What Is Bytecoin?

By Lou Wallace

What is Bytecoin? Bytecoin, not to be confused with Bitcoin, is a cryptocurrency that highly focuses on privacy, decentralization, and network stability. Made in July of 2012 by the Bytecoin core development team, it was one of the first cryptocurrencies to be it’s own original code and not a cookie cutter fork of Bitcoin. But what makes Bytecoin different from Bitcoin, or other cryptocurrencies out there?

With Bitcoin, anyone can trace any transaction to any given wallet address, and can check anyones wallet balance without much effort. This completely shatters the idea that Bitcoin has a high level of anonymity, and if your wallet address ever gets linked to you, then your already fragile layer of anonymity is broken.

With Bytecoin, it’s very much different. Bytecoin can achieve full anonymity, making it so nobody can know the sender of any given transaction, and no one can check the balance of any wallet, without any effort on the user’s side. Bytecoin achieves this by using the Cryptonote protocol, allowing for almost complete anonymity.

Bytecoin is also different than Bitcoin in many other ways. At this point, Bitcoin can only be mined efficiently with specialized ASIC hardware. If you were to mine Bitcoin with a GPU or CPU nowadays, you would be spending much more on power then you would ever make. With Bytecoin, it can still be mined efficiently on even low end computers. This means you can be grab a piece of this booming cryptocurrency without spending hundreds on new GPUs and power supplies.

Bytecoin also has the added bonus of having fast transaction times, and extremely low transaction fees. Bitcoin at times can have transaction fees higher than credit card transaction fees, but Bytecoin has extremely low transaction fees of less than a cent.

But as most of us know, Bitcoin isn’t the only cryptocurrency. Of course there are many reasons why you should use Bytecoin over Bitcoin, but what about using Bytecoin over say, Ethereum?

Well for starters Ethereum is not very privacy focused. It holds the same problem Bitcoin has, that you can trace any transaction and any wallet balance can be viewed by anyone – a problem solved by Bytecoin with no user effort. Plus Ethereum has the token system, which works as a sort of fundraiser on the blockchain. However sometime in December of 2017, Bytecoin will be releasing its very own token system. Not only that, but the tokens will also be untraceable to any wallet address. These untraceable tokens will be the first of its kind, and it is expected that Bytecoin will boom sometime after the release of these untraceable tokens. Bytecoin can also be mined in large quantities with low end computers, unlike both Ethereum and Bitcoin.

Another big cryptocurrency is Monero, which is actually a fork of Bytecoin. So there aren’t too many differences between it and Bytecoin. Monero is more widely accepted than Bytecoin, but that should soon be changing as the ecosystem for Bytecoin is growing day by day. And there’s one thing that Bytecoin has that Monero doesn’t, low transaction fee’s. At the writing of this article Monero’s fees are around 1 dollar. Bytecoin’s fees are much lower than Moneros transaction fee’s, less than 1 cent. So, if you’re making large transactions throughout the blockchain the cheapest way is to use Bytecoin. Monero won’t be having untraceable tokens anytime soon.

Now the real question is, why should you even use Bytecoin? There are many incentives to use Bytecoin over other cryptocurrencies. Are you buying things that you don’t want the prying eyes of the government to see? Bytecoin protects you from those prying eyes. Just want a cryptocurrency that has low fees and fast transaction times? Bytecoin has both of those. Bytecoin is not only fast secure and reliable, but a revolution in the cryptocurrency market.

For more information on Bytecoin, visit : www.bytecoin.org

For the Bytecoin whitepaper, see: https://bytecoin.org/static/files/docs/aggregate-addresses.pdf