In the case of bytecoin it just seems weird. Some day we'll discover that the code was really being written by a single brilliant grad student under contract and one day he suffered a freak brain aneurism and died. Left with no one to continue the development and without the technical chops to even evaluate new developers and concerns about the ramifications of releasing a cryptographically anonymous cryptocurrency the people funding him open sourced the works so far and hoped for the best.
I mean really, am I missing something subtle here? it's pretty hard to pull anything over on anyone. I'm not sure what we're supposed to be tricked into thinking here. It doesn't strike me as fraudulent as much as it does just weird and poorly done. Likewise, the software is very raw, some elements of the design seem pretty poorly considered, maybe not absolutely bad but relative to the quality of the rest. Maybe I'm a little spoiled by Bitcoin.
Something like that may be true, but it doesn't explain the active efforts at deception, such the claims of "store and services" in the deep web which clearly don't exist, certainly not on a large scale, the fake Cicada 3301 references, claims of thousands of users with a hash rate under 10 machines, etc.
It could be more like that the original developer died, but rather than open source and hope for the best, whoever ended up with it tried a ham-handed scheme to make a lot of money off of it, seeing as how that has already been done by a lot of people in the altcoin space starting with far less.
I mean really we don't even know the the people behind the web site and github actually have anything to do with creating the code. Maybe they do, maybe someone inherited it as you suggest, maybe they stole it, or some number of other possibilities. It has been claimed that this thread has nothing to do with the people behind the web site and is just effectively a fan thread, but we don't know that either. There is this cryptonote site, and they claim to be the designers, but again, there is no transparency to it. They could just as easily have read the code (found who knows where) and written it up after the fact. All this is groundless speculation. But taking things at "face value" does not make sense when some parts of face value are clearly fraudulent.
So yes, I agree respect is due to the creator or creators here for the technical accomplishmens. Not quite at the level of Satoshi, but certainly significant. But we have no damn idea who to respect. So, I say, let's just move on with what we have (pretty much just the code and that's it) and build something viable. Which happens to be MRO at the moment, but of course that could change.
But as I said earlier, and you sometimes acknowledge, it is what happens later that really matters, and that pretty much required a fork, because apart from the premine, the distribution curve -- especially starting +2 years and even if not, is just
way too fast. It will be nearly fully mined in a couple of years, which isn't enough time for it to gain anywhere near the level of adoption for that to work.