Does anybody know if there have been any "glitches" in the past year re: Monero, that would have allowed insiders to obtain XMR "off the books" as it were? Thank you for any answers. Wasn't able to get an answer yet in #Monero on #freenode. I know that there was some incident in August/September 2014, but not sure on the details.
Thanks for the answers so far. Its important to try to understand the distribution of monero, especially in the early part of its life-cycle. If the distribution seems skewed to relatively few people, then the chance for profits may not be that great. Again, thanks for the replies.
The "glitch" in the obfuscated miner was fixed extremely fast (by NoodleDoodle, one of the core team members), a lot faster than most people remember. At the time it was a pretty big deal.
Specifically,
the change was commited May 7th, so ~19 days from launch = 2.58% of initial emission mined up to that point (we have infinite tail emission, but still use the 18.4 million initial emission as a reference point). This was roughly a 2.5x speed improvement over the original (sorry smooth, I was misremembering yesterday). There was an additional speed bump,
once AES-NI support was added on May 18th, and that was an additional ~5x speed improvement, so by the time the first month had passed we'd improved the miner efficiency by more than 12x and made those changes publicly available.
A good exercise is to look at a logarithmic hashrate chart for the period:
You can see the initial spike as speculative miners start CPU mining, and then a continual ramp-up, with spikes on May 4th-8th and again on May 19th-20th, but neither of those spikes are orders of magnitude greater than the initial spike.
Remember, too, that at the time the core team that you know and love today didn't know each other. I knew othe a bit (online), but I'd never even had a passing pm with any of the others. Plus the community as a whole, largely spearheaded by those who would become the core team, were in the process of taking it over after things with thankful_for_today were...not working out;) So collusion on any level would have been unlikely, and if we did collude with the intent to scam you can bet we would have run with an improved miner for a lot longer than a couple of days. We would have mined for many months with only small improvements to the hashing function, and added lots of whiz-bang features to build the price up whilst we built up our stash.