Community news

Privacy is the state of being free from intrusion or disturbance in one's private life and affairs.

It is a fundamental human right that is explicitly stated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and in many other international and regional treaties. Privacy underpins human dignity and other key values such as freedom of association and freedom of speech. And now, as we all can see, privacy is a head-of-state issue on the global stage.

Dictionary.com called 2013 the year of privacy and its protection. Yes, this year showed us a lot about our privacy and the forces hunting for our personal data. Today we actually know how hard it is to keep our lives safe and private. Body scanners that produce near-naked images of people; global programs spying for mails and phone calls; NSA agents in games and other virtual environments; private policies allowing companies to use your data for advertisements; systems controlling your funds flow; surveillance cameras every corner... If you stay quiet for a minute and you'll feel a chill on your skin - that's how Big Brother is watching you.

But if you have already started to build the guarded bunker for the skeletons from your cupboard, we have news for you. You may stop your building for a while and relax. Because 2013 also showed the world how to fight for rights and private lives without blood and shambles. Yes, it is all about the cryptocurrency and Bytecoin!

Some of you may say that decentralized crypto-monetary system with high anonymity level is not a panacea, but it's undeniably important step on the way to the better world. And if 2012 was the year when only few pioneers were brave enough to try this road, 2013 became the turning point and thousands of people all over the world have already done this first single step, starting "a journey of a thousand li" to the future.

Dear friends, now we are standing at the beginning of an entirely different era, but everything - our stable network, our large community, the whole our system - is ready for new challenges!

So let 2014 be the year of Bytecoin! Let's do it together!

05/12/2014

Reminder

Fundraising in order to support important initiatives is still goes on at http://oelk72ntcrvzljfo.onion/

Support the Khanacademy

Donation address:
21wFQ4bxMzVTePEZ6xM9JdKVZC8X9YUXeiBBGeHv79Z69ioEuKoRV46JcU5LWsmCzpGvkrdxF143xEPApRAQEWJQV3wPPnY

Already donated: 22,256,234.22150096 bytecoins
371 donations recieved

Support the TOR project

Donation address:
22k6qhj6X8FZkwPDbpswnUescZm63tGArYj5fAkjLvG5f8wZcdXvMxmK5gKrufqTM1As722mmKTftd1sz8Ng2rBy8jgfgYD

Already donated: 15,005,908.01056885 bytecoins
284 donations recieved

Support Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI)

Donation address:
24vQATDVxeRWwNRwVJG8gbTTHe5v83XH7WHBzXo7mzBXBavRGk8BGvdJdaaexS3nMt41SQBhAAQeEg9r3jrQPMRiPbAWVCz

Already donated: 17,383,300.38915500 bytecoins
259 donations recieved

05/09/2014

Software update

Updated software awaits in the downloads section! It contains various optimizations and Win32-compatibilty ;)

05/08/2014

MacOS binaries & blockchain available!

MacOS binaries and blockchain are available in the downloads section. This version is fully compatible with MacOS 10.7, 10.8, & 10.9. Thanks to lemier & amphibian from Fantomcoin for the update.

Enjoy!

04/10/2014

Quick-start bundle for the beginners

We have released windows bundle with everything you need for a quick start. If you are new to our community, just download "Easy setup bundle for the beginners". It contains daemon, wallet, blockchain, and "run.bat" script file.

unzip the archive
launch "run.bat"

The script will install the blockchain, open the daemon, and generate your new wallet (or open an existing one).

Good luck and welcome!

P.S. MacOS version coming soon.

04/07/2014

Important release!

Bytecoin high level API formalized. All the services and stores are strongly recommended to migrate to it.

02/27/2014 15:19

CONGRATULATIONS!

Bytecoin's network is stable again. Connectivity is back and hash rate is recovering to a pre-incident level. You may mine and make your transactions in a usual manner without any concerns.

We think one possibility of what happens is planned botnet attack on our network. Somebody tried to exploit the p2p protocol vulnerability and kill our TOR gateways. It may be the result of the recent Mt.Gox related events and somebody's wish to manipulate cryptocurrencies. However further investigation is needed.

By the way it was good stress test for the whole Bytecoin system. And we passed it with the highest marks! Bytecoin proved its reliability, our core developers demonstrated their ability to respond quickly to sudden problems, and all members of Bytecoin community showed a very good team work!

Thanks to everybody, who kept nodes, opened additional gateways and offered solutions! Thanks to people who helped to spread information and consulted others how to update their deamons. Thanks to all who react fast! Thanks to all of us!

02/27/2014 05:50

MANDATORY UPDATE

The problem has been found and fixed. New binaries and sources are already available in the download section.

02/27/2014 03:30

ATTENTION!

Our network is under targeted attack (Mt.Gox backwash?). We've lost some connections between TOR and public internet nodes and network connectivity significantly decreased.
Please don't panic and watch developments. Warn other users if you can.
We are working hard on the problem. There is nothing dangerous; the problem will be resolved as soon as possible.

12/25/2013
Christmas is all around us! It's time to share our bright feelings with the community and friends.

Some of us can remember that at the same time last year Bytecoin was like a little child doing his first steps. The system had been working less than half of the year and was far from being perfect. The first quarter of 2013 was the hardest time for us all, you know it. But then May-2013 started and brought the fresh blood to our community, new solutions and ideas for the old problems and finally became the turning point for the whole cryptocurrency world and for Bytecoin too.

We have done a lot since that time. We had grown even bigger then we could imagine last December. That's why we would like to thank all devs, teams' leaders and members, all people from the industry, individual miners and everybody else who believed in us, who supported us and worked over our common project!

