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Author Topic: Blowing the lid off the CryptoNote/Bytecoin scam (with the exception of Monero)  (Read 132814 times)
Luke-Jr
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August 22, 2014, 11:35:38 AM
 #241

...
I didn't read
...

You should try it out sometime.
Why? Did I miss something important skimming?

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August 22, 2014, 11:41:42 AM
 #242

I didn't read
...
You should try it out sometime.
Why? Did I miss something important skimming?
You missed just about everything. Take your time re-reading and reading every reply before you make a nonsense post.
Bytecoin is dying and nothing is going to stop that.

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August 22, 2014, 11:42:33 AM
 #243

Regarding the website mysteries... my bet is on that CN didn’t make their own website themselves - did you ever see a nice, design-ish site from a hardcore developers of pretty much any technology? I sure as hell didn’t, simply because bearded, covered in sweaters guys don’t do this kind of stuff.

I mean, look at XMR - they got tons of websites and all of them look like shit.

I think CN ordered a website to someone. It’s just doesn’t add up - what’s the point for hardcore developers to spend so much time designing and coding this website. There probably should be the guy who admins website, actually, maybe he is the guy that replaced those files. Would love to ask him a few questions if he exists.

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BrianM
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August 22, 2014, 11:42:59 AM
 #244

Preamble

I'd like to start off by stating categorically that the cryptography presented by CryptoNote is completely, entirely solid. It has been vetted and looked over by fucking clever cryptographers/developers/wizards such as gmaxwell. Monero have had a group of independent mathematicians and cryptographers peer-reviewing the whitepaper (their annotations are here, and one of their reviews is here), and this same group of mathematicians and cryptographers is now reviewing the implementation of the cryptography in the Monero codebase. Many well known Bitcoin developers have already had a cursory look through the code to establish its validity. It is safe to say that, barring more exotic attacks that have to be mitigated over time as they are invented/discovered, and barring a CryptoNote implementation making rash decisions to implement something that reduces the anonymity set, the CryptoNote currencies are all cryptographically unlinkable and untraceable.

Two other things I should mention. I curse a lot when I'm angry (and scams like this make me angry). Second, where used my short date format is day/month/year (smallest to biggest).

If you find this information useful, a little donation would go a long way. Bitcoin address is 1rysLufu4qdVBRDyrf8ZjXy1nM19smTWd.

The Alleged CryptoNote/Bytecoin Story

CryptoNote is a new cryptocurrency protocol. It builds on some of the Bitcoin founding principles, but it adds to them. There are aspects of it that are truly well thought through and, in a sense, quite revolutionary. CryptoNote claim to have started working on their project years ago after Bitcoin's release, and I do not doubt the validity of this claim...clearly there's a lot of work and effort that went into this. The story as Bytecoin and CryptoNote claim it to be is as follows:

They developed the code for the principles expressed in their whitepaper, and in April, 2012, they released Bytecoin. All of the copyright messages in Bytecoin's code are "copyright the CryptoNote Developers", so clearly they are one and the same as the Bytecoin developers. In December 2012, they released their CryptoNote v1 whitepaper. In September 2013, they released their CryptoNote v2 whitepaper. In November 2013, the first piece of the Bytecoin code was first pushed to Github by "amjuarez", with a "Copyright (c) 2013 amjuarez" copyright notice. This was changed to "Copyright (c) 2013 Antonio Juarez" on March 3rd, 2014. By this juncture only the crypto libraries had been pushed up to github. Then, on March 4th, 2014, "amjuarez" pushed the rest of the code up to github, with the README strangely referring to "cybernote", even though the code referred to "Cryptonote". The copyrights all pointed to "the Cryptonote developers", and the "Antonio Juarez" copyright and license file was removed. Within a few days, "DStrange" stumbled across the bytecoin.org website when trying to mine on the bte.minefor.co.in pool (a pool for the-other-Bytecoin, BTE, not the-new-Bytecoin, BCN), and the rest is history as we know it. By this time Bytecoin had had a little over 80% of its total emission mined.

Immediate Red Flags

The first thing that is a red flag in all of this is that nobody, and I mean no-fucking-body, is a known entity. "Antonio Juarez" is not a known entity, "DStrange" is not a known entity, none of the made up names on the Bytecoin website exist (they've since removed their "team" page, see below), none of the made up names on the CryptoNote website exist (Johannes Meier, Maurice Planck, Max Jameson, Brandon Hawking, Catherine Erwin, Albert Werner, Marec Plíškov). If they're pseudonyms, then say so. If they're real names, then who the fuck are they??? Cryptographers, mathematicians, and computer scientists are well known - they have published papers or at least have commented on articles of interest. Many of them have their own github repos and Twitter feeds, and are a presence in the cryptocurrency community.

The other immediate red flag is that nobody, and I mean no-fucking-body, had heard of Bytecoin. Those that had heard of it thought it was the crummy SHA-256 Bitcoin clone that was a flop in the market. Bytecoin's claim that it had existed "on the deep web" for 2 years was not well received, because not a single vendor, user, miner, drug addict, drug seller, porn broker, fake ID card manufacturer, student who bought a fake ID card to get into bars, libertarian, libertard, cryptographer, Tor developer, Freenet developer, i2p developer, pedophile, or anyone else that is a known person - even just known on the Internet - had ever encountered "Bytecoin" on Tor. Ever. Nobody.

Indisputable Facts

Before I start with some conjecture and educated guesswork, I'd like to focus on an indisputable fact that obliterates any trust in both Bytecoin's and CryptoNote's bullshit story. Note, again, that I do not doubt the efficacy of the mathematics and cryptography behind CryptoNote, nor do I think there are backdoors in the code. What I do know for a fact is that the people behind CryptoNote and Bytecoin have actively deceived the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency community, and that makes them untrustworthy now and in the future. If you believe in the fundamentals in CryptoNote, then you need simply use a CryptoNote-derived cryptocurrency that is demonstrably independent of CryptoNote and Bytecoin's influence. Don't worry, I go into this a little later.

So as discussed, there were these two whitepapers that I linked to earlier. Just in case they try remove them, here is the v1 whitepaper and the v2 whitepaper mirrored on AnonFiles. This v1/v2 whitepaper thing has been discussed at length on the Bytecoin forum thread, and the PGP signature on the files has been confirmed as being valid. When you open the respective PDFs you'll notice the valid signatures in them:


signature in the v1 whitepaper


signature in the v2 whitepaper

These are valid Adobe signatures, signed on 15/12/2012 and 17/10/2013 respectively. Here's where it gets interesting. When we inspect this file in Adobe Acrobat we get a little more information on the signature:


Notice the bit that says "Signing time is from the clock on the signer's computer"? Now normally you would use a Timestamp Authority (TSA) to validate your system time. There are enough public, free, RFC 3161 compatible TSAs that this is not a difficult thing. CryptoNote chose not do this. But we have no reason to doubt the time on the signature, right guys? *crickets*


See these references from the v1 whitepaper footnotes? Those two also appear in the v2 whitepaper. Neither of those two footnotes refer to anything in the main body of the v1 whitepaper's text, they're non-existent (in the v2 whitepaper they are used in text). The problem, though, is that the Bitcointalk post linked in the footnote is not from early 2012.


May 5, 2013. The footnote is referencing a post that did not exist until then. And yet we are to believe that the whitepaper was signed on 12/12/2012! What sort of fucking fools do they take us for?

A little bit of extra digging validates this further. The document properties for both the v1 whitepaper as well as the v2 whitepaper confirms they were made in TeX Live 2013, which did not exist on 12/12/2012. The XMP properties are also quite revealing:


XMP properties for the v1 whitepaper


XMP properties for the v2 whitepaper

According to that, the v1 whitepaper PDF was created on 10/04/2014, and the v2 whitepaper was created on 13/03/2014. And yet both of these documents were then modified in the past (when they were signed). Clearly the CryptoNote/Bytecoin developers are so advanced they also have a time machine, right?

Final confirmation that these creation dates are correct are revealed those XMP properties. The properties on both documents confirm that the PDF itself was generated from the LaTeX source using pdfTeX-1.40.14 (the pdf:Producer property). Now pdfTeX is a very old piece of software that isn't updated very often, so the minor version (the .14 part) is important.


