An open-source technology
and concepts for the cryptocurrencies
of the future

CryptoNote provides users with a completely anonymous payment scheme. CryptoNote implements the ring signature technology which allows you to sign a message on behalf of a group. The signature only proves the message was created by someone from the group, but all the possible signers are indistinguishable from each other.

Even if outgoing transactions are untraceable, everyone may still be able to see the payments you have received and thus determine your income. However, by using a variation of the Diffie-Hellman exchange protocol, a receiver has multiple unique one-time addresses derived from his single public key. After funds are sent to these addresses they can only be redeemed by the receiver; and it would be impossible to cross-link these payments.

Nobody is able to spend the same money twice — even if all his signatures are anonymous. Every signature contains a key image — a kind of fingerprint of the secret key. It is based on a one-way cryptographic function; this implies that given only the key image it is impossible to restore the corresponding secret key. These key images are used to prevent double-spending.

Non-repeating one-time addresses and mixed keys in ring signatures make the whole blockchain resistant to analysis. Each future transaction will only increase the entropy and create additional obstacles for an analyst.

The proof of work mechanism acts as a voting system. Thus, it is crucial that during the voting process all the participants have equal voting privileges. CryptoNote brings this equality with its egalitarian proof of work, utilizing built-in CPU instructions, which are very hard and too expensive to implement in special purpose devices, but perfectly suitable for ordinary PCs.

A decentralized payment system must not depend on a single person's decisions, even if this person is a developer. CryptoNote has no hard-coded constants; magic numbers in the code are designed to be re-calculated based on the previous state of the network. Thus, they always change adaptively and independently, allowing the network to develop on its own.