I honestly don't see the advantage of bringing the block time down to 1 minute. You're ultimately looking at increasing orphan blocks and decreasing hash power, and all you get is a feature that looks great on paper but has little purpose. I wouldn't mess with it. Apparently the BCN devs wanted 5-10 minute block times but settled on 2 minutes after lengthy disputes. Their decision is explained in more detail here:

https://forum.cryptonote.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=20

It would only be useful as far as viewing transactions. Addresses are encrypted and have different values for every transaction.

New music on bytecoin.org, plus a shout-out to danteT!

A small annual increase to the money supply. A lot of folks are against it ("omg inflation"), but small debasements won't affect trade value and it keeps the wealth distributed by giving more back to the miners.


Spam protection is just about the only thing fees are good for, which is why I'm suggesting keeping it fixed. Fees are low as of now, when only 300k people use bitcoin. When tx volume increases 100x or 1000x, I imagine fees will escalate and can even become more expensive than current credit card processing fees, as it becomes a bidding war to get your tx on the next block. Also, if we have a debasement, we don't need to use fees to pay miners.


I disagree 100%. The entire purpose of CryptoNight is to maintain decentralization within the network, something that bitcoin failed at miserably (and perhaps intentionally). CryptoNight is designed to have a linear cost/profit growth curve, so having better hardware is still advantageous, but the miners with the deepest pockets don't automatically get all the wealth.

I also fail to see how botnets are a greater issue than, say, large mining pools controlling more than 50% of the network. The biggest protection to botnets is lots and lots of miners, which should be much easier with an egalitarian pow algo like CryptoNight and easy, low-barrier mining tools that anyone can use.

If we're going to create a bcn derivative, I think we need to have a serious community discussion about possible changes and improvements in the next iteration. For example:

- Should there be a small perpetual debasement (3-5%)? This is important to keep wealth evenly distributed and to always keep block rewards high enough to incentivize miners. It also serves as a check and balance to prevent centralization from within the network.

- Either no transaction fees ever, or fixed transaction fees (0.01% no matter what). Otherwise run the risk of escalating fees.

- Should there be a slower minting process? Bytecoin isn't even 2 years old and over 80% of its coins have been mined. If there was a good reason for this, I'd love to hear it.

- Should we limit pool sizes, to prevent large pools from taking too much network power?

- Must include a cross platform GUI miner out of the box that is super easy to use (think minergate, but open source, and for win/mac/linux). Should rapidly increase early adoption.

- Must also include a GUI wallet

He messaged me as well. Perhaps he knows of a marketplace where bcn is traded at a much higher price and thinks he can arbitrage.

It's anonymous enough... at least from my perspective. The only criticism I've heard is it uses elliptic curve cryptography, which is vulnerable to Shor's algorithm and thus would be useless against quantum computers. There's also rumours that the NSA promotes ECC because they know of a weakness it has. Even if that were the case, I doubt it's so easily breakable that they can start tracing people's transactions willy nilly.

I wonder the chances these guys are watching this thread and taking us all for a ride...

How are you able to get 9 H/s on a i7 920 mining bcn? I have the same cpu and I can't break 4 H/s

It is? Where? All I see is the updated source on GitHub.

That doesn't make sense. If they didn't want their currency adopted they wouldn't have an online presence at all.

I'm not seeing that post on bytecoin.org. Did they remove it due to issues?

So if there's 150 billion coins in circulation, then more than 80% of the total supply has been mined already. What happens when block reward drops to zero? Will there be a perpetual debasement to keep paying miners?

You can run multiple instances of minergate simultaneously to create more threads.

For a long-term currency that will remain decentralized, it must have:

Proof of Work mining with a scalable cost/income ratio (true ASIC-proof mining)
This means the costs of running your hardware should be directly proportional to your profits, whether you're mining from a netbook or a supercomputer. This will keep the playing field even for everyone without giving an unfair advantage to folks with special hardware. Mining will always be profitable for everyone. Oh, and by the way, this is definitely possible.

Back to one-IP-address-one-vote
This, combined with a linear mining algorithm as described above, will provide enough cost-prohibitive measures to keep a 51% attack at bay.

This means NO MINING POOLS
Mining pools are an easy target for powerful entities to leverage large amounts of computing power. Besides, if we can make mining more profitable for everyone, we wouldn't need the pools anyway.

Complete and automatic anonymity in transactions
A serious discussion needs to be had on how this should be done. I'm imagining a built-in automatic service that mixes a certain amount of your coins, completes your transactions for you transparently, and deposits the remainder in a different address that you own. All of this would happen behind the scenes, of course, requiring nothing additional from the user. This is an important check and balance to keep the currency deregulated.

A 3-5% annual debasement or redistribution
This is another important precaution to keep the few super large coin holders from owning too much of the market. This is also how the miners will be paid, because there will be

No transaction fees, EVER
Otherwise, as transaction volume increases, people will pay higher and higher fees for priority processing, until it becomes more cost-effective to just swipe your credit card. Forget it.

Minimal block chain and sub 10 second confirmations
Yeah, yeah. That's hard to do. Figure it out.

Get all of the above features into a non-PoS alt and you win the market.