This suggests a passive allowance status, i.e. "it's not forbidden." More inviting would be an active allowance from a statute or court ruling. It's still good news, but we should make the distinction.

This is sad.... Bolivia, Ecuador and now Bangladesh, some of the poorest nations in the world, so unfair to it's people!  Make something to yourself become just a bit harder 

Wow, they are serious. I do hope this gets traction. The UK banks are hostile to bitcoin. This could be good.

This is something I am painfully aware. We like bitcoin, and we use them, and expect them to take over the world (or so we hope). But the side effect of this would be to take away the power of governments to print money. Many people like this. Printing money has always been used (also) to fund wars. You take this away, and wars will be harder and smaller. More like the middle ages wars, were a war was not a global nation effort. Although of course technology is also responsible for the global nature of war. So if bitcoin takes away some power from the us or russia or china... Well that's ok.

But printing money is generally a tax, and it is a tax that hits especially the people who hoard the money, and do not put it to any use. If your money is invested, and there is inflation, you will likely get your money back. But keep it under the mattrass and it will lower its value. And where has this value gone? In a sense it has gone to the government that printed the money.

It is easy to say that the money printed has not been put at good use. But if you just look at the difference between countries with double digit inflation and failed states you will notice that failed states do not have a working government. There are warlords. Rape and violence are rampant, double digit inflation are terrible places to be, but are better than failed states, as somehow are still working.

So, as I am worried for Italy that with the Euro has lost the power to print money to get out of debt, so I think that bitcoin is great.... but might force governments to be good administrators of their digital gold. And politicians (elected or otherwise) statistically are NOT good administrators. So I am worried, and I understand Bangladesh.

Since the dev team is in the shadow we hardly can discuss their strategy. But I hope they have some pr-section.

Really interesting article. The mysteries and puzzles behind CryptoNote and Bytecoin are fascinating. There really are so many unanswered questions regarding Cryptonote and Bytecoin. Other than the technology itself, this is what Bytecoin is all about.

Bitcoin could pose a threat to financial stability of the bank of england, move your money out quick

Apple has now become another gate keeper in online payments. Only apps can use it for online purchases, and only the apps Apple allows will be available to their users. You would be far more restricted now than you were before you started using it.

He did not really conspire to launder, but with so little requirements on such a site, it was bound to happen, maybe he was actually ignorant to this?

She's not confirmed as going. She just wants money from idiots.

"The email said: Quote from: satoshin@gmx.com Michael, send me some coins before I hitman you." Not the fbi then?

Why wouldn't the hacker though - presuming it was hacked - not use it to profit by say falsely telling a reporter he was to sell the million coins after having shorted btc everywhere instead of making a death threat??

Seems to me that someone’s blowing his gaskets trying to smear the CN tech up and down.  Hexah deserves some credit on this one, even Monero has gotten its share of the shit pie here. Making it look like a pinnacle of the CN technology ready to take on Bitcoin is just outright ridiculous.

It all smells like the competition is playing out its tricky scheme on us. I don’t want to engage in the finger-pointing here (enough has been done so far) but isn’t it like Darkcoin hates us all. Those guys have never been particularly picky about their methods.
Shall we do some ass-kicking on their thread in retaliation?      

I was impressed by the amount of work you've put to compile everything in one place. While checking your claims regarding CryptoNote whitepaper, I noticed the same XMP timestamps and other evidence that you posted.

However, there is one thing that you did not check-out when I tried to repeat your experiment.  Van Saberhagen's public key on CryptoNote website cannot be used to validite the PDF. While checking, I got this message:


Some new surprising information was found on Bytecoin's website. It hosts a very similar whitepaper v.2, which turns out to be different if you study it carefully. What's more, van Saberhagen's public key matches on CryptoNote and Bytecoin websites. It seems that Bytecoin may hold a genuine Saberhagen whitepaper as it can be verified with the published public key - however since his identity remains unknown, we can only speculate.

I then decided to continue with experiment by comparing the paper found on Bytecoin with the one CryptoNote's website. For easier references I'll call them bcn-whitepaper and cn-whitepaper. The bcn-whitepaper will always goes first on the pictures unless explicitly stated otherwise.

When opening the bcn-whitepaper we can see the article structure.


Which is not the case for cn-whitepaper.


Opening the PDF we notice the valid signature inside:


The signature date on bcn-whitepaper is almost the same as on cn-whitepaper but slightly differs in size. This by itself, points that further discrepancies may exist between the two whitepapers. I decided to continue my investigation by studying the signature details (bcn - to the left, cn - to the right):


Everything looks quite the same with the exception of the SHA and MD5 fingerprints. Moving on to the XMP properties, we can see that they are also different.


Bcn-whitepaper holds perfectly clear signatures. The CreateDate is 2013 as it should be. The pdfTeX version x.x.13 also existed. There is totally nothing strange about these tags. Unlike the whitepaper from CryptoNote website that was studied before.

Apparently, Bytecoin's whitepaper is quite consistent in terms of timelines.

The remaining question is which whitepaper may have been the genuine one.

I would assume that having exactly the same van Saberhagen's public keys posted on both websites, it would not be unlikely that it really belongs to Saberhagen - particularly since both keys validate the bcn-whitepaper.

Also, upon a careful examination of Bytecoin's whitepaper I found a watermark, which is usually hard to identify. Here it is in the whitepaper (just after the Appendix):


Most may be unable to see it because it is non-selectable, can't be copied and is transparent. You might be able to see it as a small highlighted field (e.g. if you open it with Chrome).


It turns out that the watermark appears in the tooltip for that field. Here is the tooltip's content:


This is a PGP key perfectly matching public van Saberhagen's key published on both websites.


Hence, there is a PGP signature hidden in the Bytecoin's whitepaper, but there is no such watermark in the one found on CryptoNote's website.

Are these 2 documents anyhow different apart from that? I've checked with adobe document compare tools, and it seems that they're either complete copies, or have very minor indistinguishable differences like the following three. These formulas appear to be the same, but not to the compare tool:


My Conclusions

1. It is very likely the Bytecoin website hosts the genuine whitepaper.

2. The whitepaper published on CryptoNote's website may be a forgery. There is no PGP watermark and the author's PGP public key can't be used to validate the whitepaper.

3. Someone has duplicated the genuine whitepaper line by line for them to look the same - but failed at capturing some of its hidden elements.

4. Now let's move to whitepaper v.1 on CN website. As there is no signature to validate this whitepaper, the only relevant test is watermark. If it's inside, then the asumption on CryptoNote's conspiracy may hold. However, whitepaper v.1 doesn't have this watermark.

5. The problems with latex compilator problems, XMP meta tags, and invalid links may point to a forgery attempt, not van Saberhagen's actual activity.


Unclear questions for further research

1) What and why did we find two strange whitepapers on the CryptoNote website? A number of options may be valid. I assume it could be a mistake, a social engineering trap, hacked website or someone's attempt to discredit the technology? Who knows.

I'll point CryptoNote that they may have a wrong whitepaper. Maybe they will care to comment or take actions.

Thank you! Appreciate it.

On the side note: sorry for absence guys, was quite busy for the past few weeks, going to pay more attention to the FCN

Here is our winner! Send me your FCN address to receive a reward.


Care to present a proof?

Marsberry?

It's fixed now.

Lol.

My apologies, asked Amphibian to fix this.

Hey guys, don't forget to vote for FCN on hitbtc!

https://hitbtc.com/vote

That's a great news. Thank you for the pool!

I'll contact you about the reward.