Blowing the lid off the CryptoNote/Bytecoin scam (with the exception of Monero)

[smooth]

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).

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=887482.0
https://github.com/cryptobender/lui

Well, duh, its pretty clear that various people involved here are fans of Futurama. I don't know that necessarily proves anything, many people are.

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[MasterMined710]

Interesting stuff!

[Morton Bitcoin Management]

Thanks for posting all your research! Well done! 

[ArticMine]

Some relevant posts on the impact of the Bytecoin premine / ninjamine on anonymity / privacy / fungibility.

crossposting because it was posted in a moderated thread and 99% certain it will be deleted

CryptoNote assets would be amazing!! If only there wasn't the bad 'smell' around the ~80% premine.

That premine could be a blessing in disguise if it were used to subsidize people who issue and maintain Assets like Bitshares': Assets tied to others.

The 82% premine is indeed a blessing in disguise - they own so many of the outputs in the txoset that they can trivially deanonymise everyone's transactions.

Let me say that again: as 82% of Bytecoin's outputs are controlled by persons unknown to the cryptocurrency community, those unknown entities (or entity) can deanonymise every transaction you make with Bytecoin.

There is no way around this, there is nothing they can do to reduce the attack surface. Even if 1000 sock puppets come forward and claim to own a portion of those outputs it is still impossible for anyone to independently verify.

Technical details of why such massive output ownership is a death knoll can be found in MRL-0001: A Note on Chain Reactions in Traceability in CryptoNote 2.0

Aaaaaand it's gone.

... and the desire of certain vested interests to suppress this information.

"A reply of yours, quoted below, was deleted by the starter of a self-moderated topic. There are no rules of self-moderation, so this deletion cannot be appealed. Do not continue posting in this topic if the topic-starter has requested that you leave.

You can create a new topic if you are unsatisfied with this one. If the topic-starter is scamming, post about it in Scam Accusations."

I'd do it, but you're not worth the effort.

My post lives on in perpetuity: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583449.msg11034402#msg11034402

[smooth]

Don't forget, the scammers' main thread is still unmoderated. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=512747.msg11035551#msg11035551

[ArticMine]

True, but there is a lot of information in this thread that is highly relevant to the vulnerability in question. BCN has after all become a textbook example on how to break Cryptonote by creating a massive ninjamine / premine.

[smooth]

True, but there is a lot of information in this thread that is highly relevant to the vulnerability in question. BCN has after all become a textbook example on how to break Cryptonote by creating a massive ninjamine / premine.

Yes I agree, both are relevant places to discuss it.

[Este Nuno]

Yeah, I've noticed the Bytecoin scam team is trying mount a bit of a comeback and lure in unsuspecting people who are probably not familiar with what actually happened.

Definitely a good time to get this thread out again to hopefully save some people money.

[Nxtblg]

Some relevant posts on the impact of the Bytecoin premine / ninjamine on anonymity / privacy / fungibility.

crossposting because it was posted in a moderated thread and 99% certain it will be deleted

CryptoNote assets would be amazing!! If only there wasn't the bad 'smell' around the ~80% premine.

That premine could be a blessing in disguise if it were used to subsidize people who issue and maintain Assets like Bitshares': Assets tied to others.

The 82% premine is indeed a blessing in disguise - they own so many of the outputs in the txoset that they can trivially deanonymise everyone's transactions.

Let me say that again: as 82% of Bytecoin's outputs are controlled by persons unknown to the cryptocurrency community, those unknown entities (or entity) can deanonymise every transaction you make with Bytecoin.

There is no way around this, there is nothing they can do to reduce the attack surface. Even if 1000 sock puppets come forward and claim to own a portion of those outputs it is still impossible for anyone to independently verify.

Technical details of why such massive output ownership is a death knoll can be found in MRL-0001: A Note on Chain Reactions in Traceability in CryptoNote 2.0

Aaaaaand it's gone.

