Topic: Blowing the lid off the CryptoNote/Bytecoin scam (with the exception of Monero) - page 35. (Read 132873 times)

No that doesn't fit. Although the dates on the signatures are bogus, and the V1 paper was clearly not created in 2012 (references from 2013), the signature itself is valid, and is signed by "Nicholas van Saberhagen", which is an identity directly associated with cryptonote, not bytecoin. In otherwords, it was "Cryptonote" that faked the signature dates, not "Bytecoin."

I agree with you they are, in reality, likely one and the same, but the theory that they are separate organizations and the bytecoin people are behind all the shadiness doesn't hold up, for this reason and others.

Wow, this is the best hatchet job I've seen since the last time I did one hahaa.

I don't think the fake dates prove that the Cryptonote team were in on the scam.  It's quite possible that the Bytecoin team had a copy of the (as yet unpublished) white paper - perhaps having convinced the Cryptonote team that it would be better to delay publication until the launch of the coin.  In which case all fakery could easily be down to the Bytecoin team.

If that were the case, and the fakery was not done with the consent of the Cryptonote team, then it does raise the question as to why the Cryptonote team haven't come forward to cry foul, but there are a couple of possibilities:

• They figure it would be pointless, as it would be too difficult to substantiate that they really were the Cryptonote team
• They wish to keep their anonymity and fear having their cover blown - perhaps the Bytecoin team know their identity so they don't want to pick a fight with them

BTW, for convenience I'm refering to the people behind the text of the white paper, and the ideas within it (including the cryptographic design) as "the Cryptonote team" and the people behind the software implementation and the launch of the coin as "the Bytecoin team".  In reality, though, I strongly suspect that the original intention would have been to call the coin Cryptonote, and for whatever reason it was renamed prior to launch.

roy

Why use a bought account? Because maybe he just wants to be taken seriously by people on the internet. His actions seem a lot more like someone who got involved with a community and took it upon himself to try and fix a coin he loved in ways that in hindsight weren't the ideal ways to fix them. Simply chalk that up to inexperience and maybe being driven too much by emotions. Maybe being taken seriously was so important to him that he didn't even consider how buying an account might seem shady to people who thought he was the leader of some elaborate scam (because there's no scam taking place to begin with).

I can show you a million examples of scammers that are successful with brand new accounts. He didn't need to buy an account if he wanted to scam people.

Go look at the last month of pages in the QCN thread. You'll find that OracionSeis just seems like some guy in his own little world doing the right thing in his mind. He continues devving and posting regardless of how many other people are posting or how much his coin is losing value. He doesn't bash other coins and he doesn't artificially hype shit up.

Remember when people wanted to fork Litecoin after Scrypt ASICs starting surfacing? Were they trying to scam anyone or were they just acting passionately about a coin they liked that started losing its identity? I think QCN and its dev is very much like this situation. Again, whether or not Monero had issues that even warranted a relaunch is another story. I'm just saying that good intentions can be misconstrued in a realm where daily scams have people on constant high alert.

Hopefully the QCN dev can come forward and dispel some of these conjectures in this thread. I don't think the QCN dev ever had people accusing him of being a scam artist at this level, so he might be pretty oblivious to all these accusations happening right now. Or I could be totally wrong and you are completely right.

@smooth  Are you complaining that most of the sites are using "font-awesome"? It's a modern standard. You can find more info here: http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/
Also Sourceforge provides public tracking for download count, Mega.co.nz does not. It's a simple choice which one to use if the dev wants all the users to have accurate knowledge of the actual usage of the coin.

There are more links.

First, the style of communication on all these coins is quite similar. The developers are absent for days at a time or longer, then make very short posts with questionable (at best) English writing skills. They don't really interact with the community so much as show up occasionally and make prepared statements, then disappear again. (BTW, this reminds me a lot of TFT.)

Second, we know of bought accounts being used for both bytecoin and quazarcoin.

Third, there are major stylistic similarities between all of their web sites. For example, look at the icons used for their download links:

bytecoin.org:



quazarcoin.org:



fantomcoin.org:



monetaverde.org:



old bitmonero.org:



I thought maybe this style of download links was extremely widely used and this could be a coincidence, so I looked at several other coins that are reasonably "hot" now, including DRK, CLOAK, and XC. None of them used this particular style of download links.

