XMR/AEON Developer Smooth Investigation

[noobtrader]

If that's true, then why aren't you trolling the monero thread constantly pointing out the fact that it was launched as a scam because of its intentionally de-optimized miner? Don't you owe that to the users and investors of XMR? I think daily reminders at a minimum should suffice. Get on it!

Because it was not intentionally (or otherwise) de-optimized by the then-or current-developers of Monero, who were the ones who in fact optimized it and released the fixes as open source, to the great inconvenience and frustration of those trying to stay ahead with optimized private miners. This is well-documented; there is no dispute over it.

So you are admitting that monero was released with a scam miner that had been intentionally de-optimized, but you are claiming that you had no knowledge of the scam code you continued to push on your users? Are we supposed to just take your word on this?

"Admitting" that it was likely deliberately de-optimzed by the Bytecoin/CN scammers from which Monero was forked? We're the ones who originally discovered and reported exactly that!

I believe it was eizh, or tacotime, I don't remember which.

WOW...

i learn alot of thing,  Thank you for clarification

FYI, in case you are not aware the tacotime and eizh I mentioned above were and are Monero core team members, as was and is NoodleDoodle who did most of the early work to fix the miner.

thats hard to know, they all anon u know.

[1714942587]

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[blobafett2]

With respect TPTB, I don't really think promoting your project on this thread is on topic. Post on your own threads or an ANN pre-ICO or the Securities subforum for venture investors or whatever.

This is not meant to criticize your effort in any way, but posting suggestions for people to invest in your coin whenever they discuss investing in other coins you claim are "obsolete" is a bit of spamming.

"posting suggestions for people to invest in your coin whenever they discuss investing in other coins you claim are "obsolete" is a bit of spamming."

A bit like how you post on all your competitors threads telling people not to invest, with the implied investment advice being to invest in your competing coin instead.  Honestly Smooth, I think you are losing all perspective...

[smooth]

If that's true, then why aren't you trolling the monero thread constantly pointing out the fact that it was launched as a scam because of its intentionally de-optimized miner? Don't you owe that to the users and investors of XMR? I think daily reminders at a minimum should suffice. Get on it!

Because it was not intentionally (or otherwise) de-optimized by the then-or current-developers of Monero, who were the ones who in fact optimized it and released the fixes as open source, to the great inconvenience and frustration of those trying to stay ahead with optimized private miners. This is well-documented; there is no dispute over it.

So you are admitting that monero was released with a scam miner that had been intentionally de-optimized, but you are claiming that you had no knowledge of the scam code you continued to push on your users? Are we supposed to just take your word on this?

"Admitting" that it was likely deliberately de-optimzed by the Bytecoin/CN scammers from which Monero was forked? We're the ones who originally discovered and reported exactly that!

I believe it was eizh, or tacotime, I don't remember which.

WOW...

i learn alot of thing,  Thank you for clarification

FYI, in case you are not aware the tacotime and eizh I mentioned above were and are Monero core team members, as was and is NoodleDoodle who did most of the early work to fix the miner.

thats hard to know, they all anon u know.

Sure you ware welcome to labor under the delusion that tacotime, NoodleDoodle, eizh, or myself (or othe) are affiliated with the Cryptonote/Bytecoin team because we are anonymous. I assure you that will be laughed off the forum by anyone who is familiar with the history.

[spatula]

But only after enough time had passed that smooth and friends could have easily minted a small fortune off of the backs of their users.

In fact that is literally impossible because above blog post documents exactly who was doing the bulk of the mining (spending $250K on AWS, presumably at a profit) and it wasn't us. In fact I think he says in there that he had no connection, financial or otherwise, with the Monero team. It is one of the few cases where who exactly was doing most of the mining is out in the open, mostly a serendipitous occurrence since he happens to be a CS professor who likes to blog about his exploits. Most miners wouldn't.

He claims to at times to have his 60% of total network hashrate, and from what I can tell this was pretty far after the launch. Either way, someone figured out your trick and had to use a significant amount of AWS just to keep up with you. How many instances were you and your friends using? Were you using the scam miner you pushed to the public in your ANN thread? Are we just supposed to believe you?

[smooth]

With respect TPTB, I don't really think promoting your project on this thread is on topic. Post on your own threads or an ANN pre-ICO or the Securities subforum for venture investors or whatever.

This is not meant to criticize your effort in any way, but posting suggestions for people to invest in your coin whenever they discuss investing in other coins you claim are "obsolete" is a bit of spamming.

"posting suggestions for people to invest in your coin whenever they discuss investing in other coins you claim are "obsolete" is a bit of spamming."

