Right at the start of the Electroneum journey we looked at many cryptonight algorithm based coins. Our favourite was Monero, for many reasons, however to change it to include all the things we needed for Electroneum was too big a job for us in the time required. We chose Bytecoin for the relative simplicity of the job.
The good news is that once Electroneum started to raise money and our profile was raised, we managed to recruit a core member of the Monero team, to work on developing an Electroneum fork of Monero. He wants to remain anonymous at this stage (probably until we can prove Electroneum to be the huge success we all hope it can be).
We co-developed Electroneum with both our Bytecoin codebase AND the new Monero codebase to allow us to test them against each other and let us choose between them before launch.
That testing is complete! It is FANTASTIC NEWS! We are launching with the Monero based code – which will be VERY good news for Electroneum, and I’ll explain why…
Maintenance and future proofing. Monero is WAYYYYYYYY more developed and maintained than Bytecoin. Bytecoin has had 88 commits to it’s core code since 2014. Monero has had 4795 commits!
Stability. The number of people working on Monero and the development has meant it is far more stable and offers many more features, flexibility and growth potential.
Ease of exchange listing and likelihood of acceptance. There are only a small handful of exchanges left that list Bytecoin, and it’s been (almost inexplicably) delisted from a number of exchanges, which was a worry for us. Monero is listed on virtually every exchange of note. If they have Monero listed, it makes it SUPER EASY for them to list Electroneum. Copy a few files at their end, recompile our code and it will be live. It will make it literally an hours work for an exchange to list us.
Command line languages – Monero have already thought ahead to add language capability to their command line wallet manager – allowing complex use of the product by a handful of languages. It will make it much MUCH easier for us to integrate additional languages into the compiled command line wallet manager.
Small transfer fee introduced.
I’d also like to let everyone know that based on our stress testing we’ve introduced a small (tiny!) transfer fee. The fee is 0.01 Electroneum (or 1 eCent as we’ve been calling them) for any transfer.
We’ve done this for a very good reason, and it’s not to further reward the miners or to take any profit ourselves (that small fee does go to the miners) – but to protect the Electroneum blockchain.
It came to our attention while we were stress testing that with a zero fee there was nothing to stop malicious users from automating scripts that just transfer a balance between wallet addresses as fast as they can – indefinitely. This would clog (flood) the blockchain with useless transactions. By introducing a small fee, any automated script would eventually deplete the wallet total and cost the malicious user money. It is unfortunate that we’ve had to do this, as in our Utopian view of the world, we loved the idea of zero transaction fees – but we’ve had to cover this eventuality and protect the blockchain. As such we’ve made the transaction fee as small as our two decimal placed system allows at o.01 ETN. Hopefully this doesn’t offend anybody too much, as it’s lower than just about any other way of transferring value around the world.
Have a great day everyone, we’re excited to get this live next week!