Although Bytecoin (BCN) has been around for over five years, the cryptocurrency isn’t talked about much. The recent surge in the price of Bytecoin has finally made people take notice of it.

Although Bytecoin offers many of the same use-cases as Bitcoin, it is more privacy and anonymity-oriented than even Bitcoin. Basically, Bytecoin developers took the best of Bitcoin and improved on it.

Because of the team behind the coin keeping to themselves and remaining anonymous for most of the coin’s existence, the Bytecoin remained largely obscure and didn’t get the same kind of attention that Monero got, which is actually a fork of Bytecoin. Over the last one year, the Bytecoin team has become more open and public and they are finally trying to get the cryptocurrency the recognition it deserves.

Bytecoin is based on cryptonote technology, which allows the creation of the completely anonymous cryptocurrencies and untraceable payments. I won’t go into the details here but if you want, you can read more about the technology on the official website.

How to mine Bytecoin (BCN)

According to Coinmarketcap, there are currently 183,253,534,612 BCN in circulation. The max supply of the BCN could only be 184,470,000,000 BCN. So, still there are over a billion Bytecoins that remain to be mined.

Getting a Bytecoin wallet

Before you start mining, you will need a Bytecoin wallet to store the coins. Since Bytecoin isn’t as popular as Bitcoin, there aren’t a whole lot of options. The best option is to go for the official Desktop wallet. It is available for Windows, Linux and Mac. With the official wallet, you can either download the complete blockchain (around 5-6GB right now) or use a third-party node (like node2.bytecoin.uk:8081). If you are going to complete download the blockchain, it will take a few days. To reduce the download time, you can manually download the Blockchain from the Bytecoin website and use that. The instructions can be found here. While you wallet synchronizes, you can still get the wallet address and start mining using a tool like Xmr-stak or built-in miner.

If you want a mobile wallet – you can either use the official Bytecoin Android wallet or Bytecoin wallet from Freewallet.

Using XMR-Stak for mining BCN

xmr-stak is a good command-line CPU and GPU miner that you can to mine Bytecoin. It supports all common backends (CPU/x86, AMD-GPU and NVIDIA-GPU), so you shouldn’t have any compatibility issues. Also, it works with all three major OS – Windows, Mac and Linux.

You can download the xmr-stak from their Github page. Extract it and run the xmr-stak executable file. If you get an error, make sure you have these have these Microsoft Visual Studio libraries installed. Also, if your antivirus tries to block the miner, whitelist the miner.

Xmr-stak will then ask you some questions, like what are you trying to mine, select Monero (yes, Monero is based on the same Cryptonote tech as Bytecoin). Put in your pool details. Bytecoin.uk and Bytecoin.party are two free-of-cost and good pools that you can use. Put your wallet details. There is no password and start.

There are plenty of other command line miners but some are either CPU-only or some are AMD-GPU only or NVIDIA-GPU only.

Using official Bytecoin wallet as a CPU miner

Like most official cryptocurrency wallets, Bytecoin official wallet also comes with a built-in CPU miner. It is fairly easy to use. Go to mining section in the Bytecoin wallet , add the pool details and start.

Using Minergate

Apart from the official wallet, Minergate is the only other GUI desktop miner available. It supports both CPU and GPU mining. It is very easy to use, but not the most trusted. Reddit and Discord are full of reports about Minergate stealing hashing power. But, if you have no problem Minergate stealing some of your CPU or GPU power as long as you don’t have to deal with command line, go for it.

• Get Minergate

Buying Bytecoin

At this point, there aren’t a whole lot of exchanges offering Bytecoin trading. So, the best way to buy Bytecoin is to get Bitcoin first and exchange it for Bytecoin. You can buy Bitcoin using your credit card (full guide) at Coinbase, Changelly or Coinmama and then head over to HitBTC or Poloniex to exchange Bitcoin to Bytecoin. Both HitBTC and Poloniex are decent.

This is it. Free free to drop in you questions in the comments and I will be happy to answer them.