Topic: Blowing the lid off the CryptoNote/Bytecoin scam (with the exception of Monero) - page 31. (Read 132873 times)

How about a Monero address?

It was probably unfair to specifically target you smooth. Monero shills in general act as bad or worse than pump and dump coins. Even the DRK cult is more subtle with their hidden agenda than most Monero shills and DRK is a shit coin. To be fair I don't bother spending the time to read through other altcoin threads, but Cryptonote coins aren't just another Bitcoin alt clone, so I'm not used to reading through all the trolling and hidden agenda bullshit that goes on in these threads.

http://bitcoinbarbie.com/cryptonote-open-source-technology-concept/

That entire response from Cryptonote in that arcticle is incoherent. First Crytonote was behind the technology and Bytecoin devs are the currency people, then by end of answer it's Cryptonote which is going to promote the currencies and Bytecoin the "main contributing developers for Crytonote"

And these Bytecoin devs are a "team of top notch p2p and cryptocurrency developers, which have been contributing to the sphere for quite some time" but didn't think a post on bitcointalk would help with the coins adoption  
And same with Crytonote, if they decided they wanted to "let the world know about the technology and promote new CryptoNote currencies" wouldn't a good place to start be an annoucment of some sort to the Bitcoin community? As far as I know the first mention here on the forums was an "accidental" discovery and nobody else involved with Bitcoin knew about it before that..

Thanks to whoever posted the link to that article because that is more convincing than anything else to me that BCN was all a lame attempt to dump an 80% premine. Hard to imagine it's Crytonotes sole intention for developing the protocol. And the other clones being called CN's scorched earth policy sounds more like Monero shills trying to protect their turf. It would also be nice to see Monero shills show some humility since they are (most likely) going to win the cryptonote coin space and profit nicely off of the work done by whomever the fuck developed the protocol. Not saying the Bytecoin guys aren't sucmbags, just saying them being scum doesn't make Monero devs walk on water..
For anyone willing to spend the time an unbiased cliff notes version of Cryptonote and the CN coins would probably help adoption of Monero and legit CN coins. All the controversy just chases people away. With all the pump and dump shills and underwater bagholders trolling these forums it's hard to believe someone with a hidden agenda claiming another coin is scam and their coin is gods gift to the world.

I know, right?



:-P

This CN debacle has more intrigue than Game of Thrones.

But do BCN devs not also refer to the CN website? It would be strange for damaging material to be posted in that place.

Since some time has passed since the publication of the original analysis in this thread, the possibility of a "corrected" backdated whitepaper being posted on one or both of these sites should not be discounted.

My Conclusions

1. It is very likely the Bytecoin website hosts the genuine whitepaper.

2. The whitepaper published on CryptoNote's website may be a forgery. There is no PGP watermark and the author's PGP public key can't be used to validate the whitepaper.

3. Someone has duplicated the genuine whitepaper line by line for them to look the same - but failed at capturing some of its hidden elements.

4. Now let's move to whitepaper v.1 on CN website. As there is no signature to validate this whitepaper, the only relevant test is watermark. If it's inside, then the asumption on CryptoNote's conspiracy may hold. However, whitepaper v.1 doesn't have this watermark.

5. The problems with latex compilator problems, XMP meta tags, and invalid links may point to a forgery attempt, not van Saberhagen's actual activity.


Unclear questions for further research

1) What and why did we find two strange whitepapers on the CryptoNote website? A number of options may be valid. I assume it could be a mistake, a social engineering trap, hacked website or someone's attempt to discredit the technology? Who knows.

I'll point CryptoNote that they may have a wrong whitepaper. Maybe they will care to comment or take actions.
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This is really good analytical research about the whitepapers.
There are indeed 2 possibilities here (IMO): It was a genuine mistake from the CN website (not really 100%, on this one) or it was a malicious act to try discredit the technology itself. Lets not forget that when competitors consider you  a threat and to their own interests, they will go in all lengths to discredit you.