This version of pdfTeX was only pushed to the pdfTeX source repository on February 14, 2014, although it was included in a very early version of TeX Live 2013 (version 2013.20130523-1) that was released on May 23, 2013. The earliest mentions on the Internet of this version of pdfTeX are in two Stack Exchange comments that confirm its general availability at the end of May 2013 (here and here).

The conclusion we draw from this is that the CryptoNote developers, as clever as they were, intentionally deceived everyone into believing that the CryptoNote whitepapers were signed in 2012 and 2013, when the reality is that the v2 whitepaper was created in March, 2014, and the v1 whitepaper haphazardly created a month later by stripping bits out of the v2 whitepaper (accidentally leaving dead footnotes in).

Why would they create this fake v2 whitepaper in the first place? Why not just create a v1 whitepaper, or not even version it at all? The answer is simple: they wanted to lend credence and validity to the Bytecoin "2 years on the darkweb" claim so that everyone involved in CryptoNote and Bytecoin could profit from the 2 year fake mine of 82% of Bytecoin. What they didn't expect is the market to say "no thank you" to their premine scam.

And Now for Some Conjecture

As I mentioned earlier, the Bytecoin "team" page disappeared. I know it exists, because "AtomicDoge" referred to it as saying that one of the Bytecoin developers is a professor at Princeton. I called them out on it, and within a week the page had disappeared. Fucking cowards.

That was the event that triggered my desire to dig deeper and uncover the fuckery. As I discovered more and more oddities, fake accounts, trolling, and outright falsehoods, I wondered how deep the rabbit hole went. My starting point was DStrange. This is the account on Bitcointalk that "discovered" Bytecoin accidentally a mere 6 days after the first working iteration of the code was pushed to Github, purely by chance when mining a nearly dead currency on a tiny and virtually unheard of mining pool. He has subsequently appointed himself the representative of Bytecoin, or something similar. The whole thing is so badly scripted it's worse than a Spanish soap opera...I can't tell who Mr. Gonzales, the chief surgeon, is going to fuck next.

At the same time as DStrange made his "fuck me accidental discovery", another Bitcointalk account flared up to also "accidentally discover this weird thing that has randomly been discovered": Rias. What's interesting about both the "Rias" and "DStrange" accounts are their late 2013 creation date (October 31, 2013, and December 23, 2013, respectively), and yet they lay dormant until suddenly, out of the blue, on January 20th/21st they started posting. If you look at their early posts side by side you can even see the clustering: Rias, DStrange.

At any rate, the DStrange account "discovering" Bytecoin is beyond hilarious, especially with the Rias account chiming in to make the discovery seem natural. Knowing what we unmistakably do about the fake CryptoNote PDF dates lets us see this in a whole new light.

Of course, as has been pointed out before, the Bytecoin website did not exist in its "discovered" form until sometime between November 13, 2013 (when it was last captured as this random picture of a college girl) and February 25, 2014 (when it suddenly had the website on it as "discovered"). This can be confirmed by looking at the captures on Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://bytecoin.org

The CryptoNote website, too, did not exist in its current form until after October 20, 2013, at which time it was still the home of an encrypted message project by Alain Meier, a founding member of the Stanford Bitcoin Group and co-founder of BlockScore. This, too, can be confirmed on Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://cryptonote.org

It's hard to ascertain whether Alain had anything to do with CryptoNote or Bytecoin. It's certainly conceivable that the whitepaper was put together by him and other members of the Stanford Bitcoin Group, and the timeline fits, given that the group only formed around March 2013. More info on the people in the group can be found on their site, and determining if they played a role is something you can do in your own time.

Update: Alain Meier posted in this thread, and followed it up with a Tweet, confirming that he has nothing to do with CryptoNote and all the related...stuff.

Batshit Insane

The Bytecoin guys revel in creating and using sockpuppet accounts. Remember that conversation where "Rias" asked who would put v1 on a whitepaper with no v2 out, and AlexGR said "a forward looking individual"? The conversation took place on May 30, and was repeated verbatim by shill accounts on Reddit on August 4 (also, screenshot in case they take it down).

Those two obvious sockpuppet/shill accounts also take delight in bashing Monero in the Monero sub-reddit (here are snippets from WhiteDynomite and cheri0). Literally the only thing these sockpuppets do, day in and day out, is make the Bytecoin sub-reddit look like it's trafficked, and spew angry bullshit all over the Monero sub-reddit. Fucking batshit insane - who the fuck has time for that? Clearly they're pissy that nobody has fallen for their scam. Oh, and did I mention that all of these sockpuppets have a late January/early February creation date? Because that's not fucking obvious at all.

And let's not forget that most recently the sockpuppets claimed that multi-sig is "a new revolutionary technology, it was discovered a short time ago and Bytecoin already implemented it". What the actual fuck. If you think that's bad, you're missing out on the best part of all: the Bytecoin shills claim that Bytecoin is actually Satoshi Nakamoto's work. I'm not fucking kidding you. For your viewing pleasure...I present to you...the Bytecoin Batshit Insane Circus:




Seriously. Not only is this insulting as fuck to Satoshi Nakamoto, but it's insulting as fuck to our intelligence. And yet the fun doesn't stop there, folks! I present to you...the centerpiece of this Bytecoin Batshit Insane Circus exhibit...


Of course! How could we have missed it! The clues were there all along! The CryptoNote/Bytecoin developers are actually aliens! Fuck me on a pogostick, this is the sort of stuff that results in people getting committed to the loony bin.

One last thing: without doing too much language analysis (which is mostly supposition and bullshit), it's easy to see common grammar and spelling fuck ups. My personal favorite is the "Is it true?" question. You can see it in the Bytecoin thread asking if it's Satoshi's second project, in the Monero thread asking if the Monero devs use a botnet to fake demand, and in the Dashcoin thread confirming the donation address (for a coin whose only claim is that they copy Bytecoin perfectly, what the fuck do they need donations for??).

Layer After Layer

One of the things that happened soon after the Bytecoin "big reveal" was a string of forks popping up. The first was Bitmonero on April 18. Fantomcoin was launched May 6. Quazarcoin was launched May 8. HoneyPenny was announced on April 21, although only launched as Boolberry on May 17. duckNote was launched on May 30. MonetaVerde as launched June 17.

Now for some reason unbeknownst to anyone with who isn't a retarded fuckface, the Bytecoin code was pushed up to SourceForge on 08/04/2014 (the "Registered" date is at the bottom of the page). I have no idea why they did this, maybe it's to try and lend credence to their bullshit story (oh hey, look how old Bytecoin is, it's even on Sourceforge!)

Coincidentally, and completely unrelated (hurr durr), Quazarcoin, Fantomcoin, and Monetaverde are all also on Sourceforge. This gives us a frame of reference and a common link between them - it's quite clear that at least these three are run by the same team as CryptoNote. There is further anecdotal evidence that can be gathered by looking at the shill posts in the threads (especially the way the Moneteverda shills praise merge mining, in a way that is nearly fucking indistinguishable from the Bytecoin praise for multi-sig technology).

QuazarCoin is a special case and deserves a little attention. Let's start with OracionSeis, who launched it. He's well known on Bitcointalk for selling in-game currencies. In that same thread you'll notice this gem right at the end from Fullbuster: "Hey,OracionSeis is no longer under my use so please https://bitcointa.lk/threads/selling-most-of-the-game-currencies.301540/#post-5996983 come into this thread! thank you !" Click through to his new link and Fullbuster clarifies: "Hello, I may look new around here but i've sold my first account and created new one and i have an intention to keep the same services running as my first account did." So now that we know that OracionSeis is a fucking bought account, we can look at his actions a little more critically.

On May 7, just when Monero was being taken back by the community (see below), OracionSeis out of the blue decided to take it over/relaunch it himself. This included a now-defunct website at monero.co.in, and a since-abandoned Github. The community pushed back hard, true to form, with hard-hitting statements such as "To reiterate, this is not the original devs, and thus not a relaunch. OP, fuck you for trying this. This should warrant a ban." A man after my own heart. OracionSeis caved and decided to rename it to...QuazarCoin, which launched on May 8. To recap: bought account, launched by trying to "relaunch" Monero, got fucked up, renamed it to QuazarCoin. Clearly and undeniably goes in our pile of fuckface coins.

