The story of CryptoNote goes as follows. In late 2011 somebody (supposedly Nicolas van Saberhagen) invented the protocol. It was refined and developed in the first half of 2012. CryptoNote team has mentioned on a number of occasions that Bytecoin developers helped them implement the protocol in code and launch the coin.
At some point in time the teams split up. CryptoNote is more about research and general technology promotion, while Bytecoin is currently the main developer of all software features in CryptoNote coins.
Yep. Thats the history they told us:
https://web.archive.org/web/20141204145921/http://bitcoinbarbie.com/cryptonote-open-source-technology-concept/As we’ve mentioned before, CryptoNote team was not interested in building a currency. That is when Bytecoin developers took the lead. They are the team of top notch p2p and cryptocurrency developers, which have been contributing to the sphere for quite some time. They finalized our cryptographic and currency prototypes and coded a beautiful solution to represent CryptoNote.
By the way, Bytecoin was not the very first realization of CryptoNote, as there was a so-called “BetaNote”, which was used for a couple of months before the launch of Bytecoin to test whether the currency works as designed. This test coin was presented to a large number of influential people in educational, scientific, and gaming industries, who eventually became the first miners of Bytecoin. I believe this “circle of a few” affected the way the currency developed during the next year and why the information was slow to spread. It is not in the nature or business of these participants to post on the Web, so all the mining teams grew in number through word-of-mouth only.
Anyway, when the coin was launched, CryptoNote team gradually departed from Bytecoin team to finalize the white paper (which eventually became available in December 2012) and returned back to other projects. After nearly a year, the team gathered back to review the white paper, catch up with Bytecoin news and decide on our strategy.
It turned out that even though Bytecoin had grown and was indeed working as a currency (accepted at certain deep and dark web projects, circulating as a main local currency in one very large international research center, traded on small OTC exchanges), it lacked mass adoption. Ironically, the coin was simply under conventional business radars, while Bytecoin devs were wholly obsessed by the technology they were working on and didn’t pay much attention to spreading the word about it. That is when CryptoNote team decided to let the world know about the technology and promote new CryptoNote currencies, while ensuring that Bytecoin team (main contributing developers for CryptoNote) is still devoted to technology development.
That was before the suppose java-based Cryptonote history of now:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CryptoNote#Bytecoin_.28BCN.29Bytecoin is the first implementation of CryptoNote protocol. It should not be confused with another Bytecoin (BTE), a now defunct absolute copy of Bitcoin. Since launch in July 2012, a number of improvements have been introduced into Bytecoin, including multisignature transactions[29] and several security updates. In 2013 original CryptoNote protocol implementation on Java has been rewritten from scratch using C++.
So what it is, "BetaNote" or Java