So is this an actual new code base or is it using Bitcoin code somehow?
Meaning did they recode from scratch?
Hey Smoothie, it's based on this:
https://cryptonote.org/whitepaper.pdf100% new code, it's probably more different than Bitcoin compared to most of the other alternative coins.
The chain will be about 5 times larger than Bitcoin eventually, but that is the price to pay for proper anonymity that isn't based on a trusted accumulator (zerocash) or based on nodes that see all (Dark, XC)
Have a read of the white paper.
The first implementation was called Bytecoin but it was mined over two years (Ninja style) in secret with unchanging difficulty. Monero is our communities based fresh start.