Thanks for introducing me to Bytecoin/CryptoNote. Some solid cryptography being used (in theory) and some great improvements over bitcoin. Unfortunately the fact that there is another coin called
bytecoin is very confusing and bytecoin doesn't really have any formal documentation other than
this page. Time to do some source code reading!
Yea, the Bytecoin/Bytecoin thing caused me to not notice it for a long time.
The cryptographically interesting Bytecoin has a reasonable whitepaper:
https://bytecoin.org/old/whitepaper.pdf Some of the things it does appear to be pointless or ill-advised to me and I would have counciled otherwise but as far as the privacy aspect goes, the ring signature approach appears top notch. The privacy depends on the decisional DH problem, so perhaps you could argue that its privacy has a slightly weaker cryptographic story than the basic discrete log stuff (computational DH) but in the curve they're using its believed to be equally strong. In any case, anything that has reduced the privacy question to asking about cryptographic assumptions has gone pretty good.
Sorry for the OT tangent here. Though there may be some good bitcoin-relevant privacy things to mine out of the bytecoin design.