If you are referring to one post I made recently which was obviously intended as a joke, I plead guilty of having a sense of humor.

If you are referring to the posts I made there months ago when less was known about the scam, I was giving my opinion at the time on what was still an unclear but shady-looking sitatution (some of those comments were before I was involved with Monero and in fact led to my participation with Monero). In hindsight pretty much everything I said turned out to be correct. If it hadn't I'd be the first to post a correction or retraction, as I have done on other occasions (once recently with respect to BBR for example).

We can only speculate. It is a fact that there have been a lot of absurd cheerleader-type pro-Monero posts going up recently that we have nothing to do with. Usually they display a poor grasp of English grammar which ought to be a clue who is behind them, but in all honesty we just don't know. There may also be negative posts going up talking down about other coins, something we generally don't do (unless we have specific substantive criticisms). Treat them with similar skepticism.

Agreed, and even this thread which is about Cryptonote/BCN has turned into nothing more than a Monero circle jerk..

The author of this post is NOT involved with Monero in any way. I cannot refute some or even most of his findings, but I certainly disagree with the vitriolic voracity with which it is delivered. He is exceedingly angry, and that is at odds with the way any members of the Monero core team view CryptoNote or Bytecoin.

I can only find the one comment that smooth made recently in the Bytecoin thread, and I don't think there is a fundamental problem with engaging cross-thread. We harbour no ill-will against Bytecoin, so to label a tongue-in-cheek comment as "trolling" is a bit of a stretch, don't you agree? I know it's a fine line, but I don't think we're being purposely obtuse or abrasive.

As to those involved with Monero who you label "Monero trolls", we simply cannot control anyone. People are going to say good things and bad things about Monero, and it is not our responsibility or in our best interest to attempt to stifle free speech. There will always be people that passionate like or passionately hate Monero, and that's a good thing, as it encourages intense debate. For those that cross the line to trolling or excessive pandering, I apologise for their behaviour on behalf of the core team. We do not condone it, but we are also not in a position to be able to stop it. Please accept my personal apology as well if the behaviour of anyone even peripherally involved with Monero has offended you in any way.

My take has been that most of these trolls are plants by some other party to make Monero look bad. They are annoying to Monero supporters, too -- not just you.

This is why I don't own XMR or any CN coin. The Monero trolls are everywhere, every coin thread Cryptonote or not, and why the fuck would I want to buy a coin when current coin owners are so desperate they feel the need to troll so dam much. Even smooth trolling the Bytecoin thread so fucking hard and he's part of the Monero team..seriously where do you guys get the time to troll so much? And you're actually hurting XMR not helping, it's just making this whole cluster fuck surrounding Cryptonote coins worse.
My conclusion, Cryptonote coins are all FUBAR

Don't forget, from https://cryptonotefoundation.org/:


So, they have two weeks to come up with more pseudonyms, lol.

Has there been any official notices from the developers?

I was impressed by the amount of work you've put to compile everything in one place. While checking your claims regarding CryptoNote whitepaper, I noticed the same XMP timestamps and other evidence that you posted.

However, there is one thing that you did not check-out when I tried to repeat your experiment.  Van Saberhagen's public key on CryptoNote website cannot be used to validite the PDF. While checking, I got this message:


Some new surprising information was found on Bytecoin's website. It hosts a very similar whitepaper v.2, which turns out to be different if you study it carefully. What's more, van Saberhagen's public key matches on CryptoNote and Bytecoin websites. It seems that Bytecoin may hold a genuine Saberhagen whitepaper as it can be verified with the published public key - however since his identity remains unknown, we can only speculate.

I then decided to continue with experiment by comparing the paper found on Bytecoin with the one CryptoNote's website. For easier references I'll call them bcn-whitepaper and cn-whitepaper. The bcn-whitepaper will always goes first on the pictures unless explicitly stated otherwise.

When opening the bcn-whitepaper we can see the article structure.


Which is not the case for cn-whitepaper.


