What is Bytecoin?

Bytecoin is a decentralised and private cryptocurrency. It was the first privacy coin created with open source code that allows anyone to be part of the development network.

It can be used reliably for purchases anywhere in the world and runs on a fast and secure blockchain. In its early days, Bytecoin helped to facilitate transactions when people were using BTC for naive uses on the dark web.

History of Bytecoin

Created in 2012, Bytecoin (BCN) has the main goal of creating fast, anonymous, and untraceable transactions. It claims to be the first cryptocurrency to implement CryptoNote technology. CryptoNote allows for absolute anonymity through the use of ring signatures.

Bytecoin claims to have a block time of two minutes and parameters that were designed to make the coin easy to mine. Mining Bytecoin is completed by using an Egalitarian Proof-of-Work function called Scrypt. This function allows it to be minable using both CPUs and GPUs. It is also one of the only coins that can be mined with a PC rather than an ASIC rig.

Bytecoin’s main advantage is its capacity for true privacy and anonymity. This is provided by ring signatures and stealth addresses. However, there was a divide in the team regarding the future direction of the project, which resulted in a hard fork and the creation of another well-known privacy coin – Monero. Monero bases itself on the same protocol that Bytecoin first integrated – CryptoNote.

Why use Bytecoin?

Bytecoin was one of the earliest coins to introduce and use ring signatures. This piece of cryptography groups public keys together during transactions to mix single outputs of similar value into one transaction. This technology is ahead of its time and makes it nearly impossible to find out where money has come from and where it has gone to. It also protects these addresses, making them unlinkable to prevent blockchain analysis.

BCN is also extremely safe and reliable. Its reliability is defined by the total computing power of all the computers involved in each transaction. This means that the greater the power, the more reliable the network is. With this power, money that is stored in wallets has already been protected during the transaction process.

Other advantages of using Bytecoin include that its emission rate is decreasing over time, meaning the value of each BCN coin is only going to increase. Bytecoin is also resistant to hacks due to the cryptographic algorithms that have been used to power the currency. If a hacker was to try and find an account key, they would have to go through an enormous amount of resources. This, in turn, makes any attack unprofitable.

BCN coin

BCN is tradeable on some of the most popular exchanges such as Binance, Poloniex, and OKEx, and has a market cap of $172,488,054 USD at the time of writing. BCN can be stored in a mobile, web-based, or desktop wallet and its trading volume is fairly low. However, despite its impressive market cap, the coin does not often make the news on cryptocurrency exchanges.

Conclusion

From its creation in 2012, Bytecoin has remained private and guaranteed its users’ safety from third parties wanting to snoop on transactions. It is one of the oldest projects in the space that allows users to transact anonymously with others. By being the first cryptocurrency to implement the CryptoNote protocol, it has served as a leader for other projects to follow.