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Author Topic: Blowing the lid off the CryptoNote/Bytecoin scam (with the exception of Monero)  (Read 132809 times)
rethink-your-strategy (OP)
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August 15, 2014, 08:15:37 AM
Last edit: June 23, 2015, 09:26:51 AM by rethink-your-strategy
Merited by smooth (30), malevolent (20), Hueristic (10), GingerAle (10), suchmoon (7), jeffthebaker (5)
 #1

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 Archive.org. 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.
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arbitrage001
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August 15, 2014, 08:27:22 AM
 #2

We all know all altcoins are pump and dump, this is nothing new.

My question is, how are you benefiting from revealing the "truth"?

rethink-your-strategy (OP)
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August 15, 2014, 08:38:19 AM
 #3

We all know all altcoins are pump and dump, this is nothing new.

My question is, how are you benefiting from revealing the "truth"?

Well ya know, CryptoNote is a brand new protocol, and the cryptography is sound. I don't want to remove the focus from that. What I'm blowing the lid on is providing evidence that Bytecoin is definitely not 2 years old as they claim, and that any of the coins that are backed by the CryptoNote developers should be considered unsound and unsafe. The only CryptoNote-based coin that is definitely not in any way associated with their scammy bullshit is Monero, and that's because they took it away from the CryptoNote fuckers. I like the CryptoNote technology/protocol, I fucking hate the scamshit they had along with it. Whether you think Monero is good or not is a separate issue, and that you should make your own mind up.

99% of my holdings are in Bitcoin, and I own a small amount of Monero, so my motivation is not driven by that. My motivation is the same as it was when I blew the lid on Radar's scammy-as-fuck Alt Casino Shares. The truth will come out one way or another, I happen to just be the messenger this time around.
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August 15, 2014, 08:41:18 AM
 #4

You tried hard for this thread. I know a little about Monero, but know an expert who might discuss with you. I will tell him about it.
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August 15, 2014, 08:50:01 AM
 #5

Regardless of CryptoNote being a scam or NOT, you should be commended for your analytical skills and the amount of effort you put into this.
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August 15, 2014, 09:01:25 AM
 #6

Good detective work. I feel relieved that Monero is not one of them.
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August 15, 2014, 09:12:19 AM
 #7

Regardless of CryptoNote being a scam or NOT, you should be commended for your analytical skills and the amount of effort you put into this.

I agree - this is a mountain of information to go through:)

OP, I'd like to thank you for confirming the suspicions many of us involved with Monero have held for quite some time. There are a handful of things I'd like to comment on.

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.

I'm a moderator in the subreddit, and I can confirm that this happens on a daily basis. There are around 60 separate sock-puppet accounts we've found posting in the Monero subreddit. The creation dates are all between the 23rd of Jan and the 9th of Feb this year.

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.

The core team consists of 7 people, and we hail from all over the world and are multi-faceted in our knowledge. This does mean we're sanity-checking each other, to be sure. Pretty much all of us have been around for well over a year, which I'm sure contributes as well. We try to keep our development as transparent as possible, and we publish all of our development efforts and links to dev branches on github in our weekly Dev Diary (part of the Monero Missives).

Thank you for the vote of confidence and for the effort you put in to uncovering this.

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August 15, 2014, 09:15:56 AM
 #8

As a Dashcoin developer I can assure you that the things you think about Dashcoin are simply not true. Donations are for community projects, as it's clearly written in our thread. You can see where all the coins go if you read it.
Also, if you think automation is a free process, think again. It's cheaper (I am talking about time, not money), not free.
And the conclusion that we are part of the Bytecoin/Cryptonote team are just nonsense. Give me a probable game theory answer why a member of Bytecoin/Cryptonote will do that project.
From all the coins you mentioned, only FantomCoin seems to be a probable project of Bytecoin/Cryptonote member. But there is also a good change their developer is just a pure genius with no relation to Bytecoin/Cryptonote team.

Forknote (create cryptocurrenies easy) - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1079306.0
Dashcoin (anonymous cryptocurrency) - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1020627.0
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August 15, 2014, 09:38:36 AM
 #9

Agreed 100% with everything you said. I'll also add that the mining algorithms are exploitable in Cryptonote based coins.