A bit like how you post on all your competitors threads telling people not to invest, with the implied investment advice being to invest in your competing coin instead.  Honestly Smooth, I think you are losing all perspective...

No, that is not alike at all. The many differences are obvious.

[oaxaca]

...Sure, if I am engaged in trolling on the Dash thread and there are reply back and forth, there may be a good number of posts in a short time...

Misquoted.

But accurate none the less.

[TPTB_need_war]

With respect TPTB, I don't really think promoting your project on this thread is on topic. Post on your own threads or an ANN pre-ICO or the Securities subforum or whatever.

This is not meant to criticize your effort in any way, but posting suggestions for people to invest in your coin whenever they discuss investing in other coins you claim are "obsolete" is a bit of spamming.

First of all the creator of the thread asked me to post a link to mine (when I was debating with him about masternodes on page 6).

I ignored his request.

But then I got interested in what you are doing with AEON. Then I noticed your receipt of a 400K coins donation to be the sole and lead dev for AEON might be a counter-example to my claim that asking for donations [hasn't proven economical afaics, e.g. Monero which lacks funding for development as you noted] instead of honestly selling an ICO that can be mathematically proven to not be a scam in favor of the devs because of the large donations you received to be a lead dev for CN coin given you are already prominently connected with another CN coin.

So I asked and received a response from the person who made half of that donation to you.

What I am saying is that the cost of expertise is not free. Just as you posted the following cartoon upthread:

As others have pointed out, the 1000 commits had nothing to do with my (not 9) commits.

Also, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you probably would not have been able to perform all of those (not 9) commits correctly, if any of them.

And that mining a CN clone with nearly no hashrate because nobody is interested and then donating to acquire a new lead dev (yourself) who is coming from the leading coin of that CN technology (Monero), who can then of course use his clout to bring interest to coin that nobody was interested in before (among a sea of CN clones) is just another form of instamining and a political way of obfuscating nepotism. That may not have been your motivation. I dunno. But yet people could see it that way.

If you want real innovation, then you need to compete and invest. I don't work in Communism. And I am also not hiding behind yet another obfuscation of instamining. As far as I can see, what I am proposing to do is transparent, and thus no one is being lied to. They can invest or not invest. Their free will choice.

I think that perspective is relevant in this thread.

That you are doing experimentation in AEON is fine. And even awarding yourself 400k coins from the instamine (low hashrate) is fine. Just please don't be dogmatic against others who are trying to find a way to get some innovation funded and to market.

I say that with respect for all the help you've given me and all the discussions we've had. And seems you've always been logical and fair at least all my dealings with you. You've even gone out of your way to be more fair with me (e.g. the BTC2.5 during the BCX incident).

The case for DarkCoin/Dash being excessively instamined seems to be quite strong as far as I know. The case that Monero was excessively instamined seems to be weaker but still plausible.

I think you have a right to point out those things but you can see that if you harp on it too much, there will be justifiable backlash. Nobody wants to be a slave to another person's dogma.

I guess what bothers me is the righteousness holier than thou. We can look at the 400K of AEON (even if tied up with community obligations) as a form of an instamine. We don't know of any potential back door conversations with the donator. We don't even know who you are.

That doesn't mean I am accusing you. I am just saying we don't know. And so I think while you do a service to point of egregious instamines and sloppy technology, you also need to allow that nothing is perfect. And some people might be sincere in the way they are trying to do it.

I tend to agree now in hindsight that Evan is probably an opportunistic and appears he was lying. I haven't studied deeply but I've seen enough to assume that was probably the case.

And I agree that CoinJoin and masternodes have probably added zilch in terms of advancing cryptocurrency. Instead they probably retarded the necessary developments in anonymity. Luckily some others of us were not standing still while most people were wasting their money and time on that crap. But you won't see me over in the Dash thread slamming that large community. I will try to entice them over with sweet words and the opportunity to become wealthy.

And soon you will see the fruits...

[rangedriver]

This thread is kinda hilarious. Some of you Dash subordinates are really quite inept.

I mean it's said that Dash types aren't exactly renowned for their intelligence but this thread really does punctuate a stereotype.

Here's the thing dickheads:-

While Dash has many faults, ultimately it still has a bigger marketcap!

And yet you're still burning untold energies into sucking the cocks of your next downward rival?

What the hell? How does that even work?

I mean seriously, Dash is effectively XMR's next upward competitor. Whenever little bitch fights break out like this it only serves to benefit Monero - demonstrably in fact. DASH vs XMR is a branded-dialectic that is inevitably advantageous to Monero simply because it has a lesser market cap. Where do you think you're even going with it?