The other three are a little more interesting. Let's start with fuckNoteduckNote. It's hard to say if duckNote is a CryptoNote/Bytecoin project. The addition of the HTML based wallet is a one-trick pony, a common thread among most of the CryptoNote/Bytecoin controlled coins, but that could also be the result of a not-entirely-retarded developer. Given the shill posts in the duckNote thread I'm going to flag it as possibly-controlled-by-the-fuckface-brigade.

And now we come to HoneyPenny MoneyPenny HoneyBerry Boolean Boolberry. This is an interesting one. This was "pre-announced" on April 21, although it was only released with the genesis block on May 17. This puts it fourth in line, after Fantomcoin and Quazarcoin, although fucktarded proponents of the shittily-named currency insist that it was launched on April 21 because of a pre-announcement. Fucking rejects from the Pool of Stupidity, some of them. At any rate, "cryptozoidberg" is the prolific coder that churned out a Keccak-derived PoW (Wild Keccak) in a month, and then proceeded to add completely fucking retarded features like address aliasing that requires you to mine a block to get an address (lulz) and will never cause any issues when "google" or "obama" or "zuckerberg" want their alias back. Namecoin gets around this by forcing you to renew every ~200 - 250 days, and besides, nobody is making payments to microsoft.bit. This aliasing system is another atypical one-trick-pony that the CryptoNote developers push out and claim is monumental and historical and amazing.

There's also the matter of cryptozoidberg's nickname. In the Bytecoin code there's the BYTECOIN_NETWORK identifier, which according to the comment is "Bender's nightmare" (hurr durr, such funny, 11100111110001011011001210110110 has a 2 in it). Now this may be a little bit of conjecture, yo, but the same comment appears twice in the "epee" contributed library, once in the levin signature, and again in the portable storage signature. The contexts are so disconnected and different that it would be a fucking stretch to imagine that the same person did not write both of these. We can also rule out this being a Bytecoin-specific change, as the "Bender's nightmare" comments exist in the original epee library on github (which is completely unused anywhere on the planet except in Bytecoin, most unusual for a library that has any usefulness, and was first committed to github on February 9, 2014).

We know from the copyright that Andrey N. Sabelnikov is the epee author, and we can say with reasonable certainty that he was involved in Bytecoin's creation and is the dev behind Boolberry. Sabelnikov is quite famous - he wrote the Kelihos botnet code and worked at two Russian security firms, Microsoft took him to court for his involvement (accusing him of operating the botnet as well), and then settled with him out of court on the basis of him not running the botnet but just having written the code. Kelihos is a botnet that pumped out online pharmacy spam (you know the fucking annoying "Y-ou Ne3D Vi-4Gra!?" emails? those.) so it's good to see he transitioned from that to a cryptocurrency scam. Regardless of BBR's claim to have "fixed" CryptoNote's privacy (and the fake fight on Bitcointalk between the "Bytecoin devs" and cryptozoidberg), it's clear that the link between them is not transparent. BBR is either the brainchild of a spam botnet author that worked on Bytecoin, or it's the CryptoNote developers trying to have one currency distanced from the rest so that they have a claim for legitimacy. I think it's the second one, and don't want to enter into a fucking debate about it. Make up your own mind.

Which brings us to the oddest story of the bunch: Bitmonero. It's pretty clear, given its early launch date and how unfamiliar anyone was with creating a genesis block or working in completely undocumented code, that thankful_for_today is/was part of the CryptoNote developers. He made a fatal error, though: he thought (just like all the other cryptocurrencies) that being "the dev" made him infallible. Ya know what happened? He tried to force his ideas, the community politely said "fuck you", and Bitmonero was forked into Monero, which is leading the pack of CryptoNote-based coins today. Let me be perfectly fucking clear: it doesn't matter that the Bytecoin/CryptoNote developers know their code and can push stuff out, and it doesn't matter that Sabelnikov can shovel bullshit features into his poorly named cryptocurrency, and it doesn't matter that Monetaverde is "green" and has "merged mining". Nobody working behind these cryptocurrencies is known in the cryptocurrency community, and that alone should be a big fucking red flag. Monero is streets ahead, partly because of the way they're developing the currency, but mostly because the "core devs" or whatever they're called are made up of reasonably well-known people. That there are a bunch of them (6 or 7?) plus a bunch of other people contributing code means that they're sanity checking each other.

And, as we saw, this has fucking infuriated the Bytecoin/CryptoNote developers. They're so angry they waste hours and hours with their Reddit accounts trawling the Monero sub-reddit, for what? Nobody has fallen for their scam, and after my revelation today nobody fucking will. Transparency wins, everything else is bullshit.

As pointed out by canonsburg, when the Bytecoin/CryptoNote people realised they'd lost the fucking game, they took a "scorched earth" approach. If they couldn't have the leading CryptoNote coin...they'd fucking destroy the rest by creating a shit-storm of CryptoNote coins. Not only did they setup a thread with "A complete forking guide to create your own CryptoNote currency", but they even have a dedicated website with a fuckton of JavaScript. Unfortunately this plan hasn't worked for them, because they forgot that nobody gives a fuck, and everyone is going to carry on forking Bitcoin-based coins because of the massive infrastructure and code etc. that works with Bitcoin-based coins.

There are a bunch of other useless CryptoNote coins, by the way: Aeon, Dashcoin, Infinium-8, OneEvilCoin. We saw earlier that Dashcoin is probably another CryptoNote developer driven coin. However, this entire group is not really important enough, nor do they have enough potential, for me to give a single fuck, so make up your own mind. New CryptoNote coins that pop up should be regarded with the utmost caution, given the bullshit capabilities that we've already seen.

All Tied Up in a Bow

I want to cement the relationship between the major CryptoNote shitcoins. I know that my previous section had a lot of conjecture in it, and there's been some insinuation that I'm throwing everyone under the bus because I'm raging against the machine. That's not my style. I'm more of a Katy Perry fan..."you're going to hear me roar". There were some extra links I uncovered during my research, and I lacked the time to add it to this post. Thankfully a little bit of sleep and a can of Monster later have given me the a chance to add this. Let's start with an analysis of the DNS records of the CN coins.

If we look at the whois and DNS records for bytecoin.org, quazarcoin.org, fantomcoin.org, monetaverde.org, cryptonote.org, bytecoiner.org, cryptonotefoundation.org, cryptonotestarter.org, and boolberry.com, we find three common traits, from not-entirely-damming to oh-shiiiiiiit:

1. There's a lot of commonality with the registrar (NameCheap for almost all of them), the DNS service (HurricaneElectric's Free DNS or NameCheap's DNS), and with the webhost (LibertyVPS, QHoster/SecureFastServer.com, etc.)
2. All of the CN domains use WhoisGuard or similar private registration services.
3. Every single domain, without exception, uses Zoho for email. The only outlier is bitmonero.org that uses Namecheap's free email forwarding, but it's safe to disregard this as the emails probably just forward to the CryptoNote developers' email.

The instinct may be to disregard this as a fucking convenient coincidence. But it isn't: Zoho used to be a distant second go Google Apps, but has since fallen hopelessly behind. Everyone uses Google Apps or they just use mail forwarding or whatever. With the rest of the points as well, as far-fetched as the link may seem, it's the combination that is unusual and a dead giveaway of the common thread. Just to demonstrate that I'm not "blowing shit out of proportion" I went and checked the records for a handful of coins launched over the past few months to see what they use.

darkcoin.io: mail: Namecheap email forwarding, hosting: Amazon AWS, open registration through NameCheap
monero.cc: mail: mail.monero.cc, hosting: behind CloudFlare, open registration through Gandi
xc-official.com: mail: Google Apps, hosting: MODX Cloud, hidden registration (DomainsByProxy) through GoDaddy
blackcoin.io: mail: Namecheap email forwarding, hosting: behind BlackLotus, open registration through NameCheap
bitcoindark.org: mail: no MX records, hosting: Google User Content, open registration through Wix
viacoin.org: mail: mx.viacoin.org, hosting: behind CloudFlare, closed registration (ContactPrivacy) through Hostnuke.com
neutrinocoin.org: mail: HostGator, hosting: HostGator, open registration through HostGator

There's no common thread between them. Everyone uses different service providers and different platforms. And none of them use Zoho.

