Well, well.
It would appear either bytecoin have some powerful enemies or monero have some powerful friends, or that it is merely coincidence that just as BCN is picking up steam with lots of updates and rising market cap, and just as I have got the measure of XMR shills, that this story comes to light.
As yet Ive only watched the vid which fluffypony linked on the XMR thread last night only minutes after its release. Ive not read the reddit pots yet. Paying for positive press might be regarded as unscrupulous by some but it is nevertheless a time-honored tradition. How mych press have BTC, DOGE and DRK paid for I wonder?
It is interesting that, despite your thinly veiled accusations against Monero being somehow behind this revelation, you don't even include Monero in the list of coins which might have paid for press.
I think you very well know what is really going on here. You might not like it for whatever reasons, but you know what's up.
And what is going on here smooth? Could you tell us something we don't know?
1. The reporter never answers to any of the smooth's question "yes". He says he doesn't know or is not sure. The whole thread is speculative (nice questions smooth though!). It appears that nobody asked or pushed him to write specific things about Bytecoin, only make a research of a rumor on Monero:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/3g1x60/who_owns_and_runs_cointelegraph_madbitcoins_live/ctu8w442. There were never any article published on CT against Monero. The author confirms:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3g1rpx/mad_bitcoins_on_twitter_the_truth_behind/ctu7peaAlso he never says whether somebody paid CT to research bothet issue.
3. There is only one Bytecoin promoting article ever found on CT. It's on Bytecoin recent birthday with the text paraphrasing Bytecoin's blog post:
http://cointelegraph.com/news/114746/cryptonote-based-bytecoin-turns-3-plans-to-implement-colored-coins-smart-contractshttps://bytecoin.org/news/bytecoin-roadmap-updated/I don't think it's a show orchestrated by XMR (otherwise, his answers would be brutally different).
However, what can we actually infer from this whole story?This comment, in particular, is more revealing:
I may not have explained that correctly. They asked me to investigate into accusations that Monero was mined exclusively (or almost exclusively) with malware powered botnets.
Instead, I found evidence that it was mostly mined with cloud computing. You can tell because the difficulty (at least around summer 2014) would mirror the prices at Amazon. When it went up, the difficulty went down and when it went down the difficulty went up.
When I tried to write that story, they killed it, so it never got published.
There are some shill replies on reddit trying to claim that showing the coin to be heavily cloud mined to "not be a story" (paraphrasing) and that's why they "killed it" (not paraphrasing) but that clearly doesn't hold up.
First of all, given the widespread allegations at the time (and where do you think those came from?) that it was primarily botnet mined and the attention Monero was getting at the time, a story showing clearly that it was
not botnet mined but instead cloud mined would have been quite interesting. In addition, just showing the connection between coin mining and AWS prices would also have been interesting, as I'm not sure there has ever been much coverage of cloud mining and how important it can be to some coins.
Furthermore, he says elsewhere that he was usually allowed to write whatever he wanted (and that was one reason he liked working there). Pay would be determined by traffic, so if the story were not interesting, he just wouldn't get paid much for it.
But for some reason, in this case, different rules applied. Very interesting.
But mainly the biggest take-away here is that the people behind Bytecoin funded a "news" site in order to bias coverage in favor of Bytecoin and most of the other cryptonotes (duckNote is specifically mentioned) and against Monero.
This raises many questions about who is behind Bytecoin and what else they are doing. Getting involved in the business of funding news web sites does not exactly strike me as something that cypherpunks and cryptographers from the darknet would be particularly involved with. So obviously there is more to the story here, or the writer is lying about what happened (which I very much doubt).
Still, why are we arguing over what he said on this BCN thread? Seems silly and redundant. People can watch the video and read the reddit discussions and come to their own conclusions.