TIP: Stop whining like retard bitches and do something about your incompetently short-sighted strategies, and if you absolutely must troll someone then at least have the fucking self-respect to troll your next upward competitor. Don't fucking troll your next downward competitor - That's just humiliating.

[smooth]

But only after enough time had passed that smooth and friends could have easily minted a small fortune off of the backs of their users.

In fact that is literally impossible because above blog post documents exactly who was doing the bulk of the mining (spending $250K on AWS, presumably at a profit) and it wasn't us. In fact I think he says in there that he had no connection, financial or otherwise, with the Monero team. It is one of the few cases where who exactly was doing most of the mining is out in the open, mostly a serendipitous occurrence since he happens to be a CS professor who likes to blog about his exploits. Most miners wouldn't.

He claims to at times to have his 60% of total network hashrate, and from what I can tell this was pretty far after the launch. Either way, someone figured out your trick and had to use a significant amount of AWS just to keep up with you. How many instances were you and your friends using? Were you using the scam miner you pushed to the public in your ANN thread? Are we just supposed to believe you?

I was not mining on AWS. I mined some on my own hardware, using the code from github. I never got any optimized miners from NoodleDoodle or anyone else (in part because his test versions only ran on Windows, which I don't use at all, so I couldn't help him test). As for the 40%, there were many, many people publicly posting about mining at that time, and in addition publicly selling off some or all of their mined coins. I recall vaguely the names of some of the bigger public miners, but I would have to look back on the threads and find them. They were not core team members.

So a large portion of the hash rate is very transparently accounted for. Furthermore the fact that mining with the standard mining code was still profitable (even on AWS I recall) essentially guarantees that optimized miners were not in very widespread use, because of how difficulty adjustment works and mining economics.

[blobafett2]

This thread is kinda hilarious. Some of you Dash subordinates are really quite inept.

I mean it's said that Dash types aren't exactly renowned for their intelligence but this thread really does punctuate a stereotype.

Here's the thing dickheads:-

While Dash has many faults, ultimately it still has a bigger marketcap!

And yet you're still burning untold energies into sucking the cocks of your next downward rival?

What the hell? How does that even work?

I mean seriously, Dash is effectively XMR's next upward competitor. Whenever little bitch fights break out like this it only serves to benefit Monero - demonstrably in fact. DASH vs XMR is a branded-dialectic that is inevitably advantageous to Monero simply because it has a lesser market cap. Where do you think you're even going with it?

TIP: Stop whining like retard bitches and do something about your incompetently short-sighted strategies, and if you absolutely must troll someone then at least have the fucking self-respect to troll your next upward competitor. Don't fucking troll your next downward competitor man. That's just humiliating.

Um...this is a thread investigating Smooth for his attacks on various competitors and insider-dealings between AEON/XMR?  Did you click the wrong thread?

[sidhujag]

Seems AnonyMint goes wherever smooth goes and AnonyMint ends up talking about his sure thing coin which will replace Bitcoin because of anon transfers. So far in my dealings with smooth he's pretty knowledgable and straight up you never know how people really are but from far he seems pretty ethical.. You can tell he has connection to xmr but he never really bashes other projects from what I read anyways my 2 cents.

[smooth]

With respect TPTB, I don't really think promoting your project on this thread is on topic. Post on your own threads or an ANN pre-ICO or the Securities subforum or whatever.

This is not meant to criticize your effort in any way, but posting suggestions for people to invest in your coin whenever they discuss investing in other coins you claim are "obsolete" is a bit of spamming.

First of all the creator of the thread asked me to post a link to mine (when I was debating with him about masternodes on page 6).

Still seems kind of off topic to "Developer Smooth Investigation" don't you think. If I'm going to have my own hate thread, I want to keep it focused on me! Ego, ya know?

What I am saying is that the cost of expertise is not free. Just as you posted the following cartoon upthread:

I'm not suggesting you don't make money or raise money or whatever, as you know.

The case for Dash being excessively instamined seems to be quite strong as far as I know. The case that Monero was excessively instamined seems to be weaker but still plausible.

Sorry but I have to disagree with you there. Instamine is defined as coins mined faster than the published schedule, especially at the very beginning when only a privileged few (generally highly-biased toward insiders, which is what makes it a highly deceptive practice) are staged at the starting line and ready to grab the "instant-mining" right at launch. This is made even worse when the launch (and therefore highly-accelerate "instant-mining") happens before the promised (to outsiders) launch time. That did not happen to any significant degree on Monero. It 100% did happen with Dash.

