BitBay is a free, decentralized marketplace for buying and selling goods and services on the blockchain. You can connect directly with peers and transact without the need for a middleman like Amazon, eBay, or Craigslist. Transactions are secure and anonymous. They’re also guaranteed by escrow. The project aims to be the new standard for eCommerce, allowing individuals to trade one-to-one at scale. As a result, BitBay claims it will revolutionize global trade. It’s seemingly a great solution for other niche applications as well, where groups of people aren’t served by existing marketplaces. In the beginning, BitBay got off to a rocky start. In 2014, the original founders raised capital in bad faith and quickly abandoned the project after fundraising, leaving the lead developer holding the bag. It seemed like BitBay was finished, but the developer continued working on the project out of a sense of duty to the original investors, without access to the capital raised in the fundraising round. The BAY token is the transactional token in the marketplace. You use it to buy and sell, and it can also participate in freezes, escrow, bets, swaps, etc. The token itself operates like Bitcoin and is secured by the network. Although you can use BAY for transactions, you don’t have to. You do, however, have to use BAY if you’d like to take part in token staking. BAY’s price cratered after the original founders left and stayed low until March 2017 when it took off. It has been through several cycles of bull and bear runs, with a max price over 30 cents in January 2018 before retreating to its current value. BitBay supports all kinds of privacy and security measures. It’s easy to create a multisignature wallet for added security. There are integrations for Tor and other proxies that help anonymize your connection to the marketplace. An on-screen keyboard allows for password or key entry without using your keyboard and being susceptible to keylogging. Additionally, you can create images with your private key embedded, so that finding a stored key is more difficult for a hacker. The marketplace also has functionality for time locking contracts and swapping currencies. This enables all kinds of cross-chain transactions and financial implements. The time lock and other smart contract elements make it possible to create bets, escrow, futures and options trades, or any number of other financial transactions. The idea and implementation by BitBay, of a decentralized marketplace and trading platform is brilliant and shows further promise of expansion.The rocky beginning of the cryptocurrency and its subsequent comeback as a promising platform indicate that the developers are in it for the long haul and don’t plan on abandoning the platform after all these years.
What is Monero? Monero (XMR) is the top privacy-centric cryptocurrency based on the CryptoNote protocol, a secure, private and untraceable currency system. Monero uses a special kind of cryptography to ensure that all of its transactions are remain 100% unlinkable and untraceable. In an increasingly transparent world, you can see why something like Monero can become so desirable. Origins of Monero In July of 2012, Bytecoin, the first real life implementation of CryptoNote, was launched. While Bytecoin had promise, people noticed that 80% of the coins were already published. So, it was decided that the bytecoin blockchain will be forked and the new coins in the new chain will be called Bitmonero, which is was then renamed Monero, meaning “coin” in Esperanto language. In this new blockchain, a block will be mined and added every two minutes. Why Monero? #1: Unlinkability - Your identity is completely private You have complete control over your transactions. You are responsible for your money. Because your identity is private no one will be able to see what you are spending your money on. When you send funds to someone’s public address, what happens is that you actually send the funds to a randomly created brand new one-time destination address. This means that the public record does not contain any mention that funds were received to the recipient’s public address. In Monero, your public address will never appear in the public record of transactions. Instead, a 'stealth address' is recorded in a way that only you, the recipient, can recognize the incoming funds. #2: Fungibility Fungibility is interchangeability between one asset and another asset of the same type. Suppose you borrowed $50 from your friend, you can even return the money in the form of 1 $50 bill or 5 $10 bill, It is still fine. This shows that the dollar has fungible properties. However, if you were to borrow someone’s car for the weekend and come back and give them some other car in return, then that person will probably punch on the face. Cars, in this example, are a nonfungible asset. What is CryptoNote? CryptoNote is the application layer protocol that fuels various decentralized currencies. While it is similar to the application layer which runs bitcoin in many aspects, there a lot of areas where the two differ from each other. CryptoNote features an entirely new code base and is not a fork of Bitcoin. More info about CryptoNote can be found at their website. CryptoNote uses Ring Signatures to conceal sender identities via mixing and it also has unlinkable transactions that is achieved using 1-time keys for each individual payments. Ring signatures enable ‘transaction mixing’ to occur. Transaction mixing means that when funds are sent, the sender randomly chooses several other users’ funds to also appear in the transaction as a possible source of the funds being sent. The cryptographical nature of the ring signature means that no one can tell which of the funds were really the source of the transaction – not even the person that gave the funds to the sender in the first place. A system of ‘key images’ associated with each ring signature ensures that although no one can tell the true source of the funds, it can be easily detected if the sender attempts to anonymously send their funds twice.