As was stated countless times... Bitcoin was mined by a few people too for a VERY long time. And there was no announcment on BitcoinTalk, hell, there was no BitcoinTalk.
So what? Bitcoin deserves **? If you don't know about something - it does not mean that nobody know.
No - the Bitcoin whitepaper was announced on the Cryptography Mailing List, and then the code was announced and released on the same mailing list a little while later:
http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/The Cryptography Mailing List has tens of thousands of readers, thousands of which are very well known, very famous figures. It is also archived by a number of sources, which means we can always go back and look at those initial announcements.
With Bytecoin nobody cares
where it was released, just that it actually was released in the middle of 2012. This leads to an easy solution: all we need are two things:
1. The location of the archived announcement for the CryptoNote whitepaper and the subsequent announcement of Bytecoin (even if these were in two different places)
2.A few hundred people as well known as those on the cryptography mailing list to come forward and verify the public release of Bytecoin
Both of these are really easy to provide, and yet remain unprovided.