All of you should know: today we are stronger than ever. We are full of hopes for the best, full of the brightest plans for the future and of strength for their realization.

Merry X-mas, dear friends! New Year

12/06/2013 -
Good luck at Finals, dudes! And may the curve be ever in your favor.

12/01/2013
Community Meetings Schedule for 2014 is available now.

11/26/2013
How Did Dread Pirate Roberts Could Have Protected His Bitcoin Wealth
We only want to note that you unlikely to see similar paper in regard to our system. Not because of our law-abiding users, but due to ring signature and one-time addresses. All payments are truly untraceable, unless you make an effort to deanonymize yourself =)

09/13/2013
Updated "Einstein" is now ready for working in the new regime

09/01/2013
One more changelog

08/30/2013
Welcome back from summer break, colleagues!
Hope everybody's batteries are recharged and you're ready for your new academic terms and further work on Bytecoin. Check your mails for details!

07/15/2013
"V.Hugo" is back, be ready for increase.

07/04/2013
Happy Birthday, Bytecoin!
It's one year from the launch.

05/01/2013
Meeting-4.
Place is encrypted in blockchain (second decoding method). Exact time will be send later.

04/29/2013
L00Rr is now officially out of the team.
The community decided to use his funds for a giveaway. More info in the newsletter.

04/20/2013
! Zerocoin !

In front of widespread talks about Zerocoin (ZC) we want to make a few notes about this tech and how it compares with our ring signature. Leaving aside cryptographic mumbo-jumbo, we will consider only consumers features.

First of all, let us boast our benefits. To spend a single zerocoin you should produce a signature sized of 30-40 KB. No alternative. It implies high user fees and blockchain bloating.Our system offers a user to choose his anonymity level and the size of his signature: 96 bytes or more. A conservative size about 500 bytes provides you almost the same practical level of privacy as ZC. Moreover, our solution relies on elliptic crypto, which works (in general) noticeably faster than RSA-based ZC.

Yes, the flexibility of our scheme has one hypothetical downside. As we said, a user can choose his level of privacy. While we believe that ambiguity degree "one of ten" (~500 bytes) for each transaction input is enough for practical untraceability, some may disagree and choose "one of all-possible-inputs" with huge-sized signature. ZC already hides your payments among all transactions with the same constant: 30-40 KB. It perfectly suits for a low transaction rate, but our linear-sized ring signature is asymptotically better: both for users' pockets and the blockchain size.

Another important note is about trusted setup in Zerocoin. In easy words the whole system is based on some secret values nobody should know (for example, this secret allows to make a double spend). How to acquire these values? ZC devs says: we can generate them and then "forget" OR we can implement the special algorithm to do in a distributed way at the system start (everybody know only his own part of the secret). The second option, of course, is preferable, but the problem of trust still remains: there is no way for new users to be sure they are not fooled by the early adopters, who has generated the secret values. As you guess, our system has no such trapdoors: every parameter is public, as in original Bitcoin. We consider this as a major advantage over ZC.

And BTW we are already working =)

02/16/2013
Community meeting-3
Coordinates are in extranonce, meeting time in emails.

03/01/2013
We have troubles with mail servers.
Weekly newsletters will not be sent for some time. Sorry for inconvenience.Check your team's emails for instructions. Be careful.

01/01/2013
Happy New Year!
Glad to see increasing nodes number. However the fact of non-increasing hashrate is a little bit strange.

11/29/2012
"Dante" has started working.

11/17/2012
Difficulty is back to 'normal'
The last jump of difficulty value (from ~100k to 385513) was quite unexpected. But it's back what is even more surprising! Important note: no double-spend or forking attack were mentioned.Some numbers were also inserted in the blocks; looks like a counter. Btw retargeting algo works out perfectly. We are ready for the next "wave".

11/12/2012
For hints contact j69f.

11/10/2012
"The R guy" team is onboard since today.

09/30/2012
Community meeting. Coordinates will be in chain soon, meeting time in emails.

09/10/2012
We are growing: average difficulty reached 100k a few days ago and keeps increasing.
There is a stable growth of the network: we see more and more new connections daily. Also we hope to see you at the community meet-up in the London conference bar to discuss network growing and other important stuff personally. More info via team mails.

08/12/2012
Extranonce data.
Changelog -- extranonce field added.

07/14/2012
"V.Hugo" team are with us now.

07/05/2012
Transaction functional tests seem to be OK. Thanks twimc!
Special thx to our test_node_6, more precisely, to it's administrator, who might think that "winter(-time) is coming" and put the clock back an hour.
It resulted in the wrong timestamp in block #3 -- minus 3599 sec (at the edge of allowed time window!). By the way this timestamp caused low difficulty, so you shouldn't complain! Moreover, it was the perfect test for out retargeting function.
Long live test_node_6!

07/04/2012
Congrats! Finally...We have done it (from the 4th attempt)! Thx to all devs and teams!
The first block was founded 07/04/2012 05:00:00 (GMT). Functional test runs well. More information via emails.
Happy Independence Day!

06/30/2012
Dear friends! We are proud to announce the launch of our project.
The system will be started on July, 4th (according to the community voting results). Every team will be informed about the exact launching time later via email to the responsible persons. Please, be ready for the event: carefully check the code version on updates available (update files are in download section). The first functional tests will be performed just after the start. In case of any questions, please contact 6H7QV3LK55m as usual.

Specifications

Links

Downloads

Easy setup bundle for beginners

Blockchain direct download

Contacts

Community news