This is very interesting to read, and people can learn how scammers work by trying to follow this thread.
The main character in this thread is "Kolin Evans" aka "digitalindustry" :
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/kolin-evans-pump-and-dump-bribe-scammer-674410 and made many profits with Quark and acted as if he was the spokes man of Quark.
Kolin created multiple accounts and has many shill accounts. It is one big Digitalindustry family on bitcointalk.
It is still difficult to find out which persons in this thread are real and who are just another account name of digitalindustry (or a shill account).
But first the investigation. There are calculation mistakes and the OP overlooked (on purpose?) a few interesting things while he pointed to it.
The most important doubtful things I found:
1) the blocks 1, 100 and 1000 and timestamps:block 1: 13:03:50
Block 2: 13:04:06 (=16 seconds block time)
block 100: 13:14:18 (=average block time of 612 seconds/100 blocks = 6 seconds!)
block 1000: 14:42:58 (=average block time of 5932 seconds/1000 blocks = 6 seconds!)
With the 30 second blocktime of Quark you would expect:
Block 100 after: 100*30 seconds = 50 minutes. Not 10 minutes after launch
Block 1000 after: 1000*30 seconds = 500 minutes = 8 hours and 20 minutes. Not 1 hour and 38 minutes after launch.
Above is exactly the reason why Quark is called an instamined coin by many persons:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.9341740 https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.2774252Nowhere in his investigation this is discussed.
2) Multiple wallet addresses direct after launch.When you check the blockchain you will find multiple Quark wallet addresses mining Quark.
This is mostly used as an argument for good distribution of Quark.
However...
Is each wallet address a single miner, or have single miners multiple wallet addresses? Or was a mixing device used? I have no idea....
But...
If there were so many miners at launch why was the hashrate so low??
https://bitinfocharts.com/de/comparison/difficulty-qrk.htmlAs can be seen, the hashrate increased when the price exploded in November/December 2013. Not at launch.
Also what is doubtful is that Quark was spread over multiple addresses just two hours after launch (see block 1576:
http://qrk.blockr.io/block/info/1576 )
Nowhere the OP discussed this in his investigation.
3)
Total amount of Quark Quark is designed that after 6 months there were 247M Quark in circulation, and thereafter there can still be 1M Quark mined each year.
This means that at the moment about 248M Quark is in existence.
According to the OP there are about 782M Quark in circulation at 20NOV2013 (4 Months after launch). A miscalculation of more than 500M Quark by the OP.
So far in my opinion the lousy investigation by the OP.
I notified him, but of course he didn't react or corrected his investigation.
Further about the reactions afterwards.
That is also interesting to see.
According to " digitalindustry" (DI) and "Spoetnik" (a person associated with Kolin, who have problems to distinguish himself from DI (
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.9366830 ) this is a great investigation and compliment the OP.
.
The Quark holders (netnox, coinmama, quarkfx, quarkcheck and reraise), are also happy and relieved that they haven't invest in a "scam coin" and show appreciation to the OP.
But then there is one person "Stealthcoin" who knows more about Quark and knows this whole investigation is just one "theater play" by scammers.
He tried to show, but he is attacked by (shill)accounts of DI, and the OP removes some of his posts.
The (shill)accounts of DI who attack "stealthcoin" are: StephenJH, AliceWonder, Spoetnik and BitcoiNaked.
It is interesting to see that scammers attack the attackers (try to denigrate the attacker) and try to confuse. But that real investors are done with posting in this thread after they showed their appreciation.
Your calculations are mostly right but I think you are mistaken about the relationships between the people with it, for the most part people around the forums don't communicate as much and are just skeptical of each other in general.
The First Blocks that would have been mined then or Premine through Instamine might be about 2 Million or so? I guess it would depend on how long it was released after BitcoinTalk launch and how many Blocks were mined before then to get an idea of the amount of hashrate that the initial rigs were outputting.
Height: 1
Version: 112
Transaction Merkle Root: 7db74d7bdacb6068375d799062dbe044a0fa77debdf43c02bca55c7e8a5f7243
Time: 1374422630 (2013-07-21 16:03:50)
looking at the Quark Block Explorer, 28 Blocks were mined in the first 5 minutes (average time 10.7 seconds)
Height: 28
Version: 112
Transaction Merkle Root: cfcaad1952520c853c4376e6dfea85c9dd0815bf46ee5041890e1964a3ff8fe4
Time: 1374422928 (2013-07-21 16:08:48)
95 blocks after 10 Minutes (average time 5.7 seconds)
Height: 95
Version: 112
Transaction Merkle Root: 0038481bdc7830eee0ca15b18082f1459840ff2052b7225817ae5e4d30350137
Time: 1374423222 (2013-07-21 16:13:42)
500 blocks after 45 minutes (average time 5.4 seconds)
Height: 500
Version: 112
Transaction Merkle Root: f3a9c374a5fe484c12602592a02cdef33d4c1da8d1a6e791a4a5f88bc41380dd
Time: 1374425372 (2013-07-21 16:49:32)
750 blocks after 1 hour and 6 minutes (average time 5.28 seconds)
Height: 750
Version: 112
Transaction Merkle Root: 8b58465d421d334280b471272a3fa381dd48981fd04203bbedc89db7034db4a8
Time: 1374426572 (2013-07-21 17:09:32)
Difficulty: 1.991 (Bits: 1e008091)
Cumulative Difficulty: 1.583
1000 blocks after 1 hour and 40 minutes (average time 6 seconds)
Height: 1000
Version: 112
Transaction Merkle Root: 0bfc8ae71f8d1316e80e36d115cc1012dd6450ab5d189a209677f5d8183c3544
Time: 1374428578 (2013-07-21 17:42:58)
Difficulty: 6.949 (Bits: 1d24d6f1)
Cumulative Difficulty: 5.363
1500 blocks after 3 hours and 50 minutes (average time 9.23 seconds)
Height: 1500
Version: 112
Transaction Merkle Root: deede55bf518b02db7532b706dab0e7cf8451d4e9f6aaef495cb9511f8aab737
Time: 1374436403 (2013-07-21 19:53:23)
Difficulty: 76.878 (Bits: 1d035477)
Cumulative Difficulty: 59.770
Now you can go to the Quark topic main page
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/ann-qrk-quark-core-010-upgrade-260031 and you can see that everyone was complaining about orphans but lots of people got blocks, one guy got 50 blocks of the first 1000 blocks.
Conclusion:With low starting difficulty and a long retarget time, the reward output increases until the hashrate levels out.
If there was a large rig put on to Quark after it was launched by the developers that made it, that hashrate would have been pushed out by the time it hit block 1500 or so, a lot of miners found the difficulty getting too high to mine quite early on in the life of Quark.