Thread by @AnonIndustries_

🚨How Scammers Helped Create Monero🚨
Here is an exposé about the dark history of the beloved cryptocurrency Monero. Get ready for a wild ride that all starts with Monero's White Paper 📝. #monero #xmr #crytpo #privacy @monero

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But a fun fact about Monero is that it doesn't have an OFFICIAL white paper, because Monero was cloned from Bytecoin. Bytecoin launched in 2014 and is based on the CryptoNote protocol. It was heralded as fixing all the privacy issues that plague bitcoin and it SEEMED legit.

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Even prominent Bitcoin core devs were impressed with the privacy created by Bytecoin and the Cryptonote protocol:

“The privacy achieved by Bytecoin is better than any existing-in-production privacy tools " - Gregory Maxwell - Bitcoin Core Dev - 2014

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So the code was good, but its backstory was too good to be true. Bytecoin creators claimed that it was used by dark markets, gamers, and even academics. They claimed that Bytecoin had thousands of users and had been around for years....

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BUT no one had heard of Bytecoin before🤔. No one could find an article, video, forum post, or even a mention of Bytecoin anywhere on the internet. So people began to dig into Bytecoin and a scandalous fact about the supply was uncovered...

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Around 80% of Bytecoin's total supply had already been mined before it was officially announced or used anywhere!!! All of Bytecoin's history was just created by the Bytecoin devs to get a bunch of easy money 💰.

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The premine for Bytcoin happened just weeks before its official announcement. The Bytecoin team hoped that the coin would take off and make them tons of money. Premines are common scams in the crypto space, but there was something unique about this premine scam...

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Rember the CryptoNote white paper from earlier? Well, the code in that paper was still amazingly private, premine or not! The code was open source and was deemed to be sound, so some people simply cloned the Bytecoin code and started..... Bitmonero.

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Thankful_for_today was the main person behind bitmonero, but people didn't trust him either. He constantly went against the communities wishes and at one point advocated for Bitmonero to merge mine with Bytecoin. Merge mining like this would support the Bytecoin project.

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The community had suspicions that thankful_for_today might in fact also be the creator of the Bytecoin project and looking to run another scam. So the community abandoned Bitmonero, cloned it, and started a new cryptocurrency called... Monero.

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The well-known Ricardo "Fluffypony" Spagni headed up the new Monero team. The team began by building upon the foundation laid by Bitmonero and Bytecoin. Monero has since outgrown its sketchy origins to be the privacy-preserving crypto that we all know and love today.

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To this day no one knows for sure who was actually behind Bytecoin, Cryptonote, or Bitmonero or what they wanted. But none of this matters since Monero's code is open source and has been verified by thousands of people and stood up to all scrutiny 🧐.

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If you have any questions about this story, Monero, or anything else drop them below. I got more great content coming soon!

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The majority of my research came from these four bitcointalk threads:
Bytecoin Announcement:
bitcointalk.org/index.php?topi…
Bitmonero Announcement:
bitcointalk.org/index.php?topi…
Bitmonero Merge Mine With Bytecoin:
bitcointalk.org/index.php?topi…
Monero Announcement:
bitcointalk.org/index.php?topi…

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I also made a youtube video where I go into more details about Monero's origin story:


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