Instamine most especially does not mean that some clever (programming/hardware design,etc.) or fortunate (location with low electricity costs, etc.) miners have a cost advantage over others, which literally happens with virtually 100% of mining, if not 100%. It doesn't even mean a de-optimized miner scam, which arguably did likely happen with Monero (assuming the Bytecoiners mined it which seems logical and likely, but is unproven).

As for AEON's easy mining (which still exists by the way right now, so anyone can mine even today at a good clip, which again argues against it being an instamine), again everything was public, nothing violated the schedule/planned/published schedule, there was nothing fast (favoring insiders) about a process the proceeds slowly over weeks or months or years giving everyone an opportunity to participate, and it was open to everyone. And the people who donated, including the guy who posted here, were entirely voluntary in doing so. They could have kept the coins and attempted to make money in some other manner.

But again, I have no problem with you raising money for your project however you would like, as long as you are transparent and non-deceptive about it (which I have no reason to believe otherwise).

[blobafett2]

Seems AnonyMint goes wherever smooth goes and AnonyMint ends up talking about his sure thing coin which will replace Bitcoin because of anon transfers. So far in my dealings with smooth he's pretty knowledgable and straight up you never know how people really are but from far he seems pretty ethical.. You can tell he has connection to xmr but he never really bashes other projects from what I read anyways my 2 cents.

For the sake of accuracy, FYI yesterday Smooth attacked 3 competitors with 50 posts:

Example Day of forum attacks by Smooth (today, 12th Aug 2015)

Attacking his competitors:

Dash thread: 28 posts (competing with the anon feature)
Vanilla threads: 20 posts (competing for Poloniex volume)
Bytecoin thread: 4 posts (competing "Anon coin")

Posting on his own threads:

AEON: 3 posts
Monero: 0 posts

Smooth's competitors attacking his coins on any threads:

Dash devs: 0 posts
Vanilla devs: 0 posts
Bytecoin devs: 0 posts

Today it's a lot more (but I haven't collated the info yet).  But for example, he is starting a new campaign where he will "warn" investors on the main Dash thread with this message every 24 hours (which apparently I drafted with another user, even though I never read it)

The following message was drafted by generalizethis and submitted for open review and modification by Dash community member blockafett/blobafett2, or others, who did not offer any proposal for changes, and is therefore is considered a collaboratively-constructed fair disclosure statement.

public service announcement

Dash (formerly xcoin and darkcoin) had a significant fastmine over the first 48 hours of its existence (~2 million coins). These facts should not be glossed over by those seeking a fairly launched coin, so until the dash media reflects these facts, this warning will be posted every 24 hours on the BCT dash thread. This warning will not be posted when the media reflects these facts. For those seeking more information Monero Developer Smooth has created a thread with the pertinent facts: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=999886.0

"submitted for open review and modification by Dash community member blockafett/blobafett2"

Not sure what you mean, I have never received anything like this.  Do you mean it was posted somewhere?  Generalize is on my ignore list mostly so I don't usually read his posts. 

Not sure why you think today suddenly it's such big news about Dash's launch issues from 18 months ago, you yourself have already posted about it prolifically for months, and it's been officially explained and accepted by the community / market a long time ago: https://dashtalk.org/threads/the-birth-of-darkcoin.162/

Sad to see you are back on the Dash thread again FUD'ing the same old rubbish whilst neglecting your own coins.  I notice you are not disclosing to people that you are on the core team of at least 2 small competitors to the anon-features of Dash either so you have a vested interest (in your mind anyway) to try to disrupt the Dash community from all the work they are doing.

I won't be responding to your FUD here by the way so I guess leave you to it. 

[smooth]

Seems AnonyMint goes wherever smooth goes and AnonyMint ends up talking about his sure thing coin which will replace Bitcoin because of anon transfers. So far in my dealings with smooth he's pretty knowledgable and straight up you never know how people really are but from far he seems pretty ethical.. You can tell he has connection to xmr but he never really bashes other projects from what I read anyways my 2 cents.

I most certainly do "bash" other projects when I feel they are fraudulent, deceptive, unethical, technically unsound, or otherwise worthy of my criticism. That's exactly why this thread exists -- because I criticize the heavily-instamined, launched-ahead-of-schedule, manipulated, and self-dealt (and technically unsound) Dash, which motivated butt-hurt blobafett2 to start attacking me and posting about my "conflict of interest" (while he still denies the irony of his own conflict of interest in doing so).

