I do know what I'm talking about. I have an MBA with a concentration in Finance and Economics from a top 10 business school, became an associate partner at a worldwide management consulting firm which is widely considered the most prestigious in the industry where I served financial services clients, and most recently led the research and due diligence for the payments sector at a $20 billion investment firm. I am now sought by payments startups to help them with strategy and market positioning. So I'm actually a leading expert in the payments segment.
The paragraph on the "easymine" was not included because you didn't ask about it. But since you are asking now, here is my previous write-up on the subject (updated slightly since the initial post last October).
Let's do some simple math to see whether the early mining data aligns with Evan's claims. Let's assume that Evan (or his colleague) were the ONLY miners for the first 500 blocks (that's the worst case scenario... you can't assume he mined more than 100%). If we simply determine the network hash rate for the first 100 blocks (using the networkhashps command in the Dash wallet), you can see that there was only 12.6kh/s... however, there is a delay between the genesis block and the first "mined" block. If you exclude the genesis block, the hashrate was about 395kh/s. This is probably his hashrate, but let's be conservative and assume it took time to get everything going. From blocks 100-500 the average jumps to 711.2kh/s and appears pretty steady that whole time. Let's assume that this 711.2kh/s is Evan and his friends. They would have gotten about 245,000 of the first 250,000 coins mined (through block 500).
By block 500, things start to change. A few other miners are clearly joining them by this point, but assuming the 711 of the 895 kh/s were theirs from block 500-600, then they still got 79% of those blocks too (worth about 40,000 Dash). If you repeat this process to figure out the share of each block of 100 they got, you get something like the following:
EDIT: The coin start and coin finish are the beginning total coins in circulation and ending coins in circulation for each set of 100 blocks... so the difference is how many were created for each 100 block section... multiply that by the dev's share and you can see where I get the numbers from.
http://imgur.com/Se5USkwEach row represents 100 blocks. As you can see, by about block 1,000, the hashrate was up dramatically... this is consistent with posts on Bitcointalk of many other miners saying they were up and running. There are a couple of points at which network hash drops, consistent with the fact that a couple of bug fixes went out which probably caused Evan and other miners to stop mining for a brief time to update. By block 2300, Evan and Co's share was probably less than 1% of the network hash rate, by which time these estimates would put them at about 511k coins. After that, there is little chance they got a decent share... maybe another 6,000 coins for the next 1,000 blocks, but basically the party was over by then, so to speak. So if you assume they got about 518k coins by the time they were consistently getting less than 1% of the coins, that represents 7.8% of the current number of coins in circulation... which is very consistent with the statements from Evan that "all of the founders" hold less than 10% of the supply combined as of early 2015 (when the available supply was much lower than even now).
Also, these assumptions are generous to the "instamine" crowd for several reasons:
1) It assumes that Evan was the ONLY miner for the first 500 blocks, which we know isn't true. There was at least one other developer at that time, I believe a friend of Evan's who sold out in the first few months... so the "instamine" would have been split at least between two people
2) It assumes no one else besides those two were mining for the first 500 blocks (which may be the case... we'll never know, but I make this assumption in the interests of being conservative)
3) It assumes that Evan and Co had absolutely no down time for updating their miners when bug fixes came out, which is impossible... any downtime would reduce these assumptions
4) It assumes that once huge amounts of mining power joined beginning at block 500 that Evan didn't start experiencing an elevated level of rejects... this is unlikely as well since blocks were being created so rapidly at that time - literally seconds apart on average - that he and many others reported rejects, getting on wrong chains, having to reset, etc. Evan would have no way to be immune to these issues caused by the rapid creation of the blocks and network latency, so the true "networkhashps" is clearly understated during that period because many blocks were rejected and not counted. This means that my calculations overstate the share of blocks he would have been getting at that time.
5) It assumes that he never sold any Dash
Based on the data, I see no reason to disbelieve Evan and the stated amount of coin that he has. In fact, the data seems to support everything he's said.
As far as the code itself goes, there was no crippled miner (I think you are thinking of Monero). The code that set the mining reward and difficulty was inherited from Litecoin's code and limited the rate that the difficulty and mining reward would change. There is no evidence that it was intentionally planted there, so I tend to believe that Evan just wasn't aware of every line in Litecoin's code when he forked it. Also, Evan never claimed that X11 was GPU only forever. He said it would be ASIC resistant for at least two years, with the intent to follow the same adoption path as Bitcoin (wide distribution through mining, then ASICs later on). That is exactly what happened. No broken promises there. As for why no relaunch or no airdrop of coins or whatever to fix it? All those options were discussed by the community at the time. The community decided those were bad ideas... read the forums from those early days. It was already trading on exchanges and it would have been unfair to those who had purchased coins instead of mining them to reset.
If you want professional discourse and really seek information, I'm happy to provide it. However, this is my last response to you unless you drop loaded language, name calling, swearing, and other unprofessional behavior. Last chance to avoid the ignore button. Actually, I mainly posted here despite your behavior for the benefit of other forum readers... you are spreading misinformation that originated from forum trolls.
great post. i remember it from a while back and was looking for it when debating but could not find it. i'm quoting it now so as not to lose it, thanks.
anyone know where the chart is that shows how many masternodes would have to be owned/nsa compromised to have a chance to deanonymize a transaction? i think it was something like 1% of transactions @ 8 rounds if someone controlled 90% of the masternodes. seems like i remember a official thread on DASHtalk with all the numbers and a chart.
