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Monero is, as far as I understand, not a FORK of bytecoin, but a clone. Bytecoin was the first implementation of a cryptonote coin ; but the cryptonote developers made a "kit" to invent your own cryptonote coin. There have been several, of which bytecoin, and monero.
As far as I understand, bytecoin has been involved with some premine scandals, as a few other cryptonote clones are. Essentially, the claim was that when bytecoin came to be known here, that it was "already used for 2 years on the dark markets", to justify that most of the bytecoin coins had already been mined. There is serious doubt about these two years of unknown existence "on the dark markets", especially after that there was a bug in the original cryptonote software that allowed for very high initial mining rates. Monero has been less or not involved in these issues.
That said, the true, original "bitcoin" of cryptonote technology (invented by a certain "Nicolas Van Saberhagen" - the Satoshi of cryptonote) is not monero, but bytecoin. Monero is just a clone of it, but one that is simply perceived as being less of a premine scam than the original bytecoin one.
At this point, monero has its own history and development, and is not a pure cryptonote clone any more.
At least, that is how I understand the history of this.
Essentially, it is as if one had found out that Satoshi had been a premine scammer, and that he claimed that he invented bitcoin in 2007, that it had been used on the dark markets, and that he now brought it to the rest of the world, after having mined a good deal of all bitcoin, while he essentially had generated a falsely timestamped block chain in 2009. Then probably litecoin would now be nr 1.
If one talks about "monero" one often means "cryptonote technology", as monero is now its most well known representative. But historically, it was bytecoin that brought it out.
Monero is not a clone of Bytecoin. It can best be considered as a fork of a Bytecoin and Dogecoin cross, that has been modified materially afterward.
Here are some material differences between Monero and Bytecoin, apart from the Bytecoin pre-mine / ninja mine of over 80% of the emission before launch.
1) The tail emission. This is the Dogecoin part of Monero's heritage. The tail emission actually makes the Cryptonote adaptive blocksize limit work, while keeping the mining incentives that are necessary to keep the POW secure in place. In Bytecoin with no tail emission the penalty for increasing the blocksize becomes toothless as the emission falls. As a consequence of this it is only a matter of time before Bytecoin becomes vulnerable to a 51% attack.
2) Minimum mixin for regular transactions is enforced in Monero, making fungibility / privacy and anonymity mandatory. This is not the case in Bytecoin.
3) The use of the LMDB database to store the blockchain on disk. In this respect Monero is more like Bitcoin or Dogecoin rather than Bytecoin. The original Cryptonote protocol used a flat memory model with the blockchain stored in RAM. Storing the blockchain in RAM is of course totally impractical. Try that with Bitcoin's over 100 GB blockchain.
4) RingCT. This is of course the adaptation of Greg Maxwell's confidential transactions for use with ring signatures. This article by Shen Noether et al. introduces this innovation in Monero.
https://lab.getmonero.org/pubs/MRL-0005.pdfWhen considering Z.cash we just as in the case of Cryptonote and Monero one must make a clear distinction between the technology, Zerocoin, and its implementation in Z.Cash.
The technology has several limitations:
1) The need to "prove" the destruction of the initial private key in order to prevent a centralize "authority from creating the zerocoin tokens at will. My take is that this could be addressed by creating a market of initial setups, possibly on different side chains and have the market pick which ones are trustworthy.
2) The high computing cost of creating the zerocoins. Time is of course on the side of this technology; however at this point it may simply be not practical at all especially on mobile devices.
3) Fungibility, privacy and anonymity are in fact optional, which when combined with 2 above could easily lead to a situation where the fungibility, privacy and anonymity are seldom used, effectively creating very small mix sets.
The Z.cash implementation has at least two very serious if not fatal shortcomings:
1) The base coin has the same kind fixed blocksize issues as Bitcoin with no long term solution to the blocksize issue.
2) The corporate post mine is likely to make the Electric Coin Company an MSB in the eyes of the regulators. This will create a very significant regulatory risk requiring AML/KNC compliance in the United States and many other jurisdictions.