My next check was to inspect the web page source code for these sites to find a further link. If you take a look at the main CSS file linked in the source code for monetaverde.org, fantomcoin.org, quazarcoin.org, cryptonotefoundation.org, cryptonote-coin.org, cryptonote.org, bitmonero.org, and bytecoiner.org, we find a CSS reset snippet at the top. It has a comment at the top that says "/* CSS Reset */", and then where it resets/sets the height it has the comment "/* always display scrollbars */". Now, near as I can find, this is a CSS snipped first published by Jake Rocheleau in an article on WebDesignLedger on October 24, 2012 (although confusingly Google seems to think it appeared on plumi.de cnippetz first, but checking archive.org shows that it was only added to that site at the beginning of 2013). It isn't a very popular CSS reset snippet, it got dumped in a couple of gists on Github, and translated and re-published in an article on a Russian website in November, 2012 (let's not go full-blown conspiritard and assume this links "cryptozoidberg" back to this, he's culpable enough on his own).

It's unusual to the point of being fucking impossible for one site to be using this, let alone a whole string of supposedly unrelated sites. Over the past few years the most popular CSS reset scripts have been Eric Meyer's "Reset CSS", HTML5 Doctor CSS Reset, Yahoo! (YUI 3) Reset CSS, Universal Selector ‘*’ Reset, and Normalize.css, none of which contain the "/* CSS Reset */" or "/* always display scrollbars */" comments.

You've got to ask yourself a simple question: at what point does the combination of all of these fucking coincidental, completely unusual elements stop being coincidence and start becoming evidence of a real, tenable link? Is it possible that bytecoin.org, quazarcoin.org, fantomcoin.org, monetaverde.org, cryptonote.org, bytecoiner.org, cryptonotefoundation.org, cryptonotestarter.org, and boolberry.com just happen to use similar registrars/DNS providers/web hosts and exactly the fucking same wildly unpopular email provider? And is it also possible that monetaverde.org, fantomcoin.org, quazarcoin.org, cryptonotefoundation.org, cryptonote-coin.org, cryptonote.org, and bytecoin.org just happen to use the same completely unknown, incredibly obscure CSS reset snippet? It's not a conspiracy, it's not a coincidence, it's just another piece of evidence that all of these were spewed out by the same fucking people.

The Conclusion of the Matter

Don't take the last section as any sort of push for Monero. I think it's got potential (certainly much more than the other retarded "anonymous" coins that "developers" are popping out like street children from a cheap ho), and I hold a bit of XMR for shits and giggles, so take that tacit endorsement with a pinch of fucking salt.

The point is this: Bytecoin's 82% premine was definitely the result of a faked blockchain. CryptoNote's whitepaper dates were purposely falsified to back up this bullshit claim. Both Bytecoin and CryptoNote have perpetuated this scam by making up fake website data and all sorts. They further perpetuate it using shill accounts, most notably "DStrange" and "Rias" among others.

They launched a series of cryptocurrencies that should be avoided at all cost: Fantomcoin, Quazarcoin, and Monetaverde. They are likely behind duckNote and Boolberry, but fuck it, it's on your head if you want to deal with scam artists and botnet creators.

They developed amazing technology, and had a pretty decent implementation. They fucked themselves over by being fucking greedy, being utterly retarded, being batshit insane, and trying to create legitimacy where there was none. They lost the minute the community took Monero away from them, and no amount of damage control will save them from their own stupidity.

I expect there to be a fuck-ton of shills posting in this thread (and possibly a few genuine supporters who don't know any better). If you want to discuss or clarify something, cool, let's do that. If you want to have a protracted debate about my conjecture, then fuck off, it's called conjecture for a reason you ignoramus. I don't really give a flying fuck if I got it right or wrong, you're old and ugly enough to make up your own mind.

tl;dr - CryptoNote developers faked dates in whitepapers. Bytecoin faked dates in fake blockchain to facilitate an 82% premine, and CryptoNote backed them up. Bytecoin, Fantomcoin, Quazarcoin, Monetaverde, Dashcoin are all from the same people and should be avoided like the fucking black plague. duckNote and Boolberry are probably from them as well, or are at least just fucking dodgy, and who the fuck cares anyway. Monero would have been fucking dodgy, but the community saved it. Make your own mind up about shit and demand that known people are involved and that there is fucking transparency. End transmission.

Just a reminder that if you found this information useful, a little donation would go a long way. Bitcoin address is 1rysLufu4qdVBRDyrf8ZjXy1nM19smTWd.

I agree to all of this it was a scam!
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August 22, 2014, 11:44:18 AM
 #245

Seems to me that someone’s blowing his gaskets trying to smear the CN tech up and down.  Hexah deserves some credit on this one, even Monero has gotten its share of the shit pie here. Making it look like a pinnacle of the CN technology ready to take on Bitcoin is just outright ridiculous.

Heh - I keep saying that Monero is alpha-grade and has a VERY long way to go before it's even widely usable, so I agree that it is ridiculous:)

It all smells like the competition is playing out its tricky scheme on us. I don’t want to engage in the finger-pointing here (enough has been done so far) but isn’t it like Darkcoin hates us all. Those guys have never been particularly picky about their methods.
Shall we do some ass-kicking on their thread in retaliation?      

We'd prefer not to get involved in any retaliatory or smear campaigns. We don't have a problem talking and engaging where people ask for our individual or collective opinions or say something that is factually incorrect, but we are trying to keep our focus inward more than outward.

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August 22, 2014, 11:50:28 AM
 #246

I have carefully read this publication several times and, you know, I’ve got the impression that someone is trying hard to impose upon us his point of view. Someone wants us to think in a certain way.    
    
 I’ve tried to look at the whole situation as a bystander and posted below there are conclusions I’ve come to:  

1. It's obvious that someone is trying to discredit the CryptoNote technology along with all the CN-based coins.

CryptoNote team has published official statement yesterday https://cryptonote.org/news/archive

Quote
Greetings to all the members of the CryptoNote community and those who are interested in the technology. This message is our response to the recent developments and speculations within the CN community. Before we get to the point we’d like to reassert our firm commitment to the long-standing philosophy behind CryptoNote. Everything we do is for the sake of technology, and we take great joy as we progress towards our goal.

The initial efforts at CryptoNote development go back as far as 4 years. Some great minds were involved in its creation. More than two years ago the first implementations of CN technology were unleashed on the world of cryptocurrencies and from that moment forward the community that was forged around our vision and values grew exponentially.

What is currently going on within the CN community hardly resembles the harmonious state of mutual respect and synergy that once ruled over the CN coins. Someone clearly is instigating hostility. Moreover, the CryptoNote website has recently been exposed to illegal access by malicious users, which is absolutely unacceptable. Some data stored on cryptonote.org have been vandalized and is now temporary unavailable until the internal investigation is completed.

Having thoroughly reviewed the situation around certain CN currencies, the CryptoNote team would like to issue the following statement:

• It is the official position of CryptoNote that our technology has been created to bring positive changes into the current financial system by providing tools that have never existed before. The technology is what concerns us the most. We are not to be distracted or misled by the speculative rumors and strongly suggest you to follow suit.

• CryptoNote is not a cryptocurrency and has not been designed to be one. The only CryptoNote currency that the CryptoNote team officially endorses is CryptoNoteCoin, which has zero commercial value and serves educational purposes only.

• We consider all the name-calling and finger-pointing that has taken place on certain internet discussions as inappropriate and harmful to further development of the CryptoNote technology.
Over the years CryptoNote has had to overcome a great number of obstacles but those striving so desperately to deter the advance of new technologies are doomed to fail. We are strong believers in the power of innovation and there is no way to stop the CN development.
Discussion thread: https://forum.cryptonote.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=265&p=883#p883

Do you see this bold text? Think about it.