Opening the PDF we notice the valid signature inside:


The signature date on bcn-whitepaper is almost the same as on cn-whitepaper but slightly differs in size. This by itself, points that further discrepancies may exist between the two whitepapers. I decided to continue my investigation by studying the signature details (bcn - to the left, cn - to the right):


Everything looks quite the same with the exception of the SHA and MD5 fingerprints. Moving on to the XMP properties, we can see that they are also different.


Bcn-whitepaper holds perfectly clear signatures. The CreateDate is 2013 as it should be. The pdfTeX version x.x.13 also existed. There is totally nothing strange about these tags. Unlike the whitepaper from CryptoNote website that was studied before.

Apparently, Bytecoin's whitepaper is quite consistent in terms of timelines.

The remaining question is which whitepaper may have been the genuine one.

I would assume that having exactly the same van Saberhagen's public keys posted on both websites, it would not be unlikely that it really belongs to Saberhagen - particularly since both keys validate the bcn-whitepaper.

Also, upon a careful examination of Bytecoin's whitepaper I found a watermark, which is usually hard to identify. Here it is in the whitepaper (just after the Appendix):


Most may be unable to see it because it is non-selectable, can't be copied and is transparent. You might be able to see it as a small highlighted field (e.g. if you open it with Chrome).


It turns out that the watermark appears in the tooltip for that field. Here is the tooltip's content:


This is a PGP key perfectly matching public van Saberhagen's key published on both websites.


Hence, there is a PGP signature hidden in the Bytecoin's whitepaper, but there is no such watermark in the one found on CryptoNote's website.

Are these 2 documents anyhow different apart from that? I've checked with adobe document compare tools, and it seems that they're either complete copies, or have very minor indistinguishable differences like the following three. These formulas appear to be the same, but not to the compare tool:


My Conclusions

1. It is very likely the Bytecoin website hosts the genuine whitepaper.

2. The whitepaper published on CryptoNote's website may be a forgery. There is no PGP watermark and the author's PGP public key can't be used to validate the whitepaper.

3. Someone has duplicated the genuine whitepaper line by line for them to look the same - but failed at capturing some of its hidden elements.

4. Now let's move to whitepaper v.1 on CN website. As there is no signature to validate this whitepaper, the only relevant test is watermark. If it's inside, then the asumption on CryptoNote's conspiracy may hold. However, whitepaper v.1 doesn't have this watermark.

5. The problems with latex compilator problems, XMP meta tags, and invalid links may point to a forgery attempt, not van Saberhagen's actual activity.


Unclear questions for further research

1) What and why did we find two strange whitepapers on the CryptoNote website? A number of options may be valid. I assume it could be a mistake, a social engineering trap, hacked website or someone's attempt to discredit the technology? Who knows.

I'll point CryptoNote that they may have a wrong whitepaper. Maybe they will care to comment or take actions.

Very interesting thread and kudos to the OP for the amount of effort he put into his analysis!

He beats me by a tad in uncovering shit, and by a mile, or several, in how he's able to articulate his findings, something I continue to work on. Thanks, OP.

I was reading and suddenly my name popped up and I was like, lol?

Then I clicked on the reddit link and I was WTF is this? Someone took my quote and posted it on reddit? Why? That's indeed batshit crazy from my perspective.

Note that I don't have a reddit account.

For me, versioning is proper for electronic texts and I'm always practicing it for my papers or ebooks. Unlike paper books which are "solid", electronic papers / books can "evolve", thus versioning makes sense and why I said "a forward looking individual".

For the record, I have nothing to do with Bytecoin, Monero, BBR, Duckcoin etc etc, I am mainly into Darkcoin and only hold other anon coins as a hedge. I also believe that Bytecoin is problematic due to it's huge (effective) premine as well as the underlying tech which can't scale for real world adoption. Not until something is done for it that is.

Great tread observe further research.

Sad, that.  If one of your friends is reading this, perhaps they'll get you a birthday, and a primer on logic as a present.