That made my day.

I think the only "glitch" has been the initial release of crippled mining software. It is assumed that the scammers were mining from the beginning with an optimized miner. I think this was fixed within the first couple of months. There is a blog post by David Anderson that described this problem.

Thanks for the answers so far.  Its important to try to understand the distribution of monero, especially in the early part of its life-cycle.  If the distribution seems skewed to relatively few people, then the chance for profits may not be that great.  Again, thanks for the replies.

So let me make sure I understand this correctly:  At the start of the Monero life-cycle, the Monero mining software was also released.  This mining software was not very efficient (to put it simply) and was used for a few months.  It seems that the software was so inefficient, that it is possible that it may have been done by design.  And it is also possible that a more efficient software may have been used by insiders along side the less efficient software. Other people looked at the code, and concluded that they could optimize it greatly. And they did (after a few months since initial release).  Do I have this correct?  I am just trying to get a good grasp of what is going on before I invest too much time and money into it.  BTW, I am not knocking Monero, or anybody involved in the project at all.  I appreciate everybody's interest and hard work on Monero.  But I do have to do my due diligience. :-)

The "glitch" in the obfuscated miner was fixed extremely fast (by NoodleDoodle, one of the core team members), a lot faster than most people remember. At the time it was a pretty big deal.

Specifically, the change was commited May 7th, so ~19 days from launch = 2.58% of initial emission mined up to that point (we have infinite tail emission, but still use the 18.4 million initial emission as a reference point). This was roughly a 2.5x speed improvement over the original (sorry smooth, I was misremembering yesterday). There was an additional speed bump, once AES-NI support was added on May 18th, and that was an additional ~5x speed improvement, so by the time the first month had passed we'd improved the miner efficiency by more than 12x and made those changes publicly available.

A good exercise is to look at a logarithmic hashrate chart for the period:



You can see the initial spike as speculative miners start CPU mining, and then a continual ramp-up, with spikes on May 4th-8th and again on May 19th-20th, but neither of those spikes are orders of magnitude greater than the initial spike.

Remember, too, that at the time the core team that you know and love today didn't know each other. I knew othe a bit (online), but I'd never even had a passing pm with any of the others. Plus the community as a whole, largely spearheaded by those who would become the core team, were in the process of taking it over after things with thankful_for_today were...not working out;) So collusion on any level would have been unlikely, and if we did collude with the intent to scam you can bet we would have run with an improved miner for a lot longer than a couple of days. We would have mined for many months with only small improvements to the hashing function, and added lots of whiz-bang features to build the price up whilst we built up our stash.

Also to add, here's a log chart for all time:



You can see the onboarding of speculative miners and the improvements in hashing efficiency up till 2014-05-20, after which all changes were largely inconsequential. At that point 826k XMR had been mined, so we're talking about dga and others competing with our public improvements to the hash function that everyone used for a piece of 4.49% of the initial emission. It was a bit of an arms race, although the miners that were just pulling the changes that were committed to the repo were not at much of a disadvantage (in fact they were probably at an advantage, as they were able to expend more energy spinning up AWS instances since they weren't trying to optimise code:-P )

Thanks for the replies fluffypony.  I suppose that we can conclude that Monero was fairly mined in the beginning and also out to its current state.  I also read a bit more about the "attack" that happened in September which sounds like it wasn't much of an attack or compromise really.  All in all, I would say that Monero is very robust.  On with the Grand Experiment...

First, I understand and appreciate your concern and the fact that you are honestly seeking knowledge and accepting factual answers.

The bit that caught my attention is "then the chance for profits may not be that great."

Really?

Because:

1 - The great banking cabals of the world in bed with governments have reaped some unfathomable profits over the course of history. They continue to do so. Sure, this may be a simplification of things to say so, but for brevity's sake, I believe it to be a valid statement.

2 - Several, if not many, cryptocurrencies in the altcoin space have allowed "insiders" and informed and/or lucky speculators to reap significant profits through trading, and there are some with extremely shady histories that continue to hold good value, despite an early "distribution (that) seems skewed to relatively few people."

With these examples duly pointed out, I again will state how I completely understand your desire to know the facts surrounding Monero. I am the same way. I think the overwhelming majority of this community is too.

While it does not forgive dishonesty and treachery, unfortunately, good intentions and "chance for profits" are not always directly proportional.

     Hrmm, that is a pretty good point.  I should have used another term other than profit (although that is a motivator for a lot of people).  I am all about sovereign money.  With the advent of cryptocurrencies, each person is a "bank" unto themselves.  The profit here is the benefits of using cryptographically secured money.  It ensures privacy in transactions and also ensures choice in what you do with your money (hence a great profit/benefit).

     This important invention (cryptocurrency secured with consensus) has been vastly underestimated in its profit to society.  My first scary thought when I really understood bitcoin a few years ago after falling down the cryptocurrency rabbit hole, was that government would imprison/coerce/harass to keep this from spreading widely.  We have seen this already with what happened to people like Brian Micon and Burt Wagner. Its a very powerful idea to say the least, and, as an aside, there should be no question that Monero is the best implementation, even eclipsing bitcoin.