This is well known by people who were around in this period: Bitmonero was a fork of bytecoin.
Bytecoin use the novative cryptonote tech but was probably instamined with the trick of the volontary slow hash mining included in the code.
When forked in Bitmonero, the dev team which replaced quickly the initial dev of bitmonero realize the problem and fix it but it took some time and some talented dev such as David Andersen took advantage of the situation with a private miner.
The developers of monero didn't benefits from this. The discussion on this topic between David and Vitalik (from ETH) in the link you provide (comment section) is very informative:
Vitalik Buterin : > Yes - I think we all agree with that general statement, although there will always be situations where specific miners will have advantages.
IMO, correct mining algorithm ethics require you to disclose all information that you know about how to optimize a given algo implementation. But a looser standard is that you should not intentionally cripple an implementation that you release to the public.
From the evidence provided in the article, it seems as though Monero failed both tests, so it perhaps is indeed a premine scam. However, that is a grave accusation, and one that deserves giving the Monero devs a fair chance to respond.
David Andersen: This would be a very reasonable thing to assert if I had anything to do with Monero. I don't. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, none of the people who profited from early optimized Monero mining had anything to do with crippling the code in the first place.
Think of it this way: You step in and inherit a legacy codebase for a promising and interesting new cryptocurrency. You're immediately beset with demands -- fix bugs, release binaries, answer help questions, etc. In retrospect, it turns out that the code you took over had been de-optimized by its original creators. Is that your fault? Of course not. What's the standard that we should hold the Monero developers to? To fix any bugs or deliberate weaknesses as fast as they can after they become aware of it. To get up to speed and review and understand the codebase they inherited as quickly as a reasonable developer can do.
You're picking your words very carefully, so I suspect you know exactly what game you're playing trying to hint that Monero is a scam while being able to defensively say "well, I only said perhaps", but it's very transparent. And, personally, I find it mildly offensive that you're twisting what I wrote in the article and ignoring some of the substantive points.
Vitalik Buterin :What am I twisting?
I have no pre-existing prejudices against Monero, I actually think the cryptonote family has some very cool technology. Of course I am picking my words carefully, it's exactly the correct thing for me to do. Making accusations of malfeasance is not something that I do lightly as part of some kind of competitive PR strategy; I do not "play games". I am merely trying to understand the truth. I also have nothing against you at all; I am completely and utterly perplexed as to the source of the sudden hostility.
So, there exists code that has been deliberately crippled. This is a fact. The only reason I can conceive of for writing crippled mining code is to profit off of your own uncrippled version. Hence, there has been malfeasance on the part of someone, malfeasance that I give the label of "premine scam" because it constitutes (1) dishonest behavior that (2) enables you to mine in large quantities well before anyone else can. If the current Monero developers were not involved in that, then awesome, they are completely cool and legit folks in my view.
David Andersen : Apologies if I misread what you wrote, but I tried to be quite clear in my article that the developers of Bytecoin, who introduced the slowdown, are very unlikely to have relationships, financial or otherwise, with the current set of developers who've been responsible for bringing Monero to popularity.
I'm pretty sure that the Bytecoin version of this was pure evil, and that it was used not just to get an advantage in mining, but to fake the entire blockchain. I wouldn't touch that one with a 10 foot bitcoin. But, while I don't own any more Monero than is in transit from my hardware to the exchange, I don't think that same thing applies to Monero (because, first of all, there was no premine, and second, I know quite accurately who made the profit from the crappy miner, and I know that none of us were Bytecoin developers.)
It's possible that the initial fork-er of Monero, TFT, was complicit. But he's also out of the picture, and while he might have had a week of fun mining, he wouldn't have gotten much more than that.
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