a long shot, but perhaps worth the probably-modest cost of keeping it going now.

I'm not a big fan of Metcalfe's law as a valuation metric anyway, but I was just pointing out that this graph supports it.

I should clarify that by "a little patience is really all that is required here" I meant to see if the model works. I wasn't suggesting that I think patience is all that is needed to see high prices. I'm pretty uncertain about that.

Also, we might note that n log(n) doesn't diverge that much from n^2 if n is "small"

2.0 was the version of the original white paper, and is still the version number on the (slightly different) copy of the original white paper on their web site right now: https://cryptonote.org/whitepaper.pdf



Nothing new here. Probably -- who knows what they will actually do -- they're somewhat clever scammers.

Showing up at a conference seems like part of the effort to keep hope (of a pump and exit) alive.

When you have 80% of the coins it doesn't take a massive crypto bubble like that to cash out 10 million USD or more. BCN market cap peaked at about 12 million USD, and that wasn't in during a massive crypto bubble, at least not the peak of one, it was well into the 2014 decline.

BCN has a better chance to pump out than some crappy #40-50 coin. It has interesting technology, pretty web sites, a backstory, and a somewhat professional and experienced crew of scammers running it.

As with any pump and dump, their play is to sooner or later trade out of the 150+ billion (80%+) premined coins. Trying to make a big enough pump to do that in todays market would be difficult if not impossible. The market won't even support selling 1k-2k USD per day. So the most sensible strategy is to keep it somewhere viable in the rankings at minimal cost, wait, and hope for a better chance to exit.

Notice how the other clone coins run by the same outfit have been abandoned (FCN, QCN, MCN, etc.). That's because they didn't have the same magnitude of premine (though they all had a month or two of likely instamine given their un-deoptimized miners), so not enough incentive to keep them going.

I should have clarified that. Cryptonote are the lying scammers. I don't know if Aste has anything to do with them. For the sake of his otherwise good (as far as I know) reputation, I hope not.

I agree to a point. Any multisig would require a hard fork at this point, btw.


Sure it would (transaction size is close to linear with mixin size), but I disagree that a minimum of 3 is far to low. Why do you say that?


Look, these guys are lying scammers; that is pretty well proven. I have no reason to believe whoever they stick up there to shill is actually the original inventor, and if it is, well that's just one more person identifed as a lying scammer.


Yes you are right!

Believe it or not, I searched for XDN, but I looked for "ducknote." Doh!