lol this is nice.

looks like the site got hacked. i was not even aware that there was some text documents on the site.

I think you're wrong here. Even CryptoNote developers said the BCN team exists since 2012 (https://forum.cryptonote.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=11&start=10).
And have you seen my research of BCN blockchain?  Have a look: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=512747.msg7467098#msg7467098 . A lot of people used Bytecoin from the beggining! 

For sure Bytecoin devs have a lot of coin, but gossips about the 80% in their hands are ridiculous.   

Yes, good idea. I will try to do it, but it may take a lot of time.

What is really interesting to me is that every users "wave" has its own behavior pattern. I want to understand what are those "waves", if they are connected between each other or not... I'll try to make a further research and if you want to help or know any specific methods to disclose it I will be glad to have a PM from you.

Even if so, it means they are really concerned about users and they want BCN to be used as serious digital currency. That's why we shouldn't be afraid of pump and dump initiated by devs.
 
But to be honest now I'm sure there were many BCN miners and holders during deep web period. 

I do not pretend to be ultimate analyst, but it seems to me that you can't get much more information from the  BCN transactions history than I already have gotten.

I wish I knew the answers to these questions. IMHO the assumption that new users influxes were associated with new mining teams appearance is the most reasonable.

Thanks. I was really passionate about it. I wanted to check if BCN blockchain was formed as a result of people's interaction or just machinery falsification. Now I'm sure it was made by humans.   

Hello, folks! I've made one more step in further BCN/CN research.
I've analyzed two years old bulk of transactions in Bytecoin and here's the result.
Full text (.pdf): http://www.filehosting.org/file/details/451593/txan.pdf

Initial Data

• 500k of blocks from 2012-07-04  to 2014-06-10
• 210k of transactions
• 4m inputs
• 2.7m outputs

Glossary

•  blockId - number of the block
• amount - total inputs (defined as transfer+change)
• mixinCount - size of the ring signature, level of anonymity (1 - min)
• transfer - estimated amount of transaction
• change - estimated amount of change


Note: normally the transfer is half as much as the amount (the reason for this is a simplistic algorithm of change calculation), therefore majority of transfer charts will be looking very similar to amount charts
(with coefficient 2 on one of the scales). Most of the times when transaction is mentioned the reader should perceive the notion as amount, although a few exceptions may occur.

All the figures are expressed as 10¹² of BCN atomic units. The reward amount for the early blocks if calculated in such units equals 70.


Firstly, let's look how the amounts are distributed over the periods of time. The first chart shows the number of amounts below 300. There are approximately 198k of those (93.4%)


The highest points represent the round amounts, those are sent and received more frequently. The rest of the amounts form a Chi-squared distribution with 5-8 degrees of freedom. It's hard to say whether this
distribution is normal or not. However seeing the straight horizontal line on this chart would have been more surprising.
It is worth mentioning that we are looking at input amounts as opposed to transfer amounts i.e. the available funds that are used to form a transaction. The most popular sizes of amounts are residing within
30-60 region, which corresponds to the average block size for the first 1.5 years. Based on these figures we may conclude that either users transferred freshly mined coins to the wallets for safekeeping (e.g. cold
storage) or spent them right away - it is clear that the majority of the blocks were spent entirely in the first 1.5 years.

Now let's take a look at the tail distribution (amounts from 500 to 1000)


Here we can observe an interesting pattern that goes by the name Benford's Law : in decimal fraction of a number, 1 will be more persistent than 2, 2 more persistent than 3 and so on. Perhaps there's some sort of mystery since we are not seeing the same pattern on the previous chart. The number of large transactions is marginal; perhaps they were executed by different type of users? It is also clear that the same pattern will be present for large amount transfers distribution.

And this is an almost complete distribution of all amounts.


Here we can see that the large amounts distribution does not t the overall pattern. If there was one unifying principle, the Benford's law pattern would have been applicable to smaller round amounts, which is not the case. It can therefore be deduced that the large transactions belong to a separate class of users whereas smallish transactions are random and may have resulted as online purchases of goods or debt settlements or whatever.

