Releasing the source in advance to a select few constitutes premine in my dictionary. At best, the whole.thing was rather messy.
Anyway, Moon is looking good sitting beside my dead BTE's.
We released to one launch pool. We did this deliberately and our reasoning was explained both here and on our blog. It was a public pool, open to everyone. Nobody was excluded from participating. It was that or risk real pre-mining and chain forking.
The two things we did not plan for:
* DDOS that kocked me off-line for 10 minutes so I could not post updates or keep people informed of status at our launch pool.
* The massive number of people that were attempting to use the pool simultaneously. At one point, the pool servers had load averages above 700! The mooncoind was literally crashing over and over and over until people backed off a bit.
If you take the unexpected downtime out of the equation, everything else went very well.
Consider this scenario:
1:00:00 PM - No DDoS and pool opens to the public without any crashing
1:00:05 PM - Source drops to github.
1:02:00 PM - Other pools finish their compile and launch mooncoind.
That's what was intended from the outset.
I agree it got messy and that fuels paranoia. I just wish folks would be a bit more rational about their analysis. There were people in IRC using screeshots of a block chain explorer which was reporting time in GMT-6 as evidence of something. When we would try and explain timezones, that only amped up their hysteria.
