I'd like to address the comments that have been bouncing around, particularly the points AlexGr raised. I read some of the back-and-forth, and I'm glad we are debating and engaging like this.
As a brief history lesson, do you remember Tenebrix? It was the first scrypt-based coin. To quote
Buffer Overflow's thoughts on the matter: "The block reward at block 1 was 7769999.00000000 TBX, then continues with 25.00000000 TBX for each block after that." Tenebrix was unabashedly premined, just as BCN has been. Litecoin cloned Tenebrix (Artforz was even the main developer contributing code to both Tenebrix and Litecoin), added a few small changes and bug fixes, and there you have it. Nobody really remembers Tenebrix or even Fairbrix (fair relaunch of Tenebrix by Coblee, who launched Litecoin at roughly the same time - it died due to lack of any hashrate which made a 51% attack trivial), but Litecoin? Well. Need I say more.
I do not think any of us have any bug-bear with the BCN developers. But it is a fallacy to believe that they are wizards that wrote the code and therefore the only people capable of maintaining it, as was already demonstrated in the Tenebrix Litecoin debacle. Litecoin certainly didn't need to wait for lolcust to make code changes for them to fix bugs and improve the codebase.
I also feel we should challenge BCN's claimed 2 years of blockchain data for several reasons:
- The blockchain was not publicly observable or observed for those 2 years. We have no reason to believe it is true, and even if it was true it still means that ~151 billion of the 184 billion BCN (82%) were mined prior to its public release. Think about that pragmatically. Would you want to use a currency where unknown actors controlled over 80% of it? This alone takes Bytecoin from being decentralised to being centralised by virtue of those controlling the flow of the currency.
- Thus far we have not had any outpouring of public, known figures stating that they have used BCN for the past few years and can back up the 2 year claim. This means that the 151 billion is in the hands of people unknown, unknowable, and untrustworthy. Not only can they perform massive market manipulation with that, but everyone is left dabbling in the shallow end of the pool. Practically: at the current block reward the BCN network will spit out ~82.5 million coins a day down to ~44.7 million at the end of the year. That means that between now and the end of the year (224 days) the network will produce around 13.83 billion coins in a supposedly fair manner, or about 7.6%, barely enough to swing a cat much less affect the power wielded by those controlling 82% of the supply. By comparison, Monero has had 846 707 coins mined to date, of a total of ~18.4 million coins, or 4.6%, which leaves the market wide open for all to participate.
- The CryptoNote whitepaper
was published on October 17, 2013, and the
first commit to the Github repo was on November 15, 2013. By means of a comparison: Satoshi Nakamoto released the Bitcoin whitepaper in November 2008, and the network started in January 2009 with the first client, a not-too-disimilar timeframe. Had the BCN network started in November nobody would be questioning it. Rather, it stands to reason, by all accounts, that the individual(s) behind the CryptoNote whitepaper either wrote the initial code and gave it to the Bytecoin developer(s) who then ran with this, falsified a blockchain (trivial), and released it publicly in March after blockchain falsification was complete.
- The BCN mining code shipped purposely crippled, presumably as a way of making the falsified blockchain seem legitimate. Not just weird or written by a cryptographer who doesn't know how to optimise, but purposely crippled for slow mining. Things like recalculating a static value in every iteration of a loop instead of just once at the beginning is not a mistake, especially when viewed in light of the claimed 2 year history. Did nobody care to optimise the hashing code in 2 years, not even to improve the amount of time it takes to download and verify a blockchain from scratch? I find that unlikely. On the other hand: if you
glance at our Github commits you'll notice that in two iterations (26c1a8569c and 49d55d3c30, primarily) we first improved the hashing by 2x its initial performance, and then further improved it to 12x its initial performance. It appears that the BCN devs are so lazy they haven't even merged our changes in, so everyone mining on their network has either used our changes or is mining 12x slower than they could. Or they just have a significantly faster miner already and couldn't be bothered.
- On their website, wherein they claim 2 years of stable work, they say: "Launched back in July 2012, Bytecoin has proved that it is going to stay for years to come." If that was the case, how did they not notice critical issues in the RPC API? The documentation on their wiki is blatantly incorrect (adding a trailing slash to the JSON RPC API URL causes a 404), and running simplewallet in RPC API mode tends to silently lose its connection to the daemon every few hours. That's a surprising issue not to have picked up in 2 years - was nobody using the RPC API in the wallet? None of the BCN merchants accepting payments needed to track said payments automatically? This seems highly improbable.
Monero is not merely a fair relaunch of an existing cryptocurrency. It is unashamedly a fair relaunch of Bytecoin, but the changes and bugfixes and improvements made in under a month speak volumes for the commitment we have to improving Monero. The Bytecoin developers have already shown their reluctance to merge our changes, why would they bother inheriting any further improvements we will make? If you want to use and mine Bytecoin with their crippled miner and their 82% premine please be my guest. I have nothing against the Bytecoin developers or their coin, and wish them all the best. As for me, and the rest of the Monero team, we will continue to take Monero to the next level without needing to wait for anyone's stamp of approval:)
