This is why I chimed in. I'm trying to tell y'all that from a random outsider's perspective... nobody gives a shit if the goddamn whitepaper was copy/pasted. ZOMG!!! Conspiracy!
Don't care. People see that it costs less than a penny, was the first CryptoNote and it's got a cool name. They're thinking maybe they're getting in on the ground floor of something since they missed out on BitCoin. And even if they read this thread (they won't), maybe they will get the same impression that I did. Not that there's anything wrong with Monero or its team. I've done some reading on XMR and it looks awesome. I know privacy coins are going to be a big deal and I hold some Verge (ask me why).
Fluffy and Smooth represented Monero very, very well in this thread. Very knowledgeable and professional. Kudos. The coin just doesn't get me all warm and fuzzy even though I have my CPU chewing on XMR.
You won't get scammed by mining Bytecoin, but you are kind of perpetuating their scam, and the marketcap is $337M, not $5M.
The Cryptonote whitepaper was not copy pasted by Bytecoin. It was released around the same time as Bytecoin. They likely wrote the whitepaper and implemented it in Bytecoin, but they also almost surely faked several years of blockchain history and essentially premined more than 80% of all coins that will ever exist. That's a scam, imo, not sure about yours.
Also, since you brought it up, Verge is garbage, maybe not a scam, but garbage nonetheless. It launched as a generic scrypt clone with the name Dogecoindark with a very front-loaded emission - like I think 75% of all coins that will ever exist were mined in the first couple months of its life as Dogecoindark. Later rebranded to Verge, but is still using a 5 year old Bitcoin codebase and the dev can't even get an electrum server running properly after two years. And it likes to masquerade as a "privacy coin", when it has no privacy features except for offering a version that runs on tor by default. This isn't a privacy feature, it's trivial to run Bitcoin over tor, and you'll have far more privacy doing that because people actually use Bitcoin. Good luck with your dogecoindarks tho...