My negative trust rating is reflective of a personal vendetta by someone on default trust.
rethink-your-strategy (OP)
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August 15, 2014, 09:46:18 AM
 #10

As a Dashcoin developer I can assure you that the things you think about Dashcoin are simply not true. Donations are for community projects, as it's clearly written in our thread. You can see where all the coins go if you read it.
Also, if you think automation is a free process, think again. It's cheaper (I am talking about time, not money), not free.
And the conclusion that we are part of the Bytecoin/Cryptonote team are just nonsense. Give me a probable game theory answer why a member of Bytecoin/Cryptonote will do that project.
From all the coins you mentioned, only FantomCoin seems to be a probable project of Bytecoin/Cryptonote member. But there is also a good change their developer is just a pure genius with no relation to Bytecoin/Cryptonote team.

lol are you fucking serious?

https://github.com/dashcoin/dashcoin/compare/amjuarez:master...master

The changes are bullshit and can mostly be auto-merged, you fucking cretin. Or even better:

Code:
git clone https://github.com/dashcoin/dashcoin.git
cd dashcoin
git remote add upstream https://github.com/amjuarez/bytecoin.git
git fetch upstream
git rebase upstream/master

But you can't do that, because you've been merging manually, because you're a retarded fuckface that is part of the Bytecoin/CryptoNote crew.

We're not as stupid as you imagine we are, scammer.
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August 15, 2014, 09:51:31 AM
 #11

I'll also add that the mining algorithms are exploitable in Cryptonote based coins.

Can you elaborate that?
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August 15, 2014, 09:53:56 AM
 #12

Now this is personal, moron.

Calling me a shill is like calling you XMR shill. I can compile the same text mentioning you and Monero. What would I put in this text?

- Monero stole ("forking" lol) the tech they don't even understand away from TFT and now pretending that this is absolutely legitimate
- Unbelievably silly updates were so often that XMR had to switch to GUI to stop breaking the protocol
- Instamining, with Monero fast miner available to a few lucky individuals benefiting from it for weeks
- Monero botnets that have been ripping regular users off since the very launch
- I can name countless Monero accounts that are mere shills and can even indicate the strategic priorities that they have and instructions in case something goes wrong (although I'm still not sure if you're a shill which is most likely however)
- It would be fun to show for instance that Monero has very little actual community and the trades are likely to be fueled by botnets and fake trades
- Until recently Monero was stealing each and every Bytecoin's update and then posted on numerous occasions that it was actually Bytecoin who plagiarized the code (that's unbelievable)
- Plagiarizing CryptoNote developer's code in the XMR repository
- Fake press releases "signed" by the US federal government  (and the claims that Monero doesn't do any PR except for the team mentioned hiring a couple of PR agencies just a week before that)

I can go on and on. Would you like the proof links or did you get my message? There's a ton of bullshit that anyone can make up or find "evidence" for.

I have always praised Monero team for doing extremely good at PR. However, this one is way too insane to be even looking legitimate. It's good to know that XMR is that desperate they have to write megabytes of nonsense text instead of working on their currency.
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August 15, 2014, 09:58:28 AM
 #13

relink-your-strategy r3wt

My XDN address: xdn.io/name/ikanunaki
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August 15, 2014, 09:59:17 AM
 #14

What can we say of this "smooth" charachter. The postings of this account were dead for an extended period of time then suddenly it begins posting again. I'm thinking its possibly a purchased account

I'll also add that the mining algorithms are exploitable in Cryptonote based coins.

Can you elaborate that?

I had a discussion with an exchange owner in which we were marveling at the crude mechanism of the mining algorithm. This person asserted that some small changes could be made to make to the client to make it advantageous for a gpu. I mean, some of it was over my head but its probably blatantly obvious for anyone who knows their stuff.

My negative trust rating is reflective of a personal vendetta by someone on default trust.
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August 15, 2014, 09:59:49 AM
 #15

relink-your-strategy r3wt

huh

My negative trust rating is reflective of a personal vendetta by someone on default trust.
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August 15, 2014, 10:05:13 AM
Last edit: August 15, 2014, 10:22:18 AM by smooth
 #16

- Plagiarizing CryptoNote developer's code in the XMR repository

You're likely wrong about every single one of your accusations against Monero (I didn't take the time to go through them all) but this one is probably the most silly since everyone can verify that every single file in the Monero github has a Cryptonote copyright notice (don't shoot me if one or two are missing).

Quote
pla·gia·rize
ˈplājəˌrīz/
verb
take (the work or an idea of someone else) and pass it off as one's own

Nothing is being passed off here. Everyone knows that Monero is a cryptonote fork, and apparently cryptonote is in favor of forks. They even provide their own automated tool to create a cryptonote fork: https://cryptonotestarter.org/

So I have no idea who the hell you or what your agenda might be but accusing Monero of plagiarism of the cryptonote code is way off base.

It is also false with respect to any bug fixes that have been merged from upstream (or elsewhere). They have been credited as far as I know. If you know of a case where that did not happen let me know and I will have it fixed.
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August 15, 2014, 10:06:45 AM
 #17

Maybe you should add the "[CryptoNote] A complete forking guide to create your own CryptoNote currency" thread as part of the "scam".

