Mining with a secret, optimized miner over a period of several weeks could have easily produced a situation that rivals the DRK instamine in unfairness. The choices made in creating Monero facilitated this plan. I mean, this is truly the logic of a genius. BCN is unfair, so I'll just clone it without correct a major part of what made it unfair! And you guys call yourselves legitimate.
Monero was launched by thankful_for_today, not by us. It only really started to become "ours" on April 30th, and on May 7th
the crippled hashing code was fixed and released (2.5 weeks after launch).
On May 4th when the network was 20 000h/s (the the crippled miner was in use). At that stage mining on one of my dedicated servers ran at around 11h/s, and an Amazon EC2 c3.8xlarge slice ran at just under 50h/s. Thus the network speed at that stage was the equivalent of 400 Amazon c3.8xlarge slices - considering a newly registered EC2 user can run 50 spot instances (spread across the regions) without increasing their limit, this is still within what we'd expect. And lest we forget that leading up to that point, Monero's hash rate hovered at about half of that.
But wait! There's more!
Block reward stayed consistent and exactly in line with the published mathematics.
And the emission curve stayed exactly as expected.
Absolutely nobody had some super-fast miner from the outset. It's plain, simple, and clear to see that there was no unfairness, no cheating.
The situation on the other side of the pond is vastly, vastly different: [1] [2]
I just don't get why people are (still) arguing about this. (Some) People got (loads of) DRK for (really) cheap. (Some) People got (a lot of) XMR for (pretty) cheap. This is fact.
It is clear that whatever happened with XMR is orders of magnitude away from what happened with DRK. However, in either case, you didn't need to be in on day 1 (DRK instamine) or privy to the enhanced miner for several weeks (XMR) to profit, you simply needed to mine (or buy) and hold for a while. Early prices for DRK were in the neighborhood of 10k/BTC, XMR 2-3k/BTC.
It's also clear that Evan doesn't have 1 million+ DRK personally waiting to dump at the "peak" (at least not from mining). He has plenty though, I'm sure (though if he's still waiting to dump at the peak, it seems like he missed the mark pretty badly).
It has become quite the stigma for DRK though, with opinions varying wildly on how much it matters. I'm not convinced either coins' history is very relevant at this juncture (beyond the stigma for DRK). If Evan really somehow acquired 1 million+, what truly is he waiting for? We are talking about boatloads of money (to the average person). Was 25,000 BTC not enough (understanding he couldn't have offloaded all of it that high)? Even if he only got 100k--a somewhat-reasonable-but-too-low estimate IMO--we're still talking about 2,000+ BTC.
It's clear to me that both are legitimate projects. Technical merits are a whole 'nother topic.
It's of course possible I'm still wrong about him. If so, I believe he earns the title of "GrandMaster Scammer", as this would be a Madoff-sized operation relatively speaking.