In my opinion all of these cryptonote/bytecoin coins (except Monero) are being run out of some kind of coin mill, probably operating in a country where English is not widely used. The public-facing "developers' are really just caretakers who divide their time between appearing to be working a lot of different coins under different names. The web design is done by a common team, which explains the stylistic similarities (close attention to the web sites would probably show more such similarities).

The brain needs also b-vitamins and proper oil. Empty calories can be left to their own value. I'm a sad, one-liner example of the true opposite.

*edit: try it.

Then why use a bought account? Why buy an account in the first place unless you're trying to look legit? There is no legitimate reason to buy an account unless you're trying to scam people.

The SourceForge link between those four is also quite tenable. Nobody uses ShitForge anymore, definitely not for a cryptocurrency.

http://sourceforge.net/directory/?q=cryptocurrency - 36 projects including bullshit like Java GUIs for Bitcoin and cryptocurrency tickers.
https://github.com/search?utf8=✓&q=cryptocurrency&ref=cmdform - 1163 repositories including every cryptocurrency known to man.

It's possible, however unlikely, that the person that bought the OracionSeis account has since split off from the CryptoNote developers. It doesn't fucking matter, hiding behind a purchased account kills any hope of legitimacy. Until the developer is transparent and owns up to everything in great detail, QuazarCoin should be avoided like the scam it probably/possibly is.

Sleeping now, will respond to anyone when I'm up.

Fair enough. I just read it and I still think you are blowing it a little out of proportion.

So he tried relaunching Monero. Big deal. It wasn't really malicious in nature after clicking its thread. He even clearly outlined why he was pushing for a relaunch. I quote:


That doesn't sound too terrible, and definitely not 'malicious'. It just kinda sounds like someone who just didn't agree with Monero's progression/launch and was trying to rally like-minded community members. Seeing that either enough people didn't agree with him or that relaunching was a poor way of dealing with his issues, he canceled the launch and relaunched as Quazarcoin. Whether or not he is wrong about the assertions he was making is a different story. I think it's just pretty clear that he was just disgruntled by some things and wanted a coin like Monero that was 'fair' in his mind.

And that's pretty much all that Quazarcoin is today. The OracionSeis guy quietly goes about his business devving QCN no matter how popular or unpopular it is during a given week. I really haven't seen him take any aggressive or malevolent actions towards Monero in the process. He also shows interest in helping out community members who post problems they are having with the wallet.

If this is some scammer or thief, he's definitely doing a terrible job of it.

I'm about to pass out, but I've updated the OP with info on QCN. Search for OracionSeis and you'll find the new paragraphs.

Added my Bitcoin donation address to the OP too. Your donations pay for the insane amounts of pizza and Monster I consume when researching this shit.

The OP of this thread is suggesting that OracionSeis is part of the BCN scam.

Fact: OracionSeis came into the XMR thread, called everyone scammers, and attempted to direct traffic to his own fork of the exact same name.

If OracionSeis is one of the BCN guys I wouldn't be surprised.

"Hijacking the community" really makes no sense--nobody can hijack a community. I don't have access to any of the drama but I see mentions of it early in the QCN threads so I cannot really comment on this further.

Was he just upset about how Monero was launched? Was he on the dev team of Monero and didn't like how things were operating/progressing? Or is the OP claiming in a roundabout way that OracionSeis is part of the original Bytecoin team (proof?) and that he is trying to destroy Monero out of vengeance by forking Bytecoin and launching his own coin?

If the launch of Quazarcoin was a malicious act towards Monero and its community, it's failing hard at appearing and being malicious. As of now it simply exists as an alternative cryptonote coin with altered coin specifications and different development path. If OracionSeis was driven purely by malevolent intent, surely he would give up developing a coin that was not having the desired effect. It's a huge waste of time to put months of effort into keeping a coin alive (regardless of how well he is actually developing things).

As an outsider looking in on cryptonotes and QCN's existence, this is a situation that at worst looks like a disgruntled member of Monero/Bytecoin that was not happy with something (I still don't know what) and launched his own cryptonote coin as a result. At best, it looks like an alternative cryptonote coin that aims to develop a very "primitive" and "young" cryptonote technology down its own path.

EDIT:

The information about Quazarcoin in the OP doesn't really get any more specific than:



None of this is really damning evidence to be honest, and even if it were correct, what the hell is the problem
when you get right down to it? So 3 Cryptonote coins were launched like normal and any person can go judge how active they are for themselves.