Here is the distribution of transaction amounts


Analysis of the transactions that were executed in the first 1.5 years showed that the most frequently spent amounts are ranging from 1 to 3 blocks in size. The tail contains 21K of transactions namely 10% (nearly all of them below 1500).

Now let's look at the distribution of transfers below 300. There the picture is not clear and distribution is not even. It becomes more obvious if you look closely at amounts below 120:


It seems that if the amount of change could be more precisely calculated it would have been easier to draw a conclusion on the types of expenditures that had taken place. So far we can see a significant increase
in low volume transactions (with amounts around 5). It resembles the one-time transfers to friends to try out the new coin while the larger chunk of transactions is concentrated far back on the time line.


Here is 4 charts with 10K, 50K, 100K and 150K transactions. And here is one more: all of them below 300.


It is clear that preceding transactions are more evenly distributed. One possible explanation is that they were conducted as testing transactions to provide sufficient amount of outputs for future ring signatures. After that the final distribution has started to grow.
One can draw a conclusion that as the first chart shows the number of users has started to grow steadily. There is no need for transfers chart since the idea there is similar. Although certain increase in low volume transactions (5) is visible.

Now we'll try to compare the increase in transactions for different time periods. The oldest 30K transactions are the first to be examined.


Familiar pattern. Let's call it 'the first wave users'. And here is a chunk of recent 30K transactions:


Here we can see a significant change. Input compilation has become chaotic as it were. What is the reason for it? Could be a source code alteration or perhaps an increase in number of users: emergence of 'the second wave users' or possibly new services with automated remittance processing. The number of transactions is also increased and that is what we are going to look into.


This is the number of transactions that simply grew with time.



Obviously at the beginning a lot of transactions were made to create enough ring signatures for future transactions. Eventually this number has dropped leaving only the transactions created by users. Leaving out the two consecutive surges of transactional activity it is clear that the number of transactions indicates that the number of real users grew.

Here is one more interesting detail: the way the average transaction amount changes with time


It seems pretty even but recently the average has dropped sharply. On the other hand a lot of larger transactions reappeared.
And surprisingly, there used to be very few larger transactions before. It could have been an imposed limitation on transaction size that subsequently was withdrawn. Then it makes sense why at some point the number of larger transactions soared. So why impose a limit in the first place? It might have been due security considerations. And the reason to pull it back is growing popularity and users' demands.

Here is a chart for change in the average transaction amount.


Decrease is insignificant but worth mentioning. It looks like part of the transactions with smallish amounts has grown to be the size of the larger ones. It also happened at the time of 'the second wave users' emergence.

In conclusion let's see how anonymous the transactions were.


This chart shows AD values that were normally used. The tail is very short. Now let's look at the changes.


This chart shows the volatility of average amounts and possible limitations and also proves the theory of new users influx.

Conclusions

1. At the very beginning (the first 10 transactions) the circle of users was very small and some of the transactions were made deliberately (manually or automatically, doesn't matter) to increase the number of ring signatures.

2. Subsequently we can see all sorts of dynamics: increase in number of transactions, amounts distribution, level of anonymity variations and so on. Three stages can be singled out or perhaps even more. The beginning of each stage can be linked with the influx of new users. These users break down to classes of users with specific patterns of behavior.

3. The most common input amounts coincide with average reward for mining a new block. Therefore it is likely that the coins had been in circulation from the very beginning and not stored in coinbase.

4. Expenditure analysis is hardly possible because of the imperfection of change calculation algorithm as well as ambiguous transaction amounts. New heuristic must be put in place to help unveil the new
facts about the early transactions.

5. The other hindering aspect for conducting successful analysis is the fact that we don't know how many changes have been introduced to the source code over the last 2 years. If the source code alterations indeed took place in the past then perhaps we are missing even more details than we can think of.

6. Overall, Bytecoin's blockchain provides some data to analyze users' behavior, but still doesn't reveal anything in particular except for very general patterns.


What do you think about it?

