Critisim of CryptoNote

CryptoNote has received a mixed to negative response by the cryptocurrency community. The community has praised the algorithm for being sound but criticized the developers for faking parts of it's success, and trying to piggyback off of Bitcoin. Most of the findings were discovered by rethink-your-strategy from bitcointalk.org.

Whitepaper origins
Attempts were made to falsify the origins of the whitepapers in order to make it appear as if it came from humble beginnings, like Bitcoin. The official website uses supposedly fake names for the team members, while the white paper's author is Nicolas van Saberhagen, which is also likely to be a pseudonym. The white paper "CryptoNote v 2.0" is dated back to October 2013. There are claims that this date isn't correct: Rethink-your-strategy discovered copies of CryptoNote whitepapers with XPM properties set to 2014 on cryptonote.org site while nearly same documents with 2013 and 2012 years in XPM properties were available on bytecoin.org site.

It was also mentioned that the team developing CryptoNote had experienced a schism and went separate ways.

Bytecoin
Bytecoin (BCN) was the first cryptocurrency based on CryptoNote. Rethink-your-strategy discovered that no one in any dark web community had remotely heard of it between the time of it's announcement and it's initial creation, and considered that as an early red flag. Their invigoration also claimed multiple sock puppets, including one of Satoshi Nakamoto, were created in order to artificially prop up the currency, Despite the announcement and attempts to hype it, Bytecoin's network contains very few nodes which has lead to delayed transactions.

Monero
Monero (XMR) was originally maintained by the CryptoNote developers as bitMonero. During the transition of being handed over by the community as Monero, OracionSeis tried to relaunch the cryptocurrency all on their own with monero.co.in and since-abandoned Github. The community pushed back, the developer caved and renamed it to QuazarCoin.

Monero is now developed independently of CryptoNote since the transition over to the community and has become the only successful cryptocurrency of it's type. Attempts have been made to stop it's success by CryptoNote developers. As a consequence, Monero has expressed interests in better ASIC resistant algorithms to CryptoNote.

QuazarCoin
QuazarCoin (QCN) was created as an intermediary for in-game currencies. It was later revealed that the account from which the currency was announced from on bitcointalk.org was later sold to someone else when the creator returned under a new account. The has since been abandoned.