Is it fair to say Monero is %100 anonymous? As I understand it, it is possible to do forensic study of the blockchain to determine with high probability who sent a transaction, but it is never possible to prove it irrefutably. Is that true?That's true. There may be side-channel attacks that are currently unknown (however unlikely), but no amount of study of the blockchain will provide any useful information. Even when a transaction is linked back to a person, if the transaction was made with a mixin count > 2 there's a fairly large degree of plausible deniability. Your best starting point is the whitepaper:
http://cryptonote.org/whitepaper.pdfDoes Monero have a blockchain in the same sense as Bitcoin? How reliable is the total coin count on the block explorer and how is that number reliably determined?Yes, although not using Berkley DB as a storage mechanism. The total count should be correct - you can contact the monerochain.info guys to ask them how they determined it, or just do the math yourself (check first post for details on the emission algorithm).
I've heard that Bytecoin is closed source? Is that true and if so does that mean Monero is also closed source? Finally if Monero is not closed source how did it fork from Bytecoin if Bytecoin is closed source?None of that is true, both Bytecoin and Monero are open source, github repos have been linked to above. Both Bytecoin and Monero are distributed under the
MIT / X11 license.
Are the same type of altcoins possible with Bytecoin forks that are possible with Bitcoin forks? If so, theoretically are things like Proof of Stake, Fluttercoin's Proof of Transaction, or Darkcoin's Masternodes or TOR integration possible for additional layers of security? Would these be necessary or just superfluous bloat considering the already potentially strong security that Monero offers through ring signatures?Sure, anyone can fork it and add any of the features that altcoins have experimented with. I think that they'd mostly be superfluous bloat, although experimentation is certainly never frowned upon, and if there was any successful experiment we could most definitely inherit the code (much as Bitcoin can easily inherit Ethereum's turing-complete scripting language). Masternodes are not a feature we will likely adopt ever as they present an easy attack surface for a malicious actor that wants to control and observe the mixing of coins. I2P is not a feature we will likely adopt ever as running Java on the same system introduces an entirely new attack surface given Java's tendency to be easily exploited on the desktop. Running Monero over TOR is already possible, and it is something we may consider integrating more tightly in future.
