Hi Fluffy
This is quite a serious accusation you are making. And because you are the lead dev of Monero I trust that you can back up such serious allegations.
Please can you provide the proof of your 2 claims here so that you can be on the record with the full extent of your allegations:
1. That Evan Duffield "mined 15% of the total currency with his buddies within a few hours of launch"
2. That Evan Duffield is "a scammer" (because that implies fraud)
Thanks
BF
Sure, just reason it through: no cryptocurrency creator launches without some hashing power ready to go. Whilst speculative miners appear quickly, a new PoW invariably delays their ability to rapidly starting mining. You can delay it further with things like not having a Windows miner available at launch. In Evan's case all he needed was 32 hours.
Knowing that it would appear we have two possible options: believing that Evan is a bumbling fool who and Darkcoin was beset by avid speculative miners, in which case Evan would only own a small portion of the blocks instamined in those 36 hours, or he is a manipulative scammer who owns a large portion of them. The evidence points to the latter.
According to Evan's post, "
The Birth of Darkcoin", the following occurred on January 18th: "I announced the launch of Darkcoin (XCoin at the time) on BitcoinTalk. We launched later and immediately got stuck on block 42, I was new to the Bitcoin codebase and wasn’t sure what I missed so I announced we’d relaunch later."
So just so we're clear: he already flopped a launch and had just scrapped it and announced that he'd relaunch later. There was no problem with this, he was "new to the Bitcoin codebase" and introducing a brand new PoW, so nobody held it against him that it didn't work out the box.
He continues: "When we relaunched we had a rush of miners join causing a huge spike of coin production without it being able to adjust the difficulty quick enough, we just ended up spilling out coins. Retargeting happened every 576 blocks and could only increase the difficulty by four times, so it took about six retargets to get to a difficulty that was near 2.5 minutes per block. Later on, after the difficulty evened out we realized that there was a serious problem with the block reward calculation."
Why, at this point, did he not think to relaunch? By his own account coins were just "spilling out", which is clearly bad. Incidentally, he's talking nonsense (purposely or not) when he says that it was a "rush of miners" that caused a "huge spike of coin production". That would have happened
even if there was just one miner (it would probably have been more efficient as there would have been no orphaned blocks), the issue was his low starting difficulty and high retargeting window.
He doubles-down with more deceptive talk: "I soon fixed this issue at block 4500, but none of us realized the amount of coins that had been issued at the time. At that point we didn’t even have a block explorer yet."
Just so we're on the same page, the first block was mined at 2014-01-19, 3:54am. Block 4500 was mined at 2014/01/20, 12:05pm, a mere 32 hours after launch.
If he'd already cancelled one messed up launch and relaunched the next day, why couldn't he do the same thing a second time?Additionally, his attempt to deflect the source of the problem and make it appear to be naught-but-a-happy-accident is despicable and obviously false. Darkcoin is cloned from Bitcoin, and since Bitcoin 0.8.3 there has been a CLI and RPC command, gettxoutsetinfo, that tells you (among other things) the total coins emitted. It is a blatant and outright lie for him to claim that he didn't know the number of coins emitted. You don't need a block explorer for that at all.
To confirm that Darkcoin had gettxoutsetinfo at launch I grabbed
the Windows binary from this early post on 2014-01-19, and checked it for the relevant function:
It's also nonsensical to reason that he didn't know of gettxoutsetinfo's existence. He'd been knee-deep in Bitcoin's code, and it's not exactly a secret command. If you can change the code that affects the block reward you can figure out how to run
darkcoind gettxoutsetinfo and look for the "total_amount" bit.
In other words: we don't need to prove that Evan mined those coins directly to his wallet. The scam is easily proven by his attitude subsequent to them being mined, where either he only owns a few coins and is being purposely deceptive to enrich someone else, or he owns the bulk of them and is being purposely deceptive to enrich himself. The deception and failure to relaunch (when he'd been quite comfortable relaunching the first time round) are the nail in the proverbial coffin, who it most directly enriches is mere minutiae.