Monero had gained a lot of attention but because the mysterious devs didn't manage to financially gain from Monero's rise, they attempted to do a "scorched earth" approach to create a bunch of useless coins to dilute the CryptoNote "brand", trying to eliminate the network effect of Monero. But that didn't exactly go as planned either. They thought that if they couldn't have fame and fortune then no other CN coins should too.
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August 15, 2014, 10:08:14 AM
 #18

What can we say of this "smooth" charachter. The postings of this account were dead for an extended period of time then suddenly it begins posting again. I'm thinking its possibly a purchased account

Nope. I just lost interest in bitcoin for a while when the price crashed (which is why my account is not Hero by now). If someone were to buy an account from 2011, they'd be pretty stupid not to buy a Hero account.




rethink-your-strategy (OP)
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August 15, 2014, 10:19:58 AM
 #19

Calling me a shill is like calling you XMR shill. I can compile the same text mentioning you and Monero. What would I put in this text?

Nigga please. It's not personal. It's busting your shitscam wide open. This has nothing to do with Monero, and reacting the way you have just proves how fucking caught out y'all are. It's fucking hilarious that you don't defend CryptoNote and Bytecoin, but switch to attacking Monero. What planet do you live on, fucktard?

- Monero stole ("forking" lol) the tech they don't even understand away from TFT and now pretending that this is absolutely legitimate

Wat. You understand how forking works in open source don't you??

- Unbelievably silly updates were so often that XMR had to switch to GUI to stop breaking the protocol

There's no GUI yet except some third-party shit. I use the command-line wallet. Nothing is broken, stop being desperate.

- Instamining, with Monero fast miner available to a few lucky individuals benefiting from it for weeks

Prove it. There was a graph posted a few days ago somewhere that showed the network hash rate leading up to the crippled miner being released and that proves you wrong. But nice try, fuckface.

- Monero botnets that have been ripping regular users off since the very launch

Prove it.

- I can name countless Monero accounts that are mere shills and can even indicate the strategic priorities that they have and instructions in case something goes wrong (although I'm still not sure if you're a shill which is most likely however)

Please name them.

- It would be fun to show for instance that Monero has very little actual community and the trades are likely to be fueled by botnets and fake trades

Prove it.

- Until recently Monero was stealing each and every Bytecoin's update and then posted on numerous occasions that it was actually Bytecoin who plagiarized the code (that's unbelievable)

Well this one is actually interesting because it's something I researched when I was trying to prove that Monero was a Bytecoin project. You'll find that it's the other way around if you actually did any fucking research instead of desperately back-peddling.

Monero commit, May 21: https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/commit/44f61c3965d569c288520b75356ad3bdc68b47d1
Bytecoin copied, May 22: https://github.com/amjuarez/bytecoin/commit/b3e2face1ed91c9ab6bf0c8c9fd8057951697c38

Moner commit, June 2: https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/commit/117393d562fc9782efed0e1b25f6470d9f8102b2#diff-b7ff5388bca1357894178fd7f93d4ad8R80
Bytecoin copied, June 25 (and tried to hide it in another commit!): https://github.com/amjuarez/bytecoin/commit/76bb193b0556aaaa3ffa5d48db7bd28eceb36300#diff-b7ff5388bca1357894178fd7f93d4ad8R62

- Plagiarizing CryptoNote developer's code in the XMR repository

As near as I can see the CryptoNote developers are credited and assigned copyright for their contribution overall, and in every file I looked at that came from the original forking they have given credit and copyright to the CryptoNote developers. The license that Bytecoin/CryptoNote was originally released under is the MIT license, which says this:

Quote
ermission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software
, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

Not only are you a stupid fucking backpeddling sockpuppet scammer, but you're also incapable of reading a fucking license.

- Fake press releases "signed" by the US federal government  (and the claims that Monero doesn't do any PR except for the team mentioned hiring a couple of PR agencies just a week before that)

They denounced that, didn't they? And please link to where they said they "don't do any PR".

I can go on and on. Would you like the proof links or did you get my message? There's a ton of bullshit that anyone can make up or find "evidence" for.

Please go on, and please provide ANY FUCKING EVIDENCE. Idiot. Not a single fucking quote to back your bullshit claims up, typical of the Bytecoin sockpuppets.
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August 15, 2014, 10:21:07 AM
 #20

thanks for your hard work - I was following the cryptonotes from the beginning here.

I think you are right regarding bytecoin and probably some of the merged coins.

What is and was hard for me to understand from the very beginning is the role of the cryptonote team. I have the feeling that there is a loose connection to bytecoin, but they are really interested in the development of their protocol. I was in their forum and it was full of high quality posts as well as serious discussions. Maybe you have better information but I do not think they are scammers, it is more likely that they are academics who are interested in developing the technology.
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