This can be crucial for the exchanges and pools. What if a user withdraws the money and it got stuck and reversed after 24 hours?

If you are right, I assume the service gets the transaction back without any notification about that. Suddenly, there is simply money on the wallet with no other information on the transfer. So the service will have to manually recalculate all the incoming and outgoing transactions to test, who is the transaction owner. The larger your service, the more useless work you should be doing on the daily bases.

That's not too friendly towards the businesses working with Monero for sure.

CPU mined coins are subject to botnets by definition. However, this is not what you want for the coin you're mining or investing in. Large botnet share means that the majority of the coins is obtained by the scammers and is likely to be dumped. This can't be good for the long term development because the coins are spread not among the devs or users, but are obtained by botnet holders.

How much is the case for Monero? I really believe that not all of the spikes are due to botnets, but at least some of them could be.

I would like to ask you about the botnets in XMR. I've been reading bytecoin thread and stumbled upon XMR mining malware.
There was also a topic on the stealth miner: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=639375.0

Did anybody notice any difficulty spikes in early June?

As I’ve written there might be also other languages. There are some Korean and Russian coordinates for example, but my approach was not able to extract any of Russian or Korean symbols. I think there might be much more teams.

As you might remember, a couple of weeks ago I posted a screenshot of some text hidden in the Bytecoin's blockchain (with a string from Cyphernomicon):
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=512747.msg6747877#msg6747877

Looks like I've found something extremely interesting

I had to do bit of a work...

As there was no way to check what else might be hidden there, I was thinking about the way to extract each and every line of the BCN blockchain, just like Minergate does with all the information: https://minergate.com/blockchain/bcn/blocks

I noticed that Minergate shows "Extra raw" field for each of the transactions and also shows "(decoded)" string below it. See a random transaction:
https://minergate.com/blockchain/bcn/transaction/ae9ec912d41fd09ee68f5826ad09e21541187c642076102ad23be43b05e7b7d4

After some random clicking there was no evidence of any particular text hidden in the extra raw of the transactions. Anyway, I decided that it was worth giving a try. I asked a friend to help me extract the extra raw field of the transaction from Bytecoin's JSON RPC API. However, unlike at Minergate it was just a sequence of bytes (like on bcn.cryptostats.org). After some time I finally had a data base of block height and corresponding coinbase transaction's extra raw field. For the random transaction above this would be:


After some experiments I understood how Minergate decoded it. They transform the bytes to hex, leaving a 0 before any number below 15. The first part of the line corresponds with the "One-time public key" (as appears on Minergate) with the prefix of "01", while the second part of the extra raw always starts with "02" (kind of JSON I guess). The one-time key is fixed in length, so I could easily delete it and proceed to the second part of extra raw.

This one was very easy to tackle: I just treated the bytes as standard ASCII codes (from 32 to 127) and cut out all the irrelevant strings shorter than 9 chars (there was a lot of litter in the blockchain). And that is how I managed to solve the whole puzzle! Applying this filter to the data base I arrived at a lot of various text. What's more, I was finally able to look for these text lines at exact blocks at Minergate

See the Excel file I came up with: https://mega.co.nz/#!KJ0ERAJI!2JaN-Awuhx0Kl70uFvRTN5UDpRPStnzbO2gSn7bdLnw


The results:

1) The full text of Cyphernomicon is inside Bytecoin's blockchain. See sheet one, which contains all the extracted extras. Cyphernomicon blocks appear quite randomly.

I should remind you that a coinbase transaction is created when somebody mines a new block. Therefore, someone has posted (and I assume is still posting) the Cyphernomicon when he manages to find a block. Miners' competition explains perfectly why Cyphernomicon appears episodically, but consistently. It should be one of the older miners who posts it as his sign. Cyphernomicon starts at block 26185 (see Minergate as a proof) on August 11, 2012:

https://minergate.com/blockchain/bcn/transaction/de269e7bf407e5f480112cd08d46bb5b932523f60e7d4fe81a023b72ae00266d

2) The miner posting Cyphernomicon is likely to have mined at least 17,000 of blocks out of 400,000 blocks I've checked. That adds up to at least 4.25% of all BCN mined to be concentrated in someone's hands. As those blocks appeared quite early on the emission curve, I assess that this may well be up to 10% of the total supply.