Thanks for preserving the answer - it's the first time I saw it.

[Rias]

I hope you don't mind me cross-posting:

That is quite an insulting statement to both Bytecoin devs and the community members.

Do you mind me explaining you why I disagree?

When you see Bytecoin for the first time, you notice something distinctive about it among a thousand of various coins. There are only a handful of such projects on the market. It breathes change, it gives market radically new things to experiment with. There are only a handful of other projects that are this huge in technology terms. It was the first to implement anonymity in cryptocurrencies. That was a hard one to crack for the crypto, wasn't it? It gave birth to a diverse multi-million market, it allowed new projects to emerge, new strong communities to gather, it breathed in new ideas. That's what makes Bytecoin truly inspiring.

Bytecoin roadmap may potentially be very huge. Colored coins, digital assets, scripts. Currently there is not to many projects daring to implement such features. When I think about the potential system that Bytecoin can become, I do wish them luck. I like thinking that we almost live in future. I support projects like Bytecoin because they advance it.

And as far as I can judge from the latest release and post on Bytecoin engine, they Bytecoin devs know what they're doing.

As for your claims about the scam, you should be telling the other side of the story too. Certain people were too fast too lynch both Bytecoin and CryptoNote while there were evidence that this is incorrect [1] [2].

In any case, you may not trust, but you may wait and see.

its an obvious scam!
if the team at least would have been honest at start we could talk about it. but taking an 80% premine and try to tell us its from 2012? stupid liars!

I don't blame you for being harsh, but could you possibly consider re-reading what I've written above. You may not believe me now, this doesn't change a thing.
Again, I'm telling you, the idea that Bytecoin did not exist in 2012 is absurd and meaningless. Now back to the pillar of your argumentation ([[1] and [2] are clickable and you may read on):

Certain people were too fast too lynch both Bytecoin and CryptoNote while there were evidence that this is incorrect [1] [2].

[cAPSLOCK]

I hope you don't mind me cross-posting:

Is it true?

[smooth]

I hope you don't mind me cross-posting:

Yes, let's cross post shall we

As for your claims about the scam, you should be telling the other side of the story too. Certain people were too fast too lynch both Bytecoin and CryptoNote while there were evidence that this is incorrect [1] [2].

That 'evidence' is bullshit. I was around and I verified the original claims of rethink-your-strategy (as did others) before content on web sites started getting changed to support "alternative explanations" (euphemism for obfuscation, denial, and doubling down on the fraud). The people making claims against the original evidence are either obvious shill accounts or very likely (if not proven; I'm not sure) purchased accounts. There are certainly proven purchased accounts associated with the fraud, so I expect that in any case.

I agree with you that the crypto work on Bytecoin was very good. I'm less impressed with the recent coding work, as the quality has been rather poor (for example, the wallet still crashes under some easy-to-reproduce conditions).

But in any case if the developers of Bytecoin have more of an interest in the technology (and in making a difference to humanity as claimed by the quasi-spirtual stuff they disseminate) than in scamming money from crypto investors with a fraudulent premine and ongoing effort to cover-up, they should either redirect their talents to contributing to one of the few truly open source and transparent cryptocurrency projects such as Bitcoin or Monero, or if they must, they can start their own, which means a new project with a transparent launch, open participation (i.e. not committing tens of thousands of lines to github at one time with no process visibilty to or participation by outsiders), etc.

If they fail to do this their motives are clear.

[aminorex]

There have been several cryptonotes.  None achieved a level of community support so well as XMR, and AFICT, always because of issues of transparency, misrepresentation, contract stability.  (The latter can be construed to include a credibly sustainable development trajectory.)

[Eastwind]

There have been several cryptonotes.  None achieved a level of community support so well as XMR, and AFICT, always because of issues of transparency, misrepresentation, contract stability.  (The latter can be construed to include a credibly sustainable development trajectory.)