2. Someone tries to cause distrust and enmity between Monero and other CN-coins. "Divide et impera" is an old maxim.
 "with the exception of Monero" in the subject of this tread proves it better than everything else.

The question is: who is that "someone"? I have some thoughts on topic, but I don't want to publish them until I have enough evidence.


Seems to me that someone’s blowing his gaskets trying to smear the CN tech up and down.  Hexah deserves some credit on this one, even Monero has gotten its share of the shit pie here. Making it look like a pinnacle of the CN technology ready to take on Bitcoin is just outright ridiculous.

It all smells like the competition is playing out its tricky scheme on us. I don’t want to engage in the finger-pointing here (enough has been done so far) but isn’t it like Darkcoin hates us all. Those guys have never been particularly picky about their methods.
Shall we do some ass-kicking on their thread in retaliation?      

Well, Darkcoin hasn't been feeling good lately indeed. We know those guys are annoying with all the FUD in their topics. They surely have the incentive to discredit CryptoNote platform. But I'm not sure that they were capable of falsifying whitepaper on CryptoNote website.

Thinking more about it, I'd say that the biggest CryptoNote enemy is the government. Their philosophy is against the status quo. CryptoNote and Bytecoin is the very anonymous cryptocurrency out there. Ok, this is a bit over the roof, but if the whitepaper is replaced NSA, then I'm not surprised that Bytecoin developers are so anynomous. You just don't know what to expect.

Maybe CryptoNote will reveal the results of their investigations soon.

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August 22, 2014, 11:53:05 AM
Last edit: August 22, 2014, 08:28:11 PM by Denni
 #247

Rethink-Your-Strategy Whitepaper is confirmed to be fake

I was impressed by the amount of work you've put to compile everything in one place. While checking your claims regarding CryptoNote whitepaper, I noticed the same XMP timestamps and other evidence that you posted.

However, there is one thing that you did not check-out when I tried to repeat your experiment.  Van Saberhagen's public key on CryptoNote website cannot be used to validite the PDF. While checking, I got this message:


Some new surprising information was found on Bytecoin's website. It hosts a very similar whitepaper v.2, which turns out to be different if you study it carefully. What's more, van Saberhagen's public key matches on CryptoNote and Bytecoin websites. It seems that Bytecoin may hold a genuine Saberhagen whitepaper as it can be verified with the published public key - however since his identity remains unknown, we can only speculate.

I then decided to continue with experiment by comparing the paper found on Bytecoin with the one CryptoNote's website. For easier references I'll call them bcn-whitepaper and cn-whitepaper. The bcn-whitepaper will always goes first on the pictures unless explicitly stated otherwise.

When opening the bcn-whitepaper we can see the article structure.


Which is not the case for cn-whitepaper.


Opening the PDF we notice the valid signature inside:


The signature date on bcn-whitepaper is almost the same as on cn-whitepaper but slightly differs in size. This by itself, points that further discrepancies may exist between the two whitepapers. I decided to continue my investigation by studying the signature details (bcn - to the left, cn - to the right):



Everything looks quite the same with the exception of the SHA and MD5 fingerprints. Moving on to the XMP properties, we can see that they are also different.




Bcn-whitepaper holds perfectly clear signatures. The CreateDate is 2013 as it should be. The pdfTeX version x.x.13 also existed. There is totally nothing strange about these tags. Unlike the whitepaper from CryptoNote website that was studied before.

Apparently, Bytecoin's whitepaper is quite consistent in terms of timelines.

The remaining question is which whitepaper may have been the genuine one.

I would assume that having exactly the same van Saberhagen's public keys posted on both websites, it would not be unlikely that it really belongs to Saberhagen - particularly since both keys validate the bcn-whitepaper.

Also, upon a careful examination of Bytecoin's whitepaper I found a watermark, which is usually hard to identify. Here it is in the whitepaper (just after the Appendix):


Most may be unable to see it because it is non-selectable, can't be copied and is transparent. You might be able to see it as a small highlighted field (e.g. if you open it with Chrome).


It turns out that the watermark appears in the tooltip for that field. Here is the tooltip's content:


This is a PGP key perfectly matching public van Saberhagen's key published on both websites.


Hence, there is a PGP signature hidden in the Bytecoin's whitepaper, but there is no such watermark in the one found on CryptoNote's website.

Are these 2 documents anyhow different apart from that? I've checked with adobe document compare tools, and it seems that they're either complete copies, or have very minor indistinguishable differences like the following three. These formulas appear to be the same, but not to the compare tool:




My Conclusions

1. It is very likely the Bytecoin website hosts the genuine whitepaper.

2. The whitepaper published on CryptoNote's website may be a forgery. There is no PGP watermark and the author's PGP public key can't be used to validate the whitepaper.

3. Someone has duplicated the genuine whitepaper line by line for them to look the same - but failed at capturing some of its hidden elements.

4. Now let's move to whitepaper v.1 on CN website. As there is no signature to validate this whitepaper, the only relevant test is watermark. If it's inside, then the asumption on CryptoNote's conspiracy may hold. However, whitepaper v.1 doesn't have this watermark.

5. The problems with latex compilator problems, XMP meta tags, and invalid links may point to a forgery attempt, not van Saberhagen's actual activity.


Unclear questions for further research

1) What and why did we find two strange whitepapers on the CryptoNote website? A number of options may be valid. I assume it could be a mistake, a social engineering trap, hacked website or someone's attempt to discredit the technology? Who knows.

I'll point CryptoNote that they may have a wrong whitepaper. Maybe they will care to comment or take actions.

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August 22, 2014, 11:54:03 AM
 #248

What is going on here is called 'Reverse Psychology Marketing ' http://slymarketing.com/have-you-tried-reverse-psychology-your-marketing-strategy/

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August 22, 2014, 12:25:12 PM
 #249

I have carefully read this publication several times and, you know, I’ve got the impression that someone is trying hard to impose upon us his point of view. Someone wants us to think in a certain way.    
    
 I’ve tried to look at the whole situation as a bystander and posted below there are conclusions I’ve come to:  

1. It's obvious that someone is trying to discredit the CryptoNote technology along with all the CN-based coins.

CryptoNote team has published official statement yesterday https://cryptonote.org/news/archive

Quote
Greetings to all the members of the CryptoNote community and those who are interested in the technology. This message is our response to the recent developments and speculations within the CN community. Before we get to the point we’d like to reassert our firm commitment to the long-standing philosophy behind CryptoNote. Everything we do is for the sake of technology, and we take great joy as we progress towards our goal.

The initial efforts at CryptoNote development go back as far as 4 years. Some great minds were involved in its creation. More than two years ago the first implementations of CN technology were unleashed on the world of cryptocurrencies and from that moment forward the community that was forged around our vision and values grew exponentially.

What is currently going on within the CN community hardly resembles the harmonious state of mutual respect and synergy that once ruled over the CN coins. Someone clearly is instigating hostility. Moreover, the CryptoNote website has recently been exposed to illegal access by malicious users, which is absolutely unacceptable. Some data stored on cryptonote.org have been vandalized and is now temporary unavailable until the internal investigation is completed.

Having thoroughly reviewed the situation around certain CN currencies, the CryptoNote team would like to issue the following statement:

• It is the official position of CryptoNote that our technology has been created to bring positive changes into the current financial system by providing tools that have never existed before. The technology is what concerns us the most. We are not to be distracted or misled by the speculative rumors and strongly suggest you to follow suit.

• CryptoNote is not a cryptocurrency and has not been designed to be one. The only CryptoNote currency that the CryptoNote team officially endorses is CryptoNoteCoin, which has zero commercial value and serves educational purposes only.

• We consider all the name-calling and finger-pointing that has taken place on certain internet discussions as inappropriate and harmful to further development of the CryptoNote technology.
Over the years CryptoNote has had to overcome a great number of obstacles but those striving so desperately to deter the advance of new technologies are doomed to fail. We are strong believers in the power of innovation and there is no way to stop the CN development.
Discussion thread: https://forum.cryptonote.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=265&p=883#p883

Do you see this bold text? Think about it.

