Bitcoin Forum

Both are Cryptonight-based coins. What is the main difference (on the technical side)? And in which one would you invest?

Basically nothing. Monero started its carrier as a Bytecoin clone, but without a ninja launch. Later the XMR guys made more efforts for patching up the flaws in the original BCN code and to make some development as well.

Both coins are being developed actively. The main difference is the issue of the coins. There are not many new BCN to be issued now. We are too late to the BCN. But not to late to Monero.

The bigger issue is BCN's initial distribution. With cryptonote coins, any significant initial ownership of the coins allows for chain reactions that create traceability. Smooth has a good math breakdown of the effects.  I don't have access to the post ATM, but I'm sure he'll post something about this and the other differences between BCN and XMR.

Monero is a vastly different project from its CryptoNote origins. In the year-and-a-half since we took over as stewards of the Monero project we've added 246000 lines of code (ignoring modifications to external libraries such as unbound, miniupnpc, lmdb, etc.) and modified 13890 existing lines of code. Our focus has been on major improvements to both the protocol and implementation, as well as incremental refactoring and commenting.

To give you a stark example of the differences: Bytecoin currently has 13336 comments in its code, and Monero has 36072.

Off the top of my head, here are things that Monero has done that Bytecoin hasn't:

- Discovered severe, fundamental flaws in the underlying CryptoNote protocol (https://lab.getmonero.org/pubs/MRL-0001.pdf)
- Proposed fixes for those flaws (https://lab.getmonero.org/pubs/MRL-0004.pdf)
- Implemented fixes for those flaws in a hard fork
- Implemented a rolling hard fork mechanism
- Completely overhauled and improved the CMake build mechanism with the assistance of Kitware, the creators of CMake
- Improved and extended the wallet storage format
- Massively improved the (purposely obfuscated / broken) PoW hashing mechanism
- Added Electrum-style mnemonic seeds
- Created and added wordlists for various languages (English, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Spanish, Italian)
- Created a multilanguage subsystem for all CLI tools
- Added transaction auto-splitting
- Massively improved payment ID scanning
- Added support for OpenAlias (https://openalias.org)
- Created and implemented a scheme for address + payment ID serialisation
- Created and implemented a scheme for stealthed payment IDs
- Implemented a cryptographically secure DNS seeding system
- Implemented a cryptographically secure distributed checkpoint referencing system
- Moved from in-RAM database to a backend-agnostic blockchain database
- Created an LMDB blockchainDB implementation (with the help of Howard Chu, the creator of LMDB)
- Created a BerkeleyDB blockchainDB implementation
- Created an OS-agnostic raw blockchain format
- Built tools to convert between blockchain implementations, as well as import and export them
- Added support for FreeBSD, 32-bit Windows, 32-bit Linux, ARM v6, ARM v7 (and above)
- Added QoS (bandwidth control) to the wire protocol
- Implemented a proper background forking (daemonising) mechanism that supports Unix forking and Windows services
- Added a core crypto implementation based on SUPERCOP ref10 (http://bench.cr.yp.to/supercop.html)
- Switched to a triangular distribution for output selection
- Created a "trusted daemon" system for remote daemon use


Both will probably be non-existent in a few years. If by some chance Monero survives it will find its use as a privacy-centric currency / store of value, not as an investment vehicle. The non-fixed emission (to maintain mining incentives ad infinitum) means that it will never have the same scarcity as Bitcoin, but I think it's already been demonstrated that scarcity in altcoin distribution is wholly overrated.

Thanks you very much for your extensive explanation.

What do you mean with scarcity? I thought Monero has got a maximal total amout of around 22 mln coins.

ROFL - Extensive explanation!  :D

The original topic was "What is the difference between Monero (XMR) and Bytecoin (BCN)?"

Fluffy reeled of a list of Monero achievments - which he would. He is a Monero dev, you know and naturally wants to advertise his coin.

However you wouldn't choose between a Big Mac and a Whopper purely on the so say of McDonalds or Burger King.

Best to jump on each website and take a look at the respective roadmaps and update history if you want a balanced view.

Fluffy explained about Monero because hez Monero dev, where is the Bytecoin scam dev to explain his side?

For me, it is an extensive explanation. Sure, the Bytecoin side is not treated intensively, but it is good for me to get a view of the differences.

anyone got the inflation numbers for XMR and BCN?

reward
block speed
halftimes

BCN runs at twice the halving rate of Monero, the former at around 9 months per half and the latter 18 months. The block speed is 120 seconds for BCN and 60 for XMR, although XMR is switching to 120 as well.

Both do not have "halving days" they instead reduce the block reward by a tiny amount on every block.

The rewards of BCN are much, much lower both because two-years worth of chain was premined/ninjamined and because of the fast halving schedule. Accordingly, its hash rate is also much, much lower.

XMR has a maintenance reward (block rewards will never drop below 0.3 XMR/minute, which will happen about 8 years after launch). BCN does not.

The exact numbers of coins in existence, etc. can be found on chainradar.com or minergate.com

Wow! New year and a chilled out, objective and direct to the point and on-topic Smooth.  :D


It would be easier if you just put your BCN premine/ninjamine opinion in your sig and be done with it. Coinmarketcap begs to differ with this opinion as do many others - however your analysis of the effects of the longer BCN chain is sound. The difference in hash rate between BCN & XMR is around tenfold.

There is no "opinion" on the premined/ninjamined issue, it is undisputed that it is one or the other (and do note the care with which I stated this in my previous post). The only question is whether the equivalent of several thousand dollars of cloud computing (or much less in power costs on dedicated hardware) were spent to fake the two years of chain altogether (premine) or if it really was mined exclusively in secret for two years (ninjamine). Ultimately the result today is the same.

Yes. I was complimenting you on your post and suggesting for your own convenience to put all of the above in your sig - if nothing else to avoid you risking RSI.  :D

For me, there is not too much Bytecoin to mine, so I will choose Monero, as it is still in the distribution stage.

The much lower BCN hash rate, to some extent, mitigates the effect of being further on down the distribution stage. With the high XMR hash rate you might even find it is more profitable to mine something else and use them to buy XMR. Digitalnote is quite interesting as is Boolberry. Also Boolberry isn't on Minergate so has an even lower hash rate.

Monero is mined by some people controlling a few big data centres. So it is not profitable to mine by small miners.

Fluffy, what do you mean Monero will probably be non-existent in a few years? What makes you say that?

Lack of consumer adoption will be the downfall of many of the altcoin projects. It's critical to understand the paramount importance of brand name.

There is a fickle nature to the consumer, and picking the winners can be tough. It could be Monero or it could be BananaCoin.

None of these cryptocurrency have any current relevance to any 'consumer' at present, with perhaps BTC having very limited relevance. Any or all of these coins can continue as long as people are interested in them.

At some point there will probably be an event, innovation or discovery that could propel any currency with a good dev team into the stratosphere. What they should not do is let themselves atrophy like the BTC and LTC team have done.

In such an event, 'contender' currencies include NXT, Dash, Bytecoin, Monero, Boolberry and quite a few others - even if Monero devs walked away in a few years there could still be a take over and a chance of mainstream for Monero or any of the others.

I think that, given the strengths and competition (bad tempered and healthy) of Cryptonote dev teams it is likely to be a Cryptonote that takes advantage.