A brief history of Boolberry

2014 to present day and beyond

Background

Boolberry is a cryptocurrency based on the Cryptonote protocol. At the time Cryptonote was created, most other cryptocurrencies were copies of bitcoin with a few parameters changed. Cryptonote was developed from the ground up to solve specific known issues with the many variants of Bitcoin that had flooded the market.

“Bitcoin” is the reference implementation of the bitcoin protocol. However, describing Cryptonote’s reference implementation becomes much more complex. There is a reference implementation of Cryptonote also called “Cryptonote” a currency that was never intended to be released into production, and an alternate currency called “Bytecoin.” This was the first production version of the Cryptonote protocol. Boolberry is one of several implementations that diverged from the Bytecoin implementation, alongside Monero, AEON, and a few others outside of the scope of this document. Some of the implementations are more actively developed and researched than others.

The Cryptonote bitcoin protocols follow a separate, but parallel track with totally distinct code bases. The Cryptonote protocol offers many advantages over the bitcoin protocol with regards to financial privacy, encryption methods, difficulty adjustment algorithms, issuance schedules, and more.

How this started

In early 2014 Cryptonote arrived on the scene. It was introduced to the world by way of an implementation called Bytecoin. No one knew anything about the creators of this new coin, but this anonymity was not uncommon at that time. What was clear, however, was its level of refinement and that this polished codebase stood in stark contrast to the way Bitcoin was released. The Cryptonote protocol used ring signatures, stealth addresses, adaptive limits, and a smooth emission to create the foundation for a truly anonymous, fungible, peer to peer payment system that was both scalable and egalitarian.

However, the launch of this new protocol was immediately clouded with questions about its first implementation Bytecoin. People quickly realized that most (approximately 80%) of Bytecoin had already been mined by the time it arrived at market. This development, paired with the mature refinement of the Cryptonote codebase, evoked caution in early altcoin enthusiasts.

As questions went unanswered regarding the fairness of Bytecoin’s launch, some users, including thankful_for_today, proposed a fair fork of the technology with a fresh emission. Monero rushed to earn the status of first fork as it was a clone of Bytecoin with a couple minor modifications to the target block time and emission factor.

Taking a more methodical and measured approach, Boolberry’s (BBR) Pre-Announcement came on April 20th, which made it the 2nd fork, and crypto_zoidberg (CZ) spent the next month introducing improvements and unique features that were fully tested before main net launch on May 17th, 2014.

What happened?

One of the greatest challenges faced by any team working to create a fork from the Cryptonote codebase was the lack of documentation, and this was felt by early forks of the Cryptonote protocol. In many ways it was a departure from the Bitcoin derived projects and it was suspected that only people who already had a familiarity with the codebase were able to create forks. In 2014 anonymity among developers was widespread and generally accepted; as opposed to now, where investors (quite understandably) expect to know about the development teams backing a project.

During the short window leading up to launch, crypto_zoidberg (CZ) was churning out code, implementing unique features and setting BBR apart from the other forks around that time — including Monero. Below is the original project announcement in this post, outlining the many differentiating features of BBR at the time of launch. Features including improved anonymity through unlinkable outputs flags and up to an 80% reduction in blockchain size by pruning ring signatures.

Then, in just over three weeks, CZ went on to add the alias features, a pruning mechanism to manage bloat, and a new SHA-3 derived PoW Algorithm called Wild Keccak, which has never been shown to have an unfair advantage unlike CryptoNight (see link below for more on this).

During the rise of Cryptonote coins that all started around mid-2014, there were very high expectations for Boolberry. The records of OTC trades on Bitcointalk shows a range from 100k-400k sat, most of which took place in late May 2014.

Without notice or solicitation from CZ, Poloniex listed Boolberry on their exchange in early June 2014. According to coinmarketcap.com, Boolberry started trading at 185k sat on June 4th, 2014. Shortly after that, trading began on Bittrex and a variety of smaller exchanges. In late summer, it was discovered that an enterprising miner had used Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) to mine a disproportionate amount of coins, which were eventually dumped on the market causing wild price fluctuations. During June, it was noted by a member of the community that over 60% of the connected peers were to Amazon AWS.

In July there was a bounty posted for a GPU miner, which was released in the following month. With GPU mining and the availability of stratum mining pools, the confidence of egalitarianism was restored, and prices recovered about the 100k sat level by early September.