3) I also noticed shorter phrases, which stood out of the Cyphernomicon strings (which were generally 90-100 chars long). I filtered out those long strings and manually rechecked the rest 175 phrases at Minergate (see sheet 2). I'm not sure if I hadn't skipped anything else. And here's some more info:

4) I found a couple of links:

https://twitter.com/unSYSTEM2013/status/243726820984369153
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/11/15/pay-another-way-bitcoin
http://blog.archive.org/2013/02/21/employees-to-be-paid-in-bitcoin-please-donate
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-21916102
http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/15/4332698/dwolla-payments-mtgox-halted-by-homeland-security-seizure-warrant
http://reut.rs/1cFCyRD
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101230884

All of the links appear in the blockchain with the timestamps older than the original articles, sometimes just by half a day. I think this timespan points to some other miner who was inspired by the article he had just read so much that he posted it into the blockchain.

5) There are also quotes from other authors:

- A quote from Neuromancer (by William Gibson) appears at least six times:

- Victor Marie Hugo

- Dante Alighieri

- Friedrich Nietzsche

- Galileo Galilei

There might be also some other German and English quotes, but as they appear not longer than 1-2 words, it is impossible to identify them. I assume I filtered out much more quotes, but I had to deal with the Cyphernomicon spam. If someone wants to recheck it, you are free to do it at sheet 1.


6) There is a strange riddle, which looks like a poem but is not googlable:


7) And finally I found about 100 different coordinates from all over the world (see 3rd sheet of the file). There are a lot of universities there but also some random houses, which I couldn't identify. I found at least 31 Universities on the list, while 70 more coordinates remain unknown (I’ve put the places next to the coordinates). Could it be the Universities engaged in CryptoNote development? Could it be meetup points? Or is it just some other miner's signature?



TL;DR

The majority of blockchain extra
https://mega.co.nz/#!KJ0ERAJI!2JaN-Awuhx0Kl70uFvRTN5UDpRPStnzbO2gSn7bdLnw

1. I managed to extract almost all extra raw fields of coinbase transactions, which contained encoded messages.
2. Some old miner have been posting full Cyphernomicon text starting from August 2012.
3. Cyphernomicon text points to at least one large holder with 4-10% of all BCN supply.
4. There are article links posted by some other miner (in each case a day later than they were published).
5. There are a lot of quotes from various authors.
6. There is an ungooglable riddle (which might have been created by the Bytecoin developers or some other party)
7. There are more than 100 coordinates, at least 31 of which are Universities. The coordinates should be studied more thoroughly.


Disclaimer:

This shouldn't be treated as a full blockchain summary. There are some limitations:

1) Only coinbase transactions of first 400k blocks were studied
2) Sticking to ASCII codes from 32 to 127 might have erased blocks on non-latin languages
3) The filter skipped all the strings shorter than 9 chars
4) The second sheet filter skipped all the strings longer than 90 chars (to avoid Cyphernomicon)

However, I guess this is a good start.

If this is a thread to vote for Bytecoin, then me too.

Why not MCN? BCN, FCN, QCN, MCN... CN refers to CryptoNote and CryptoNote based coins. So cool and stylish

Lol.

I remember there were some suggestions about Standford Bitcoin Group as Bytecoin/CryptoNote developers somewhere at first pages of this thread.

I think it's way to make some money for students and professors: it costs nothing for them to find and download books and papers in case their University provides free access to those libraries for students and stuff (that is normal state of affairs for most of the cases).

I have some news to tell you. Do you remember I told you about the buddy who mined BCN last autumn? I didn't take his words for granted and was a bit pushy so he showed me a working deep web service that accepts BCN.
That's something for education: you can order a paper from payed library for BTC/BCN

http://q5eia6ev7svh2xlp.onion/index.php