Exclusive Interview with the communications and Marketing responsible for Cryptonote Platform
You may have already heard about innovative CryptoNote platform and its reference code Bytecoin (BCN), the first currency said to have truly anonymous transactions and egalitarian CPU mining only. Cryptonote technology is based on ring signatures, differs from Bitcoin source code completely and is already being discussed by the community.
On July 4th Bytecoin celebrated its 2nd anniversary and we took this opportunity to shed some light on CryptoNote platform and its reference currency, Bytecoin (BCN)
We had some time with Harry Ullman the head responsible for all external communication and marketing for CryptoNote platform, where he was able to give us an interview and explain us more about the project.
What is your name and position with Bytecoin and what is your job in the CryptoNote platform?
As you might know we prefer not to use our real names when it comes to Bytecoin as we want to avoid being influenced on our decisions by external forces. But for the sake of the interview you may call me Harry. I’m responsible for all external communications and marketing. A spokesperson if you like.
Bytecoin completed its second anniversary at the 4th of July, can you tell me a little bit about Bytecoin History?
Yes, July 4th was a second anniversary for Bytecoin. We are very proud the coin is gradually gaining recognition within cryprocurrencies community. And honestly I don’t see how it could have turned out otherwise. Clearly the CryptoNote technology is one of the very few solutions market can offer for untraceable transactions and users’ anonymity. We do realize that Bitcoin is an indisputable top dog of the day due its pioneering role; however Bytecoin is a next generation coin and has something in store that other cryptocurrencies are lacking.
Talking about the history, the first attempts at code development started right after Bitcoin was launched in 2009. When launched in 2012 Bytecoin immediately gained traction and interest of early miners even though the main services were located in the deep web. Over the years we’ve managed to put together a very impressive team of developers, economists and cryptologists. This spurred our development and gathered attention of the community, which grew steadily. Ultimately, this led to more than 10 Bytecoin clones already launched, which we perceive as recognition of our efforts.
Although, there have been some minor technical difficulties during the last 2 years, Bytecoin has proved itself a very stable cryptocurrency. We’ve been able to walk through 3 major pumps & dumps along the way, which eliminated the majority of the speculators, and come out unharmed for that matter. To my knowledge, the largest stakeholder sits on 1.5% of total emission to date.
Can you explain me how the CN platform works?
CryptoNote is the technology that allows for the creation of completely anonymous egalitarian cryptocurrencies, however it is not just about creating yet another digital coin. CyptoNote was designed as a useful tool for people with vision to break away from the current unfair financial system of total control. The ultimate goal of the CryptoNote platform is a widespread recognition of the technology through development, marketing and ideological support of those willing to take on current financial system. To put it in simple words, CryptoNote gives you a technology to make the world a better place. The recently announced CryptoNote Foundation and CryptoNote Starter are yet another step on the way to mass popularization of the technology.
Bytecoin is the first currency to be built on CryptoNote. It has been the main driver of the platform development and still contributes to the strategic long-term issues. Bytecoin is an important part required to fulfill our strategic vision.
Tell me about the Bytecoin special features?
As I’ve mentioned before, the key feature of the CryptoNote and Bytecoin is untraceable transactions capability. The way it works is through so called ring signatures. The ordinary digital signature verification process involves the public key of the signer. The signature actually proves that the author has the corresponding secret key. That’s how it works in Bitcoin and most of altcoins.
Ring signatures, on the other hand, is a more sophisticated scheme, which requires a number of different public keys for verification. By ring signatures we perceive a group of individuals, each with their own secret and public key. The signer of a given transaction is an undistinguishable member of the group. The main difference with the ordinary digital signature schemes is that a verifier cannot establish the exact identity of the signer and that is where anonymity comes from. That is how Bytecoin works.
There are other cool features in Bytecoin such as double-spending proof through a key image and blockchain analysis resistance. And it goes without saying that Bytecoin is designed for CPU only and restricts GPU and ASIC mining to bring the equality to all the miners.
As Bytecoin was created to resolve Bitcoin’s drawbacks, which became obvious soon after it was launched; it was written from scratch and contains various updates including those I’ve mentioned above. . For instance, BCN network adjusts its parameters based on the community demands, meaning that there are no hard-coded constants which require developers’ attention (unlike Bitcoin).
What’s your strategic alignment in the Altcoins Ecosystem?
Well, we are all working hard to reach the same goal. That goal is being a structural change in a current financial system. We employ different tactics and marketing ideas, however only a few of us offer something new in terms of technology.
We are trying to stay away from squabbles that are unfortunately not uncommon between communities supporting one coin or the other. In the end, we’re all pushing in one direction and it would be way better if everyone was focused on advancing the future and building products that matter.
However, there is one issue we’d like to mention explicitly. Bytecoin shouldn’t be called “altcoin” as it is not based on Bitcoin source code; it’s a completely new cryptocurrency. Thus, it is better to call CryptoNote and Bytecoin an alternative cryptocurrency platform instead.
What’s your technological roadmap and future expectations?
Bytecoin has had some major updates recently. Those are flexible API upgrade and an innovative block chain data base to be specific. The latter is a complete redesign of standard STL containers, created through a tremendous amount of work. We’re currently tuning it and are likely to create a separate open-source project for this data base to be used by the community not only in the cryptocurrencies, but also in completely different projects.
We are receiving a positive feedback from our community and expecting an additional interest to the technology. However, our goal is to keep pushing CryptoNote technology forward with the most crucial commits. We focus on the most sophisticated aspects that are required to create infrastructure that is capable to shift current paradigm.
For instance, multi-signatures is something that we are working on right now. This feature potentially has lots of uses such as wallet sharing, native escrow services, and increased security. GUI wallet is something that’s long overdue and we have it at the top of our priorities list for the nearest future. The usability issue that has not been tackled for some time will be addressed in a due manner.
Harry Ullman also informed us that the coming improvements were not complete although he assured that updates were coming by the day.
Harry finished our appointment reinforcing that:
“Bytecoin team is devoted to our work and we will keep doing our best for all the cryptocurrencies and CryptoNote.”
To get more information about Bytecoin (BCN) and CryptoNote Platform you can visit the following links:
http://bytecoin.org – Bytecoin website
https://cryptonote.org/inside.php – CryptoNote technology explained
https://cryptonote.org/whitepaper.pdf – CryptoNote white paper
https://cryptonotestarter.org – CryptoNote starter
Special Thanks to Harry Ullman for giving us this interview.
This post was authored by our new writer Nuno Menezes