Ask yourself this: Can you find any evidence at all that the coin existed prior to last year? I mean, if it was launched in July of 2012 then there would surely have been mention of it somewhere on the web, right? So find an archive.org link from that period mentioning cryptonote and you will have proof.
Can't do it?
Throwing it to the floor.
Can you on the other hand provide any evidence that the chain was faked?
Absence of evidence
despite sufficient incentives to search for such evidence, and diligent efforts to do so (including my own) is evidence of absence. It only takes one tiny little example to disprove the claim of fakery. If that can't be found despite diligent efforts, that is strong evidence in support of it being faked.
I agree with Johnny Mnemonic though, it is silly to keep playing this game.
Given what we're discussing I'd have thought accusing me of playing games is rather far-fetched, no?
OK. This is the weirdest , most bizzarro thing in crypto, save perhaps the true identity of Nakamoto.
Clearly there's is a very disturbing gap in info between mid-2012 and early 2013 by which time a large amount of BCN had been mined. However it seems just as likely that the coin was mined in closed private circles as it does the blockchain was entirely faked. There is no way of knowing if the entire BCN Team or just a part of it is responsible for this mystery.
What is curious to me is how BCN retains such a high market cap and has any active community at all, which it does. If the Monero assumptions (and they are assumptions albeit educated ones) about the BCN story are true it is hard to imagine how it has survived so long. And yet it has and development continues. Also twitter shows a decent amount of activity with a few interesting accounts (some associated to darkmarkets) going back and forth about bytecoin.
Aslo mysterious is how no interview with Harry (of which there have been at least 2 iirc) raises the question of the 2012-2013 period.
whitepapers dates being forged is of concern too. the thesis is that they were made retroactively in 2013. while this kind of deception is hard to stomach I do wonder how long the minds behind CN were working on the concepts and code before 2013. almost certainly a lot. almost certainly CN was in development in 2012 and maybe before. so while the dates were perhaps deliberatley faked it is not to say that CN research was not happening in 2012 - it seems highly likely it was.
One final thought, and question. How long was BTC mined in private or very small circles before a larger audience joined. How long after BTC was bitcointalk set up and how much BTC had been mined at this point?
smooth readily admits CN is a crypto tour de force and yet undermines their devs' credibility since the CN authors are most likely the devs of bytecoin. indeed great minds can do stupid things (like try to scam people after making a brilliant work of crytpo ) but then we get into the tricky game of resolving who turns a cypherpunk triumph (CN) into an elaborate scam, assuming BCN is such a scam.
I repeat: It seems just as likely that the coin was mined in closed private circles as it does the blockchain was entirely faked. There is no way of knowing if the entire BCN Team or just a part of it is responsible for this mystery. also despite the "fake dates" on the paper it seems very likely that CN was being developed in 2012.I can also understand why Monero did what it did and started their own fork, there are a great deal of unanswered questions.
cypherpunks and scammers have a shared interest in protecting their anonymity. either way the BCN devs have (to the best of my knowledge) successfully protected their anonymity, as did satoshi. the publication of Team member bio's on the website seems to me could have been a prank. BCN has always been clear that its devs value their anonymity, as well they might. they have at least in this regard remained consistent.