During this time, some interesting trends began to form.

What happened to BBR?

A few events led to the loss of crypto_zoidberg to another project. Back in 2014, any premine or mining tax was frowned upon (if not flatly rejected by the market), and in its absence, BBR struggled to attract the level of talent needed. CZ readily admits that he regretted setting up such a low mining tax, of 1% (which was split among multiple contributors) and acknowledged this as a miscalculation. It was not enough to attract and maintain top developers, as well as resources for marketing, PR, and exchange fees. You can read that thread here on bitcointalk.org

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=577267.msg9111378#msg9111378

Contrastingly, Monero gained much of its early traction with the help of investors, most significantly Risto Pietilla. Monero’s faster emission, which before the fork in early 2016 put it on track to be 86% mined after four years, creating enough supply for developers to establish a position sufficient to incentivize active development. The impact was similar to the momentum that was created by DASH’s infamous insta-mine, where large amounts were mineable by early adopters.

Risto not only propped up Monero as an investor but that financial contribution helped to fund early development, forming the core team. You can read more about Risto in this article on cointelegraph.com

On December 9th, 2014, crypto_zoidberg announced a new Cryptonote project with hybrid PoS/PoW consensus. Having shifted his focus to this new project, Boolberry was more or less abandoned. There were almost two years with minimal commits to the GitHub repo. Prices fell accordingly, and in September 2016 there was an announcement by 1blockologist of some “grassroots” attempt to bring Boolberry back into the limelight. Their promise to implement LMDB (Lightning Memory-Mapped Database) drove the price back above 100k sat., but after six months of efforts (for reasons that are conjecture at best), their efforts ceased. This transitory pique in interest followed by a lack of development precipitated multiple delisting’s from both Polinex and Bittrex, among others. Thread on this below.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=577267.msg17761651#msg17761651

As the “grassroots” efforts were winding down, crypto_zoidberg made a post that he would return to Boolberry in late 2017 but also highlighted the difference between buying a coin and investing in a development team, and the need and importance for them to co-exist.

CZ has now fulfilled his obligations to the project that pulled him away from Boolberry in late 2014. In these last few years, while he was not working on BBR, he and his collaborators have never stopped innovating and have only strengthened their team dynamic and expertise as Cryptonote developers.

Where are we today?

The last year saw a flurry of new development for Boolberry. During this time there’s been a lot of uncertainty and speculation surrounding crypto_zoidberg’s return and commitment to the project. A second attempt to breathe life back into BBR came when an anonymous developer, namely, B4h4mu7 hired a slew of developers and cryptographers to get acclimated to the Cryptonote codebase. After several months of research and deliberation, they introduced the concept of forking the recently released Bytecoin 2.0 codebase, using a new mining algorithm and releasing a whitepaper that improves on ring signature scaling, among other improvements. The links to their work are below and are currently being reviewed by Boolberry’s core team for consideration:

https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1168.pdf

https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/921.pdf

This work was all taken on with the assumption that CZ would not be available to work on the BBR. This showed the strong desire of the community to have committed leadership, active development, and a clear path forward.

Shortly after the community had signaled its support for a fork, crypto_zoidberg surfaced. As the original creator of the project, he was still very passionate about seeing it reach its full potential. More importantly, he went on to speak about his availability. Having recently completed the commitment that pulled him away from BBR in 2014, he was ready to come back, bringing along his talented team.

He went on to share his vision for lifting BBR back up to its previous ranking in the privacy coin vertical (At one point, it was a top 30 overall market cap coin, which now requires a market cap of more than $200,000,000).

With his team’s successful track record and eagerness to jump back into the project, it was clear that the only missing piece of the puzzle was support for fundraising and community outreach.

Through efforts from the community, sufficient funding was secured as needed to facilitate CZ’s return to Boolberry along with the appropriate support staff for marketing, design, and PR. The goal has been to set them up for massive success as they do what they do best, unlocking the tremendous value that sits untapped in BBR.

What’s next?

Boolberry is back up and running with the full force of CZ and this team behind it. On top of this development push to regain market share, the team now includes design, PR, and marketing expertise. This full scope of talent shows renewed interest and commitment from the community at large and bodes well for the future of BBR. Crypto_zoidberg himself keeps churning out code at an almost alarming rate, you can track his progress by checking out his GitHub activity.