I don't think the answers are sufficient to just ignore this situation. Its fucked up and its fucked with my head. I've tried to take some time out but it just doesn't add up. How can this have happened without anyone knowing, and why doesn't it seem to matter? Its not like it happened years ago, it was still going on last month. The guy says he thinks its all cool and xmr is great, but that only means he's got bucket loads of free coins. he managed to spend over $250k mining in costs over just a few months.
WTF? How did he spend $250K and get "free" coins?
He was part of a very large mining operation, which spent a lot of money on mining. My guess is that the profit margin toward the end "last month" (i.e. "month before last" in <3 hours) before they shut down was pretty low. Their biggest advantage was in the period before the current dev team fixed it. But don't believe me, read what the writer of that blog post wrote about it:
tl;dr: Bytecoin was a scam, they crippled the miner, Monero inherited it when Monero was still "bitmonero", and it took a while before the Monero devs got the code fast by undoing the crap that Bytecoin had added. During that time, I made some money. After that time, I didn't. That time has been over for a long time.
To their credit, the Monero devs have always been up-front that there's a lot of work to be done with respect to auditing, both in cryptography and design, and in implementation, and they've made credible progress at doing so. One hopes that any baggage from the cryptonote/bytecoin fork has been priced in and is well understood by the community, given that the coin's been around for months and the developers have been very up front about these things and their plans for addressing those risks.
