Bytecoin (BCN) is a decentralized cryptocurrency with open-source code. Bytecoin is based on CryptoNote technology and is designed to facilitate fast, secure, and anonymous transactions.
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Read on to learn everything you need to know about the Bytecoin project and the Bytecoin (BCN) cryptocurrency.
What Is Bytecoin
Bytecoin (BCN) is a private, decentralized, and open-source cryptocurrency. It's also the first cryptocurrency to have implemented the CryptoNote protocol, designed to offer global, instant, secure, and private transactions.
Bytecoin is protected against 51% attacks; its transactions usually take about 2 minutes, require no fees, and are completely untraceable.
It allows everyone to contribute to the development of its network and is a financial solution for users who prioritize financial privacy.
The project was created to provide complete anonymity. While Bitcoin, Litecoin, and other non-privacy blockchains allow viewing public addresses and transactions, Bytecoin doesn't make this information available.
To secure anonymity, Bytecoin transactions hide the sender's and the receiver's transaction addresses. Transactions senders' public keys are grouped so an observer could tell that one of the senders in that group was responsible for a transaction but couldn't tell which one.
Bytecoin Founders
The Bytecoin project was launched on July 4, 2012. It was written in the C ++ programming language like Bitcoin, XRP, and many of the earliest cryptocurrencies.
The team standing behind the Bytecoin project preferred to stay anonymous.
Some members of the team, particularly communication specialist Harry Ulman and Community Manager Jenny Goldberg, have given interviews mainly through e-mail to keep their anonymity.
Bytecoin gave rise to various discussions due to the uncertainty around it. Some supported the project's main idea of financial independence, while others found BCN would mainly serve as a currency of DarkNet.
Other disagreements were about the development process of Bytecoin, more specifically its timeline and the adoption of CryptoNote, the technology that powered anonymous and unlinkable transactions.
The whitepaper of CryptoNote was published in October 2013, when the majority of Bytecoin was mined. In a Reddit thread in 2014, the creator of another privacy coin, Monero (XMR), Riccardo Spagni, expressed his doubts about the Bytecoin chain having been falsified.
However, this remains only an assumption, and there is no proof that the cryptocurrency was premined.
How Does BCN Work
Bytecoin is based on CryptoNote technology, an application layer protocol using ring signatures and one-time keys to secure the privacy of transactions.
BCN was the first crypto coin that adopted this technique.
The recipient only uses one-time public keys, and only the recipient can access their designated output on the blockchain. Given that all outputs are unlinkable, the recipient's privacy is secured.
Ring signatures ensure the privacy of the sender. This technique binds public keys together to fuse single outputs of similar value into one transaction. As a result, it becomes impossible to carry out chain analysis and link addresses.
A ring signature serves as a digital endorsement in which possible signers are grouped to produce a special signature to confirm a transaction. In some ways, it's similar to signing in a joint bank account, but the actual signer remains unknown. The digital signature is produced when the actual signer and non-signers form a ring, where all participants are equal and valid.
A one-time spend key corresponds to the output sent from the sender's wallet. Non-signers are post-transaction outputs pulled from the blockchain, and together, they form the inputs of a transaction. To an outside observer, including the recipient, all of the inputs appear pretty similar to the transaction's output. This is how the origin of the sender remains unknown.
To prevent double spends the network uses a cryptographic key, an essential part of every ring signature derived from the spent output. There can be only one key for each output on the blockchain, and it's impossible to distinguish which output created it. All used key images are maintained in the blockchain enabling Bytecoin miners to verify that no outputs are spent twice.
This system makes the chances of any hacks near zero because if anyone tries to find an account key, they would have to spend enormous amounts of resources which is extremely difficult and unprofitable.
The Bytecoin blockchain uses the Proof-of-Work hash algorithm CryptoNight.
As stated on the project's official website, mining rewards don't depend on the network's emission rate (the speed at which new coins are minted and released). Bytecoin resets the difficulty with each block to respond to even minor hashrate changes. The network's block time is 120 seconds, and with every produced block, the number of emitted BCNs decreases. With a total supply of 184.46 billion BCN coins, the emission rate is 65,000 BCN every 120 seconds. As a result, the number of coins available for mining is reduced, automatically increasing their value.
Where Can You Buy BCN
Some popular exchanges that allow trading Bytecoin are HitBTC, Gate.io, Polonies, CoinEX, and STEX.
Binance, a leading crypto exchange, also supported BCN trading for a short period. When Bytecoin price reached its all-time high so far, surging to $0.145166 in May 2018, Binance announced that BCN trading and deposits are available on its platform. However, in December that year, the exchange delisted BCN.
Users can store, send, and receive BCN through Bytecoin mobile and web-based wallets. Bytecoin offers four wallet types: mobile wallet released in May 2017, browser Bytecoin Zero released in September 2019, the Bytecoin Wallet Daemon, and Bytecoin Desktop released in 2018.
The last two have additional features and can be used by developers and integrators.
The desktop wallet has advanced features like a backup copy, SendProof, CPU mining on preferred pools, and daemon activity monitoring (daemon is a backend program that performs individual functions).
The controlling wallet daemon can be useful for developers building e-commerce applications.
Bytecoin Wallet Daemon is designed for e-commerce projects to manage a user's account while operating with a node daemon. It enables accepting BCN payments.
The network doesn't appear in the news often. The latest updates provided by the team were related to wallets.