2. Someone tries to cause distrust and enmity between Monero and other CN-coins. "Divide et impera" is an old maxim.
 "with the exception of Monero" in the subject of this tread proves it better than everything else.

The question is: who is that "someone"? I have some thoughts on topic, but I don't want to publish them until I have enough evidence.


Seems to me that someone’s blowing his gaskets trying to smear the CN tech up and down.  Hexah deserves some credit on this one, even Monero has gotten its share of the shit pie here. Making it look like a pinnacle of the CN technology ready to take on Bitcoin is just outright ridiculous.

It all smells like the competition is playing out its tricky scheme on us. I don’t want to engage in the finger-pointing here (enough has been done so far) but isn’t it like Darkcoin hates us all. Those guys have never been particularly picky about their methods.
Shall we do some ass-kicking on their thread in retaliation?      

Well, Darkcoin hasn't been feeling good lately indeed. We know those guys are annoying with all the FUD in their topics. They surely have the incentive to discredit CryptoNote platform. But I'm not sure that they were capable of falsifying whitepaper on CryptoNote website.

Thinking more about it, I'd say that the biggest CryptoNote enemy is the government. Their philosophy is against the status quo. CryptoNote and Bytecoin is the very anonymous cryptocurrency out there. Ok, this is a bit over the roof, but if the whitepaper is replaced NSA, then I'm not surprised that Bytecoin developers are so anynomous. You just don't know what to expect.

Maybe CryptoNote will reveal the results of their investigations soon.

Maybe it’s an inside job or some kind of revenge attempt. There are so many possibilities for this type of behaviour, maybe in the end somebody is trying to earn some money crushing the exchange rate of all CN coins. While we’re talking somebody is making $$$

███████████████████████
  █████████████████████ 
    ███████████████████ 
      █████████████████ 
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              █████████ 
                ███████ 
                  ████ 
                    ███ 
                     
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August 22, 2014, 12:43:35 PM
Last edit: August 22, 2014, 08:50:37 PM by dubouis
 #250

I have carefully read this publication several times and, you know, I’ve got the impression that someone is trying hard to impose upon us his point of view. Someone wants us to think in a certain way.    
    
 I’ve tried to look at the whole situation as a bystander and posted below there are conclusions I’ve come to:  

1. It's obvious that someone is trying to discredit the CryptoNote technology along with all the CN-based coins.

CryptoNote team has published official statement yesterday https://cryptonote.org/news/archive

Quote
Greetings to all the members of the CryptoNote community and those who are interested in the technology. This message is our response to the recent developments and speculations within the CN community. Before we get to the point we’d like to reassert our firm commitment to the long-standing philosophy behind CryptoNote. Everything we do is for the sake of technology, and we take great joy as we progress towards our goal.

The initial efforts at CryptoNote development go back as far as 4 years. Some great minds were involved in its creation. More than two years ago the first implementations of CN technology were unleashed on the world of cryptocurrencies and from that moment forward the community that was forged around our vision and values grew exponentially.

What is currently going on within the CN community hardly resembles the harmonious state of mutual respect and synergy that once ruled over the CN coins. Someone clearly is instigating hostility. Moreover, the CryptoNote website has recently been exposed to illegal access by malicious users, which is absolutely unacceptable. Some data stored on cryptonote.org have been vandalized and is now temporary unavailable until the internal investigation is completed.

Having thoroughly reviewed the situation around certain CN currencies, the CryptoNote team would like to issue the following statement:

• It is the official position of CryptoNote that our technology has been created to bring positive changes into the current financial system by providing tools that have never existed before. The technology is what concerns us the most. We are not to be distracted or misled by the speculative rumors and strongly suggest you to follow suit.

• CryptoNote is not a cryptocurrency and has not been designed to be one. The only CryptoNote currency that the CryptoNote team officially endorses is CryptoNoteCoin, which has zero commercial value and serves educational purposes only.

• We consider all the name-calling and finger-pointing that has taken place on certain internet discussions as inappropriate and harmful to further development of the CryptoNote technology.
Over the years CryptoNote has had to overcome a great number of obstacles but those striving so desperately to deter the advance of new technologies are doomed to fail. We are strong believers in the power of innovation and there is no way to stop the CN development.
Discussion thread: https://forum.cryptonote.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=265&p=883#p883

Do you see this bold text? Think about it.

2. Someone tries to cause distrust and enmity between Monero and other CN-coins. "Divide et impera" is an old maxim.
 "with the exception of Monero" in the subject of this tread proves it better than everything else.

The question is: who is that "someone"? I have some thoughts on topic, but I don't want to publish them until I have enough evidence.


Seems to me that someone’s blowing his gaskets trying to smear the CN tech up and down.  Hexah deserves some credit on this one, even Monero has gotten its share of the shit pie here. Making it look like a pinnacle of the CN technology ready to take on Bitcoin is just outright ridiculous.

It all smells like the competition is playing out its tricky scheme on us. I don’t want to engage in the finger-pointing here (enough has been done so far) but isn’t it like Darkcoin hates us all. Those guys have never been particularly picky about their methods.
Shall we do some ass-kicking on their thread in retaliation?      

Well, Darkcoin hasn't been feeling good lately indeed. We know those guys are annoying with all the FUD in their topics. They surely have the incentive to discredit CryptoNote platform. But I'm not sure that they were capable of falsifying whitepaper on CryptoNote website.

Thinking more about it, I'd say that the biggest CryptoNote enemy is the government. Their philosophy is against the status quo. CryptoNote and Bytecoin is the very anonymous cryptocurrency out there. Ok, this is a bit over the roof, but if the whitepaper is replaced NSA, then I'm not surprised that Bytecoin developers are so anynomous. You just don't know what to expect.

Maybe CryptoNote will reveal the results of their investigations soon.

Maybe it’s an inside job or some kind of revenge attempt. There are so many possibilities for this type of behaviour, maybe in the end somebody is trying to earn some money crushing the exchange rate of all CN coins. While we’re talking somebody is making $$$

I know who is it: (right answer - Monero)

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August 22, 2014, 12:47:19 PM
 #251

Maybe it’s an inside job or some kind of revenge attempt. There are so many possibilities for this type of behaviour, maybe in the end somebody is trying to earn some money crushing the exchange rate of all CN coins. While we’re talking somebody is making $$$

Let me explain what really happened.

And since I engaged with most of you guys (as in exact same shill crew that has showed up here now -- you know who you are) early on in the BCN thread about the 80% hidden premine, etc., and nearly all of what I wrote turned out to be exactly correct, you might want to pay attention. You guys tried this "there are so many possibilities" line back then. It was silly and bogus back then and it is silly and bogus now.

The cryptonote site did not get hacked. They swapped out the paper because this lame "We got hacked!" defense was the best the coin mill crew behind BCN/Cryptonote/BMR/QCN/FCN/etc. could come up with to futilely try to explain away being exposed as frauds and scammers.

Open your eyes man.

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August 22, 2014, 12:54:03 PM
 #252

I think I have to agree agree with bitcoinbear. Apparently, the story behind the whitepapers has a lot of inconsistences. Why would an incorrect whitepaper be on the CryptoNote website especially if it cannot be validated by the published public key of its author? However, the most important issue is not the whitepaper v2 but the v1, which has the irrelevant references that are not even used in the text. And those particular references create "Time Machine" effect the OP is blaming CN for.

I’ve decided to follow the steps of the previous researchers to try and find the original CryptoNote whitepaper v1. Originally, it was found on the Tor website that apparently had been previously used by CryptoNote: http://ol346fucnsjru223.onion/.

TL;DR
It is likely that both CN whitepapers on CryptoNote website are forged. It is likely that the genuine v.2 is on bytecoin.org, while the genuine v.1 is on Tor CryptoNote website (ol346fucnsjru223.onion). It is possible that the whitepapers have been copied line by line with a couple of extra mistakes as in the v.1 case. The references that are inconsistent with the v.1 content are not used in the text and might have been inserted to confuse the potential researchers.



This TOR website has already been discussed . It contains CryptoNote whitepaper v.1 dated back December 2012. What I don't understand is that why nobody has attempted to check the whitepaper on this dark web website before. Let's take a thorough look at what TOR conceals.