[blobafett2]

Seems AnonyMint goes wherever smooth goes and AnonyMint ends up talking about his sure thing coin which will replace Bitcoin because of anon transfers. So far in my dealings with smooth he's pretty knowledgable and straight up you never know how people really are but from far he seems pretty ethical.. You can tell he has connection to xmr but he never really bashes other projects from what I read anyways my 2 cents.

I most certainly do "bash" other projects when I feel they are fraudulent, deceptive, unethical, technically unsound, or otherwise worthy of my criticism. That's exactly why this thread exists -- because I criticize the heavily-instamined and self-dealt (and technically unsound) Dash, which motivated butt-hurt blobafett2 to start attacking me and posting about my "conflict of interest" (while he still denies the irony of his own conflict of interest in doing so).

That's what you think Smooth, the majority of the users here think actually your time attacking your competitors instead of working on your own coins, is because you think it will benefit you financially:

https://i.imgur.com/DZLgJLw.png

And I already stated the reasons for making this thread, it's in the OP: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1151565.0

[TPTB_need_war]

smooth I agree that with mining for everyone who knows Linux command lines and that crap, then it is a transparent market. But I think that is not all that transparent, because many people don't know how to configure that stuff.

So in some respect, it is form of instamining (or what ever term you want to invent to describe a non-transparent launch).

My point is that there isn't a perfect launch ever. At least I am announcing mine wide so it is more transparent. I wasn't even aware of AEON until yesterday. I have no time to fiddle with mining it.

sidhujag, it is true that I have frequently insinuated about technology I am working on.

P.S. okay I will butt out and let you enjoy receiving all the backlash from those you assign the label "trolls". I am more on your side of this, but I think I would back off if I were you, but I am not you.

[sidhujag]

smooth I agree that with mining for everyone who knows Linux command lines and that crap, then it is a transparent market. But I think that is not all that transparent, because many people don't know how to configure that stuff.

So in some respect, it is form of instamining (or what ever term you want to invent to describe a non-transparent launch).

My point is that there isn't a perfect launch ever. At least I am announcing mine wide so it is more transparent.

sidhujag, it is true that I have frequently insinuated about technology I am working on.

It's all good,

Smooth +1 there's always haters

[smooth]

This thread is kinda hilarious. Some of you Dash subordinates are really quite inept.

I mean it's said that Dash types aren't exactly renowned for their intelligence but this thread really does punctuate a stereotype.

Here's the thing dickheads:-

While Dash has many faults, ultimately it still has a bigger marketcap!

And yet you're still burning untold energies into sucking the cocks of your next downward rival?

What the hell? How does that even work?

I mean seriously, Dash is effectively XMR's next upward competitor. Whenever little bitch fights break out like this it only serves to benefit Monero - demonstrably in fact. DASH vs XMR is a branded-dialectic that is inevitably advantageous to Monero simply because it has a lesser market cap. Where do you think you're even going with it?

TIP: Stop whining like retard bitches and do something about your incompetently short-sighted strategies, and if you absolutely must troll someone then at least have the fucking self-respect to troll your next upward competitor. Don't fucking troll your next downward competitor man. That's just humiliating.

Um...this is a thread investigating Smooth for his attacks on various competitors and insider-dealings between AEON/XMR?  Did you click the wrong thread?

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess he saw through that pretense and figured out that this is actually a rage-troll hate thread against me in retaliation for posting about Dash's fraud and abuses on the Dash thread.

[oaxaca]

...he never really bashes other projects from what I read anyways my 2 cents.

Don't read much, do you?

[smooth]

smooth I agree that with mining for everyone who knows Linux command lines and that crap, then it is a transparent market. But I think that is not all that transparent, because many people don't know how to configure that stuff.

There were Windows binary miners at launch! In fact the launch was pushed back a day to make sure those were ready. NoodleDoodle's early optimizations that we released were in fact more effective on Windows because he developed on Windows and used Intel compiler for Windows to make the binaries, which had better compiler optimizations than the usual free Linux compilers. (Later optimizaions closed the gap, but indeed this means that the Linux command line "experts" actually were for a time at a disadvantage.)

Interestingly this is yet another of the criticisms of Dash. There were no Windows binaries at launch. And of course "at launch" for Dash means quite a lot given the huge amount of mining that happened within an hour or two.

So in some respect, it is form of instamining (or what ever term you want to invent to describe a non-transparent launch).

As you say, there is never a perfect launch. But there was a great explicit effort made to do as good a launch as possible for Monero. That was the whole reason for forking it from Bytecoin after all! So most of the obvious abuses such as those discussed above did not happen with Monero.