My strong belief is that the skepticism was warranted: Here's the original slow-hash from bytecoin as it was copied into Bitmonero. It has some doozies. For example, on line 100, you might note that for every iteration through an inner loop repeated tens of thousands of times, the AES key is re-imported into the library. The later loop, starting on line 113, is repeated half a million times, and is so abstracted through lots of memcpys and pointer manipulation it's hard to tell that all it really does is one round of AES encryption, a pointer dereference into a random scratchpad, a 64 bit multiplication, and another pointer dereference. Phew. This original code was roughly 50x slower than my final optimized code, and could have easily been used to fake two years of blockchain data on a single computer or a small cluster. I'm pretty sure that's what happened.http://da-data.blogspot.com.tr/2014/08/minting-money-with-monero-and-cpu.htmlSo where is the Monero core team's official explanation of releasing this?
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The very same blogger answered that in the comments, which you would have seen if you weren't so busy selectively quoting:
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.
and
In fact, to the best of my knowledge, none of the people who profited from early optimized Monero mining had anything to do with crippling the code in the first place.
Think of it this way: You step in and inherit a legacy codebase for a promising and interesting new cryptocurrency. You're immediately beset with demands -- fix bugs, release binaries, answer help questions, etc. In retrospect, it turns out that the code you took over had been de-optimized by its original creators. Is that your fault? Of course not. What's the standard that we should hold the Monero developers to? To fix any bugs or deliberate weaknesses as fast as they can after they become aware of it. To get up to speed and review and understand the codebase they inherited as quickly as a reasonable developer can do.
Here's someone who is:
a) way smarter than you
b) way more involved with Monero during the relevant period of time
c) the exact source you are quoting, so obviously you think he's credible (which he is)
He says Monero is alright. You and everyone else should listen to him.
Let's consider by contrast: Where are the credible, knowledgable, and reputable people (such as computer science professors at world-class institutions) who think that Dash is alright, either in terms of is launch and early mining, or in terms of its technology? < Chirp...Chirp...Chirp >