And as for the "scam artists and botnet creators" claim, I have to say this: There are much easier ways to scam people in today's cryptocurrency landscape than to launch a forked version of Bytecoin "without a premine or instamine" and keep devving it long after QCN's price had peaked the first week it went on Poloniex. Scam should have been over then, dev checks out with his BTC and doesn't show his face again, right? That's not really what's happening with QCN. OracionSeis might be concocting some super-long elaborate scam that involves lying to a bunch of investors, but none of that is really happening either. If he is a botnet creator, he's doing a very bad job of keeping the buying pressure consistently elevated so he can make massive returns with his botnet. He would be spending 100% of his time on PR and marketing and not devving, right? Well, that's not happening and there aren't QCN shills running rampant trying to hype QCN every day.

 

It seems a lot of folks confuse the history of bitMonero/Monero. It was not simply a rename of the same coin.

thankful_for_today (TFT) pretended to create a fair relaunch of bytecoin in bitMonero, though it's apparent now this was an obvious attempt to corner the market and capture the non-bcn-believers before some other fork came along.

TFT pretended to listen to everyone. I even collaborated with him via PM to help him launch bitMonero on schedule (I was also planning a bytecoin fork at the time and wanted to combine resources). He appeared cooperative at first, but then stopped responding and suddenly launched with parameters that were either never discussed (much steeper distribution curve) or publicly and unanimously vetoed (60 second block times). I believe the steeper distribution was his subtle attempt to capture more block rewards with an optimized miner.

This move actually turned me away from the coin altogether. I was again planning a fork until David Latapie and others took over the project and have since turned it around.

The way I see it: bitMonero and Monero are not and should not be considered the same project.

Not sure if you read up thread, but look into how QCN started. OracionSeis attempted to hijack the community by maliciously forking Monero's code base and relaunching as Monero. After failing to do so, he deleted his original posts/threads before renaming the coin to QCN. I used to have archive.org links on hand for proof, but you can do some digging and find them yourself.

I have a question about Quazarcoin being linked to the original scam artist devs of Bytecoin:

If it's a scam, how is the dev OracionSeis benefiting? If it is was indeed a scam, the dev had an excellent opportunity to "cash out" when QCN hit Poloniex and soared to ~ 0.01 QCN/BTC. Why keep the whole thing going after this? Why post in the thread almost every day? Why is there no obvious bashing of Monero by the dev?

I like the investigative work you did, but you sort of call out QCN in your rage and don't really go into detail about anything else. Nothing I've seen over the past month or so makes any sense in the context of it being a scam. If it is one...it's a pretty damn harmless one.

Disliking XMR for whatever reason is perfectly reasonable. Different strokes and all that. But on this...


you are also very much missing the point.

The scam most certainly did not go as intended. Monero (i.e. bitmonero) was not supposed to be turned into a community-run project and suck up (nearly) all of the investor interest in the cryptonote space, leaving only scraps for the scammers at BCN et al. Which explains a lot of the anger, hostility, shills, scorched earth, etc. toward Monero (theirs not yours).

It's completely normal and unsurprising for the genesis block timestamp to be 'rigged'. ... I don't know about in BCN, but in Bitcoin there really is no facility to mine a genesis block, it's hard coded... so you end up building a separate tool to create one. Your tool _could_ read the current time, but thats ~2 more lines of code than just manually setting the time at some value. By itself I wouldn't find that concerning.

Wow, someone's been reading my posts.

Regardless of Monero's merits...
The over-the-top hubris... and auto-Bitcoin status demanded by Monero Truthers is absurd...
Building and enforcing a silly mini-cult probably hurts more than it helps.

The coin is mired at 300K sats... 40% underwater for any typical investor using ave prices.

Also, if you are bringing promoters like McRisto on board...
Where is the f***king money... talk is cheap... spend $100K on some Devs already...
This is the fastest paced Space on earth with zero intellectual property protection.

As for BCN...
By my count the total volume on Polo has been about 5-6 billion at maybe ave 7-8 sats...
So even if you count all the clones... and even if these guys are expert traders and done half the volume...
We are talking at most maybe $100-200,000... which doesn't go a long way once you start splitting it up. 

Thinly traded coin can be pump very easily when there is no supply and trade volume is thin.