This is a one-page website that briefly explains CryptoNote technology. It also hosts whitepaper v.1 along with the signature and Saberhagen's public key. Firstly, you can  validate the whitepaper on this website with the published public key.

Moreover, the public keys on bytecoin.org, cryptonote.org, and ol346fucnsjru223.onion, are all the same.



Based on the uniformity across the public keys, I assume that it is likely that the whitepaper from the Tor website is genuine. Let's have a look inside. The internal PDF signatures of the Tor whitepaper and of the one found on the CryptoNote website are almost the same. They differ slightly in size just like two conflicting whitepapers v2.



The interesting part is that the serial numbers on both certificates are the same.




However, the SHA1 digest shows that there is something fishy about these two signatures and they were not created with the same certificate which in turn may indicate an attempt at forgery.




Let's compare the references of the two whitepapers. As we can see, the reference lists differ significantly. The CN deep web whitepaper is on the left, while the CN whitepaper from the official web site is on the right:





A brief analysis shows that the two lists differ by 7 links. The CryptoNote website version has those links, but they are not used in the text. The Tor whitepaper doesn't have those references. One of the unused references in CryptoNote whitepaper points to a public discussion that took place in 2013 while the original whitepaper was published in 2012. One possible explanation is that somebody might have inserted those references so that the whitepaper looked non-legit.

A quick text comparison shows that the two texts do differ from one another. Expectedly, the reference numbers are almost completely different everywhere in the text.



However, there are a few more inconsistencies. On the next screenshot you see the difference in "difficulty" spelling in the same passage of the two whitepapers. The "new text" stands for CryptoNote official web site whitepaper, while the "old text" is the way it appears on Tor website.



On a side note: if you copy the word "difficulty" from the Tor whitepaper and paste it into a text editor you'll get the "di_culty" as a result. As far as I understand, "fi" letters combination is badly interpreted by latex compiler and is replaced in PDF by a special character that looks almost the same as these two letters but can't be copied.



You can find the same mistake on other pages.



The only possible explanation for this discrepancy is that somebody has copied the text line by line and failed to correct certain words. Apparently, the "author" of one of the texts did not have the .tex source of the genuine version of the whitepaper. Which whitepaper has these mistakes while the other doesn't? The one found on CryptoNote website, which leads me to a conclusion that it was forged.

Let's check the XMP properties. They are exactly as they should be (TOR — first, clear web — second)




Tor website whitepaper has the correct dates and the used version of latex compiler existed in 2012. The one found on the CryptoNote official website contains improper XMP tags.

And, finally, if the internal watermark is Saberhagen's actual signature, there should be one in whitepaper v.1. There is no watermark on whitepaper v.1 from the CryptoNote official website, but the one on Tor contains the same watermark as the Bytecoin's whitepaper v.2. Here it is, in the very same place.



It exactly corresponds with the three van Saberhagen's public keys (on all the websites), and the watermark in the whitepaper v.2 from bytecoin.org, which is likely to be genuine.



All of the facts mentioned above lead me to the conclusion that the genuine whitepaper v.1 is on the Tor CryptoNote website and not on the official web site as was largely discussed above.


Results

1. In line with [ur=https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=740112.msg8409063#msg8409063]the previous research on inconsistencies in whitepaper v.2[/url], there is the whitepaper "CryptoNote v.1" that differs from the one published on the CryptoNote official website.

2. The genuine whitepaper v.1 is likely to be on the Tor website. Taking into account all the mistakes in the compromised version of v.1, I assume that this whitepaper has been copied line by line with the exception of the watermark.

3. The genuine whitepaper v.2 is likely to be on Bytecoin.org

4. Since both versions of the genuine whitepaper are consistent with the declared timelines and hold van Saberhagen's public key as the watermark, one can guess that both whitepapers on the CryptoNote official web site are likely to be forged and do not correspond to the actual CryptoNote whitepaper.

5. The public keys on Bytecoin.org, CryptoNote.org, and Tor CN website are the same. This may indicate that the genuine public key is published there.


Implications

This evidence indicates that both whitepapers on CN official website are likely to be fake. It might explain why we find so many inconsistencies with the dates. Apparently, the whitepaper v.1 have been copied line by line with a few mistakes accidentally missed. What's more, someone inserted extra unused links to the references list. The wrong XMP dates may indicate the time when both whitepapers were forged and are likely the artifact that the authors failed to pay attention to (or intentionally left wrong).


TL;DR
It is likely that both CN whitepapers on CryptoNote website are forged. It is likely that the genuine v.2 is on bytecoin.org, while the genuine v.1 is on Tor CryptoNote website (ol346fucnsjru223.onion). It is possible that the whitepapers have been copied line by line with a couple of extra mistakes as in the v.1 case. The references that are inconsistent with the v.1 content are not used in the text and might have been inserted to confuse the potential researchers.

Rias
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August 22, 2014, 01:02:06 PM
 #253

Unfortunately, there is only one "shill crew" on this Forum that has showed up here. It's XMR. Trolling Bytecoin and me in particular is one thing. But verifying your false accusation is another one. And you fail at it.

UPD: I have checked the new article on whitepaper v.1 Awesome job, act now!

I think that something has to be explained to all of us. Has XMR team/supporters/whales anyhow influenced
the situation around the whitepaper or were they just in the right place to spot the vandalization and take it as a fact to discredit the whole technology?

Yeah, somebody was right. This thread is much more interesting then the Game of Thrones.
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August 22, 2014, 01:03:27 PM
 #254

I know who is it:



I doubt it, I just checked my logs and I was the first person to link to it in #monero-dev (at 12:59:02+0200). Quanttek only posted about it at 17:10:45+0200. Jojatekok is roughly in my time zone (he's in the EU) so he would have read it before Quanttek posted about it.

Also Jojatekok's a 16 year old kid (and I say that with the utmost fondness, Jo, not as an insult:) and I wouldn't expect such anger and hatred from him.

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August 22, 2014, 01:05:55 PM
 #255

Unfortunately, there is only one "shill crew" on this Forum that has showed up here. It's XMR.

That's a great theory. Except for the fact that the Bytecoin shill crew was active long before XMR was even a gleam in TFT's eye. It was just me (having nothing to do with XMR since it didn't exist) and maybe one or two people calling you out on your fake Cicada 3301 references and other bullshit on the BCN thread months ago.

Quote
I think that something has to be explained to all of us. Has XMR team/supporters/whales anyhow influenced
the situation around the whitepaper or were they just in the right place to spot the vandalization and take it as a fact to discredit the whole technology?

No. But nice try on the FUD though. I'd say "you can do better" but given the past few months of attempts, I'd guess you probably can't.

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August 22, 2014, 01:08:23 PM
Last edit: August 22, 2014, 08:36:01 PM by Hexah
 #256

I think I have to agree agree with bitcoinbear. Apparently, the story behind the whitepapers has a lot of inconsistences. Why would an incorrect whitepaper be on the CryptoNote website especially if it cannot be validated by the published public key of its author? However, the most important issue is not the whitepaper v2 but the v1, which has the irrelevant references that are not even used in the text. And those particular references create "Time Machine" effect the OP is blaming CN for.

I’ve decided to follow the steps of the previous researchers to try and find the original CryptoNote whitepaper v1. Originally, it was found on the Tor website that apparently had been previously used by CryptoNote: http://ol346fucnsjru223.onion/.

TL;DR
It is likely that both CN whitepapers on CryptoNote website are forged. It is likely that the genuine v.2 is on bytecoin.org, while the genuine v.1 is on Tor CryptoNote website (ol346fucnsjru223.onion). It is possible that the whitepapers have been copied line by line with a couple of extra mistakes as in the v.1 case. The references that are inconsistent with the v.1 content are not used in the text and might have been inserted to confuse the potential researchers.



This TOR website has already been discussed . It contains CryptoNote whitepaper v.1 dated back December 2012. What I don't understand is that why nobody has attempted to check the whitepaper on this dark web website before. Let's take a thorough look at what TOR conceals.



This is a one-page website that briefly explains CryptoNote technology. It also hosts whitepaper v.1 along with the signature and Saberhagen's public key. Firstly, you can  validate the whitepaper on this website with the published public key.

