I think there is a large color spectrum that involves "fraud" and "illegitimacy".
The classic form of scam/fraud is a scheme were people put their money and then lose it.
Does DRK have these characteristics? Are people losing money here? Or have they multiplied their bitcoins 10-100-1000x depending their point of entry?
Year to year performance (and March 23 of 2014 was over two months after the launch of Darkcoin) is something like 12-14x. Month-to-month is also exceptional (1.7x)
Just because it's profitable it doesn't mean necessarialy it's not a scam. For example, Herbalife is a typical case of a Ponzi, but more than 30 years later it's still profitable for a lot of people.
I've addressed the distribution part on the reply to Joshuar which I'll repeat here:
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Some of us who follow DRK closely know who the DRK whales are / were and we know their stories. Personally I've talked with most of them (or if I haven't, I've read their stories). I know how they got their DRKs and this pretty much narrows down what Evan has. It's not two million and it's not one million either. If my assessment is correct it should be closer to 300k coins - some of which he probably bought for 0.25btc/10k DRK. I believe he must have suffered serious losses with the Mintpal "confiscation" and consequent dumping at market prices.
I was also there while wave, after wave, after wave of dumping was happening every day at Cryptsy near the 0.0012-0.0016 range. Every day the same bitching "ohhh the dumping". We're talking quantities that were multiple the daily production. How can the instamine be ...intact if all this dumping had occurred? But now we are >10x that price with 0.017, so, in retrospect, it was very cheap distribution.
Same with thousands of coins during the first exchange days. Quite a big volume in DRKs (not so much in BTCs) at insanely low prices (0.000020-0.000080 then 0.000180, then 0.000500, then it got to 0.002 before the c-cex hack of 330 btc which brought huge reshuffling in the market). Hacker bought DRKs up to 0.008, moved them to the poloniex and was selling/dumping them for 0.0008-0.0012... again, significant re-distribution of coins.
Then you have the May pump... you have coins that you have acquired at 0.000025 up to 0.001x and the price goes 0.028 by the massive whale, which IMO was probably a stolen-BTCs-whale playing with various altcoins and having DRK as his "pet"... so at that point, the market took over the redistribution.
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You are trying to claim about redistribution in an anonymous coin. But even if this wasn't being an anonnymous, how could you claim about the ownership of the new addresses?
The changes have been made, indeed, but if it is of benefit to existing holders, it is also of benefit to a buyer that decides to buy NOW. If a deflationary change is made that preserves one's wealth better, or an economic incentive is placed that will increase value in the long term, why would a buyer that buys NOW, not get the same benefit that the current holder has? They will gain equally.
Ensuring that the coin does good is also ensuring the interests of the participants. This does not constitute a fraud / scam. You can argue that future buyers will buy at an increased price, but they will still buy because of that specific feature set that will give them even greater price at a later point of time.
On the other hand, if, say, you tuned a coin to be more inflationary (with current holders losing), this is also something that will impact current and future buyers 6 months from now. They will be thinking "why buy this over-inflationary coin if it can't preserve my BTCs?".
Hey, Bitcoin dropped very hard on its price, we think the problem is because we are generating more coins than the market can absorve, so, let's change the block reward system now and reduce the amount of coins per block from 25 to 20.
Or in other words: "hey, we are not liking the results, we are loosing in this way, so, let's cheat this and change the rules of the game."
Yes, but it only took 1 block to get 50 BTCs and less than a week to get 34.000 BTCs (the entire worth of DRK's instamine right now).
If DRK is a scam, the scam has an economic value. Say you are a reporter and you have to make an article on how big a scam DRK is. You'll either use Jan 2014 valuation of the 2mn DRKs, or current valuation of the 2mn DRKs.
The 2 prices you will come up is 50 BTCs (0.000025 x 2mn coins) or 34.000 BTCs (0.017 x 2mn coins).
And, again, 50 BTC was just the initial block of Bitcoin and 34.000 BTCs are like what? 4 days of solo-mining it?
What a nonsense. Let me explain one thing: I'm not against instamines at all. Serious. For example, Blackcoin was entire mined in less than 2 weeks and after this, they turned at a 100% proof-of-stake coin. But there's an important difference here: they stated this at the announcement when they putted how the reward system would work. OTOH, Darkcoin at the launch never claimed anything about this. Probably Darkcoin at the first hours launch couldn't be considered an instamine case. But what happened? They changed the reward system, so,
proportionally, they generated a lot of coins in the
first blocks than it should be generated. Did Bitcoin do this? No. And when this happened (
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=823.0;all ) they fixed the exploit and the block too. Darkcoin changed the entire rewards system in order to benefit themselves.
Problems at launch happen with a lot of altcoins. IIRC even LTC has an instamine issue due to problems with the difficulty adjustment algorithm (DRK was forked by LTC btw).
One thing is an in issue about block interval caused by an issue in the difficulty adjustement (and BTW, Litecoin uses the same dificulty adjusment scheme of Bitcoin). Another completely different thing is generating more or less coins per block than it should be generated.
The problem was publicly admitted and remember that he offered an airdrop solution that was voted down from the community. Evan knew that the instamine issue will be brought up again and again and that's why he wanted it solved. It's not his fault that people voted down the airdrop. At that point Evan's responsibility and blame ends, and it becomes a community responsibility. And the community had its reasons to say no.
As for the "fraud", remember what I said earlier. If people are getting massive ROI, they aren't really "scammed". A quote that brings a smile to my face is some forum members who were writing (as they watched their DRK worth multiply) "Evan scam us some more"...
2-3 months after the incident happened he purpose this? Also, how this would be posible at that point? Of course he wasn't being serious about that proposal and a conclusion of this was just did to create a false sensation of legitimacy to the coin wouldn't surprise me.