Bytecoin was forked into a coin that the community could participate in from day one.
Alas, none of the bugs or short comings were fixed in doing that— and it doesn't appear that any of the people involved in it have the background for the low level work. So you might have just written out the only active developers of the software, may not bode well for continued development.
The fork also can't claim to be roses and sunshine wrt fairness: As someone very interested in privacy technology and as someone who is usually near the hub of technical discussion in the Bitcoin system, I'd never heard of that fork until just recently— nearly a month after it's start. And… has a very fast coin distribution, and was started with a difficulty much lower than the network could support. A lot could have been done to improve fairness (e.g. fixing the subsidy to a low level at least until the difficulty crossed the level where the prior system was, or setting the minimum difficulty to a good fraction of the achieved rate), promoting it outside of pools of altcoin speculators (e.g. why do I hear about zerocash 100,000 times for every time I hear about this stuff?), etc. Not that I think that any of the altcoin stuff is advisable, but if you're going to make a fork on the virtue of fairness wouldn't it behoove you to actually be fair?
And, of course, the
fork has now also been forked. That one at least tames the insanely fast distribution somewhat... but it too doesn't fix any of the worse parts... I can only imagine that we're going to continue to see once a month forks of that stuff— suits me fine, while the technology is interesting and useful, the speculative churn is not.
