My suspicion is that AEON represents nice upside - it has only ~2% of Monero's market cap, but 99% of it's released features.  Using his reputation and position as a Monero core dev, quite easy for Smooth to start building up AEON, and with the lack of any real difference to the feature set from Monero, and with Moneo's own dev working 5x more on Aeon than Monero, AEON suddenly becomes an attractive buy and up goes the market cap....and Smooth was in, quietly (until I started pointing out), at the start.  Of course, just my opinion.

Except P2P networks are not Byzantine fault tolerant against Sybil attacks.

Skycoin's white paper proves that only need 0.9% of the top-tier nodes to take over a reputation linked network.

And wikipedia also documents that virtual synchrony is not Byzantine fault tolerant.

If you are just doing a vote (quorum), then isn't essentially proof-of-stake which can be gamed unless the entropy is unbounded.

Again if I had an incentive I could try to follow all that and explain why it is unsound. But I don't have an incentive. So you all can proceed with adhoc design if that is what you want to believe will win. I believe those with higher scholarly knowledge will win. We understand what Byzantine fault tolerance means.

Again I am not saying you are wrong, because I haven't studied Dash lately and I don't have time to. It is giant obfuscation for me to try to dig into. Does even have a stable white paper that justifies the Byzantine fault tolerance?

Maybe it is designed to take out all the other CN clones except the market leader to clear out the system to two coins both controlled by "trusted leadership"?

Does sort of make one wonder if smooth was trying to prove that cryptocurrency is dead because it can be cloned and siphon value.

But it could also be that Monero may be planning to change its anonymity algorithm from CN to this new thing that mixes all the transactions in the block, so maybe AEON will retain the CN functionality and so he can invest on both technologies.

And then he needs to invest in mine too  

Hey what is the problem with competition?

I do think you have a point though that it is better to invest in a coin where the lead developer is totally committed. And that lead dev is committed to improving only his ecosystem to stay ahead of the competition. I find that to be a valid point. Who is that developer for Monero? fluffypony?

I think the main issue you had with him is whether he is excessively expending time repeating criticisms over and over in other coins' threads. Again that is a subjective criticism.

Well honestly I attacked VNL before smooth did I think this week. It was because someone pinged me in PM asking my opinion. Then I was shocked to see there was no documentation of the zerotime algorithm which is the main claim. But now I need to go read the detailed zerotime paper just released to see if I need to rescind my criticism or not. I created extra work for myself, but maybe I will learn something so okay.

Btw, thanks for informing me about AEON.

This altcoin strategies world is quite stressful.

I am just hoping there is one set of designs that is so clearly superior that everyone for the most part just realizes it and capitulates without the need for any grinding animosity and tearing at each other. And I hope it is my design, lol  

Peace.

If you have 30 minutes of spare time I would advice you to watch this, basically explains how Monero (AEON) works -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEVm1dMn5Ks

This is veering off topic and I'm going to respect that even on this troll thread, but in short Monero has done an enormous amount of work to improve the code. I think fluffypony posted that something like 100K lines of code had been added or rewritten (I don't know the exact numbers). I know there have been >1000 commits in the main repo (and unlike the repos such as bitcoin forks, this does not include upstream commits -- that's 1000 actual Monero commits) plus the repos. Monero has also produced four MRL research reports, plus a few other mathy documents.

AEON is a much smaller and newer project in practical terms, as we've only been working on it for a few months with me as the only coder, part-time (we also have another team member but he is not a coder), I'm the only coder. In that time, there is a modified proof of work algorithm and slower block time (with a hard fork implemented to change these with zero observed disruption of the network), better connection management in the p2p, portability cleanups for low end hardware (some of these are from Monero, others will be pulled back up to Monero), some optimizations of speed and storage. AEON also addressed, in a novel way, the anonymity problems revealed by MRL-0001. In fact AEON likely has the strongest deployed anonymity of any coin today (aside from the important fact of not having much use which makes the anonymity sets small), though eventually Monero will get there too.

Better to follow up on the Monero/AEON threads please if you wan more detail.

Of these 1000 commits, 9 were Smooth, if you're interested they break down like this:

https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/commits?author=iamsmooth

Nov 9, 2014 Change 6 lines of codes, temporary bug fix
Nov 11, 2014 Commented out 2 lines of code
March 5, 2015 4 lines to change a variable and add IF statement
March 5, 2015 Added 4 lines of code, in the form of a comment
March 6, 2015 Added one line of code (a checkpoint)
March 10, 2015 Changing a default value and an IF statement, 6 lines of code
Apr 5, 2015 4 lines of code and a comment
Apr 5, 2015 2 lines of code to handle a rounding
Apr 14, 2015 Remove a define, 1 line changed

Also Smooth, just saying you have 1000 commits is a bit vague - looking at your work, that doesn't necessarily mean new features were created, nearly all your work for Monero was changing a few comments, disabling or enabling something, changing a variable name - how is that "rewriting" anything or adding lots of new code?

It's becoming kind of ridiculous to call Smooth a "Monero dev" at this stage, I don't think I can honestly say that anymore.