WILL BYTECOIN EVENTUALLY BE THE PEFERRED CURRENCY FOR DARKNET? – AN INTERVIEW WITH HARRY ULLMAN OF BYTECOIN

When did you discover Bitcoin?

Unfortunately, I can’t tell you that I’m one of the first people who discovered Bitcoin from Satoshi’s whitepaper. But I might as well be seen as an early adopter. I joined the community long before Bitcoin’s price skyrocketed to $10.

How long have you been with the Bytecoin project?

A little more than three years. Around the spring 2012 I first heard about the CryptoNote and needless to say, I became obsessed with the technology.

However, joining the Bytecoin team was not easy in any way: part of the core Bytecoin team deals with the privacy issues and that force us to avoid disclosing important information. Besides, I proved my worth and my competence over and over before I was officially on the team.

I have to say that I’m very proud that the Bytecoin website states “Ullo is one of the first Bytecoin team members.”

Tell us about Bytecoin, what’s new in the new wallet?

As you correctly stated previously — recently we’ve released a new e-commerce solution, Bytecoin RPC Wallet. RPC Wallet provides third party services with an effective, convenient way to work with Bytecoin network via RPC. With release of RPC Wallet Integration with Bytecoin just got even easier than it was before.

Bytecoin RPC Wallet supports approximately 10000 connections and can process up to 60 transactions per second. These are the raw numbers that we’ve acquired during our testing process. We are confident that this should meet the requirements for any business that is willing to accept Bytecoin.

With the recent 1.0.4 release we also have update Bytecoin Wallet. It is a user-oriented, graphical wallet which features modern design and intuitive interface. It allows users to access and operate in anonymous Bytecoin network without any obstacles like command line interface.

“Egalitarian Proof of Work”

What would you say are the core features that differentiate Bytecoin from Bitcoin and others?

It might be easier to describe their similarities rather than differences. CryptoNote and Bytecoin were created from scratch as a response to Bitcoin’s main drawbacks that became apparent after its release.

Bitcoin and Bytecoin have absolutely different codebases. There is a number of things that make Bytecoin stand out. I’ll cover the most significant features that are important for our users. The rest can be found in CryptoNote whitepaper, which is written as a comparison to Bitcoin.

First of all, Bytecoin has a very different proof of work, called CryptoNight. If you remember, Satoshi’s whitepaper states that one CPU should be equal to one user vote. However, his assumption did not hold, since FPGA farms and ASICs were soon to emerge and provided their holders with extreme advantage over other users. There have been several unsuccessful attempts to address this issue with new proof-of-work functions, but up to this date only CryptoNight satisfies Satoshi’s original vision.

We call CryptoNight an egalitarian proof of work, since it was designed to equalize CPU and GPU mining efficiency. It is inefficiently computable on GPU, FPGA, and ASIC architectures. As a result, any user can still join Bytecoin mining with a desktop PC.

Secondly, Bitcoin is admittedly pseudonymous. Its blockchain is a ledger open to anyone, which makes any payment traceable and linkable. However, we believe that financial privacy is an important feature of electronic cash. Your transactions history should not be accessible to third parties, no matter if it’s government or marketers.

To address this issue Bytecoin has made sophisticated adjustments to the original cryptocurrency design. We were first to introduce both ring signature and one-time private keys (stealth addresses for each of the transaction’s outputs).

Ring signature is a special type of digital signature that can be created by someone of the group of users, but it is unknown who exactly the signer is. Imagine a letter that is signed by a group of 10 users. You know that someone of them did sign the letter, but there’s no way to identify who that was (you may only guess). This introduces untraceability property, which means that for any Bytecoin payment there is a number of equiprobable senders.

Ring signature works differently from coin mixers and coinjoin schemes. The latter depend on other users that are currently making a payment that you can mix yours with. On the other hand, in Bytecoin you mix your unspent inputs with absolutely random ones from any time period. As a result, it creates extra barriers for blockchain analysis with each transaction.

What’s more, each transaction is sent to a unique one-time address (stealth address) which is derived from the recipient’s public address and random data. As a result, only the recipient is able to tell that the payment was made to him. This provides the unlinkability property, which makes it impossible for any party except for the wallet owner to link any transaction to this wallet or evaluate its current balance.

There are also other important differences, such as adaptive maximum block size, smooth emission curve, and two private keys for each wallet instead of one. There are plenty of other differences some of which were more or less summarized in this infographic from the Bytecoin community website:

 

[“source – cryptocoinsnews.com”]