But they went ahead with the scam launch code, knowingly or otherwise.
You are deceiving us sir. You must read the comments on the article you link.
Apologies if I misread what you wrote, but I tried to be quite clear in my article that the developers of Bytecoin, who introduced the slowdown, are very unlikely to have relationships, financial or otherwise, with the current set of developers who've been responsible for bringing Monero to popularity.
I'm pretty sure that the Bytecoin version of this was pure evil, and that it was used not just to get an advantage in mining, but to fake the entire blockchain. I wouldn't touch that one with a 10 foot bitcoin. But, while I don't own any more Monero than is in transit from my hardware to the exchange, I don't think that same thing applies to Monero (because, first of all, there was no premine, and second, I know quite accurately who made the profit from the crappy miner, and I know that none of us were Bytecoin developers.)
It's possible that the initial fork-er of Monero, TFT, was complicit. But he's also out of the picture, and while he might have had a week of fun mining, he wouldn't have gotten much more than that.
I do not have any Monero but you must be careful not to lie or to be deceptive. I lose a lot of respect for people like you when I see this.
The Trollero dev admitted to Monero launch code that was crippled. He admitted that here.
The kid found the cripple and exploited it.
The Monero devs should have checked and checked again. There were red flags and people warning them on the launch page. They didn't check, they didn't want to check, or they were covering up the scam code.
What happened between the launch and the kid finding and declaring the scam code is pure conjecture, unless people own up to their deeds. But they can also, of course, lie. So we won't ever know.
Except we know that scam code was there at launch and it was admitted, here and elsewhere. Fact. No deception required.