Moreover, the public keys on bytecoin.org, cryptonote.org, and ol346fucnsjru223.onion, are all the same.



Based on the uniformity across the public keys, I assume that it is likely that the whitepaper from the Tor website is genuine. Let's have a look inside. The internal PDF signatures of the Tor whitepaper and of the one found on the CryptoNote website are almost the same. They differ slightly in size just like two conflicting whitepapers v2.



The interesting part is that the serial numbers on both certificates are the same.




However, the SHA1 digest shows that there is something fishy about these two signatures and they were not created with the same certificate which in turn may indicate an attempt at forgery.




Let's compare the references of the two whitepapers. As we can see, the reference lists differ significantly. The CN deep web whitepaper is on the left, while the CN whitepaper from the official web site is on the right:





A brief analysis shows that the two lists differ by 7 links. The CryptoNote website version has those links, but they are not used in the text. The Tor whitepaper doesn't have those references. One of the unused references in CryptoNote whitepaper points to a public discussion that took place in 2013 while the original whitepaper was published in 2012. One possible explanation is that somebody might have inserted those references so that the whitepaper looked non-legit.

A quick text comparison shows that the two texts do differ from one another. Expectedly, the reference numbers are almost completely different everywhere in the text.



However, there are a few more inconsistencies. On the next screenshot you see the difference in "difficulty" spelling in the same passage of the two whitepapers. The "new text" stands for CryptoNote official web site whitepaper, while the "old text" is the way it appears on Tor website.



On a side note: if you copy the word "difficulty" from the Tor whitepaper and paste it into a text editor you'll get the "di_culty" as a result. As far as I understand, "fi" letters combination is badly interpreted by latex compiler and is replaced in PDF by a special character that looks almost the same as these two letters but can't be copied.



You can find the same mistake on other pages.



The only possible explanation for this discrepancy is that somebody has copied the text line by line and failed to correct certain words. Apparently, the "author" of one of the texts did not have the .tex source of the genuine version of the whitepaper. Which whitepaper has these mistakes while the other doesn't? The one found on CryptoNote website, which leads me to a conclusion that it was forged.

Let's check the XMP properties. They are exactly as they should be (TOR — first, clear web — second)




Tor website whitepaper has the correct dates and the used version of latex compiler existed in 2012. The one found on the CryptoNote official website contains improper XMP tags.

And, finally, if the internal watermark is Saberhagen's actual signature, there should be one in whitepaper v.1. There is no watermark on whitepaper v.1 from the CryptoNote official website, but the one on Tor contains the same watermark as the Bytecoin's whitepaper v.2. Here it is, in the very same place.



It exactly corresponds with the three van Saberhagen's public keys (on all the websites), and the watermark in the whitepaper v.2 from bytecoin.org, which is likely to be genuine.



All of the facts mentioned above lead me to the conclusion that the genuine whitepaper v.1 is on the Tor CryptoNote website and not on the official web site as was largely discussed above.


Results

1. In line with [ur=https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=740112.msg8409063#msg8409063]the previous research on inconsistencies in whitepaper v.2[/url], there is the whitepaper "CryptoNote v.1" that differs from the one published on the CryptoNote official website.

2. The genuine whitepaper v.1 is likely to be on the Tor website. Taking into account all the mistakes in the compromised version of v.1, I assume that this whitepaper has been copied line by line with the exception of the watermark.

3. The genuine whitepaper v.2 is likely to be on Bytecoin.org

4. Since both versions of the genuine whitepaper are consistent with the declared timelines and hold van Saberhagen's public key as the watermark, one can guess that both whitepapers on the CryptoNote official web site are likely to be forged and do not correspond to the actual CryptoNote whitepaper.

5. The public keys on Bytecoin.org, CryptoNote.org, and Tor CN website are the same. This may indicate that the genuine public key is published there.


Implications

This evidence indicates that both whitepapers on CN official website are likely to be fake. It might explain why we find so many inconsistencies with the dates. Apparently, the whitepaper v.1 have been copied line by line with a few mistakes accidentally missed. What's more, someone inserted extra unused links to the references list. The wrong XMP dates may indicate the time when both whitepapers were forged and are likely the artifact that the authors failed to pay attention to (or intentionally left wrong).


TL;DR
It is likely that both CN whitepapers on CryptoNote website are forged. It is likely that the genuine v.2 is on bytecoin.org, while the genuine v.1 is on Tor CryptoNote website (ol346fucnsjru223.onion). It is possible that the whitepapers have been copied line by line with a couple of extra mistakes as in the v.1 case. The references that are inconsistent with the v.1 content are not used in the text and might have been inserted to confuse the potential researchers.



Thanks for your work. You confirmed my suggestions that someone is trying to discredit the CryptoNote technology along with all the CN-based coins.


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August 22, 2014, 01:10:51 PM
 #257

Thanks for your work. You confirmed my suggestions that someone is trying to discredit the CryptoNote technology along with all the CN-based coins.

Just throwing this out there, but if the correct whitepaper was on the Bytecoin domain all along and on the TOR Cryptonote site, how can we trust that CryptoNote.org is genuine? What if they falsified the whitepapers on purpose?

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August 22, 2014, 01:14:49 PM
Last edit: August 22, 2014, 01:53:00 PM by psterryl
 #258


TL;DR
It is likely that both CN whitepapers on CryptoNote website are forged. It is likely that the genuine v.2 is on bytecoin.org, while the genuine v.1 is on Tor CryptoNote website (ol346fucnsjru223.onion). It is possible that the whitepapers have been copied line by line with a couple of extra mistakes as in the v.1 case. The references that are inconsistent with the v.1 content are not used in the text and might have been inserted to confuse the potential researchers.



act now, thank you for doing this analysis. Certainly raises some questions regarding the 'forged dates' basis of a large part of this discussion, and suggests that the (original) v.1 may indeed have been created in late 2012.

What I now don't understand is why bother doing a line-by-line copy to 'forge' the whitepapers when you could just download and rehost the original PDFs?  The only conclusion that I can come to is someone trying to discredit the CN team. Does anyone else have any possible theories? What I would really like is for one of the original Cryptonote developers to identify themselves and speak out publicly on this issue.

I don't really want to weigh in on the whole BCN/BBR/DCN/etc conspiracy and I feel that the developers of those coins are free to do whatever they want, provided they're not trying to scam people. I also feel it's best for everyone if we keep this civil and don't attack each other/each other's coin of preference, but as is always the case with discussions on the internet, it's not possible to stop everyone from doing this as people get emotionally invested. Live and let live is my attitude.

Disclosure: I hold (a relatively small) amount of XMR, but I want to see the Cryptonote technology flourish. It's hard to see how anyone could come out on top after a 'scorched earth' situation that this could easily result in.

Edit:

dated back December 2012.

Uh, no. Fail.

Try again scammers.



So yeah seems the 'real' v1 could just as easily have been backdated.

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August 22, 2014, 01:19:47 PM
 #259

Thanks for your work. You confirmed my suggestions that someone is trying to discredit the CryptoNote technology along with all the CN-based coins.

Just throwing this out there, but if the correct whitepaper was on the Bytecoin domain all along and on the TOR Cryptonote site, how can we trust that CryptoNote.org is genuine? What if they falsified the whitepapers on purpose?

The only motivation I can imagine for this would be to discredit CryptoNote/CN coins as Hexah suggested. Maybe I'm not seeing every angle to the situation but it's hard to envision what else a nefarious actor would have to gain from illegitimately controlling the CryptoNote.org domain. Spread dissent from within and the whole community destroys itself.
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August 22, 2014, 01:22:00 PM
 #260

Thanks for your work. You confirmed my suggestions that someone is trying to discredit the CryptoNote technology along with all the CN-based coins.

Just throwing this out there, but if the correct whitepaper was on the Bytecoin domain all along and on the TOR Cryptonote site, how can we trust that CryptoNote.org is genuine? What if they falsified the whitepapers on purpose?

It also might be the case. Someone replaced the files. It's either themselves, either a traitor inside, or an outsider attacking the website.

All three variants seem bullshit though. I'd like to hear more from CN team first before lynching them.
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