Bytecoin could be the "bitcoin" of cryptonotes, however, it has serious premining issue.

[Este Nuno]

There have been several cryptonotes.  None achieved a level of community support so well as XMR, and AFICT, always because of issues of transparency, misrepresentation, contract stability.  (The latter can be construed to include a credibly sustainable development trajectory.)

Bytecoin could be the "bitcoin" of cryptonotes, however, it has serious premining issue.

had Bytecoin not been launched with such strange premine/ninjamine/instamine, Monero would probably still exist but Bytecoin would have attracted a much larger and actually legit community..

It might have just stayed as BitMonero and died off like many other CN forks.

I can't believe how badly Bytecoin people messed up their chance to lead the market. Their greed overcame any sort of common sense.

[fluffypony]

The only thing clear is that you are a lying scumbag who can't achieve any more than a cut and paste of cryptonote/bytecoin.

For months you have been peddling the lie that cryptonote/bytecoin was totally flaky, amateurish code and that only the Monero Devs are capable of cleaning up and enhancing the original code. When you are proved wrong, and a lying bullshitter you start attacking the cryptonote/bytecoin devs directly!

You, and your cut-paste coin have been busted!

That's nonsense - we've often said that large swathes of code are/were purposely obfuscated (eg. the PoW that we've heavily refactored and commented), that there were bizarre design decisions (eg. the overuse of templating to the point where parts of the code are an unmanageable mess), and that comments are not just missing but aggressively stripped out (eg. when the Bytecoin devs "borrowed" our payment ID RPC code, and "forgot" to credit us, they stripped out all of the comments from our code).

It is also quite clear, given the Monero Research Lab publications we have already put out, that there are massively flawed aspects of the cryptography that have needed much attention. The attacks described in MRL-0001, MRL-0002, and MRL-0004 remain unaddressed by the sockpuppets pretending to be the CryptoNote or Bytecoin "team".

Nobody said that the current Bytecoin developer was incapable of layering on top of the existing codebase that the previous Bytecoin developers created, but none of that makes a single bit of difference when you have a cryptocurrency that is trivially deanonymised by the group holding 82% of the outputs.

Personally, I would have loved for some of the original developers or the cryptographer to have joined us on Monero and scrapped Bytecoin as untenable in the long run, but the continuous doubling-down on the lies and revisionist history makes it clear that they have chosen otherwise. Trying to paint Monero in a bad light doesn't make your scam shine as a beacon of truth, it just sullies its infamous reputation even further.

[cbeast]

Is this the new Dogecoin?

[mmortal03]

Is this the new Dogecoin?

Dogecoin and Monero are not very similar. The only thing about Dogecoin that is relevant to Monero right now is that it is the next PoW, fairly distributed coin on the coinmarketcap.com list for Monero to pass: http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/views/filter-non-mineable-and-premined/

[cbeast]

Is this the new Dogecoin?

Dogecoin and Monero are not very similar. The only thing about Dogecoin that is relevant to Monero right now is that it is the next PoW, fairly distributed coin on the coinmarketcap.com list for Monero to pass: http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/views/filter-non-mineable-and-premined/

It looks like it has surpassed Doge by a large margin per USD. My comment was more about the community behind it. It's interesting technology, but I have always been against the anonymity of electronic cash. Physical gold is anonymous enough.

[nachoig]

There have been several cryptonotes.  None achieved a level of community support so well as XMR, and AFICT, always because of issues of transparency, misrepresentation, contract stability.  (The latter can be construed to include a credibly sustainable development trajectory.)

Bytecoin could be the "bitcoin" of cryptonotes, however, it has serious premining issue.

had Bytecoin not been launched with such strange premine/ninjamine/instamine, Monero would probably still exist but Bytecoin would have attracted a much larger and actually legit community..

No. Monero (initially BitMonero) was launched by the same people behind Bytecoin. If Bytecoin wouldn't have the premine, they wouldn't think about creating another coin.