Monero

Monero ($XMR) is a digital asset that provides users and their crypto-related transactions with a high level of privacy and anonymity. As it is with Bitcoin—the leading cryptocurrency—Monero is also decentralized and a secure peer-to-peer cryptocurrency but more privacy-oriented than BTC.

It has the third biggest developer community among digital assets and only trails Ethereum and Bitcoin. Monero’s protocol is open-source and based on CryptoNote, which Nicolas van Saberhagen described in his 2013 whitepaper.

The privacy-based project relies on zero-knowledge proofs, ring signatures, IP obscuring methods, and stealth addresses to obscure transaction details. These features of Monero are baked into its protocol, although its users can choose to share view keys in case of third-party auditing.

Monero validates transactions via a miner network running RandomX, which is proof-of-work. As of press time, $XMR is ranked 26th in the crypto space with a market cap of $3.25B and a price per coin of $181.31.

Understanding Monero (XMR) Cryptocurrency

Monero is a decentralized, untraceable, secretive, and safe digital asset. It uses a unique type of encryption to make sure all transactions are untraceable and unlinkable. The project’s rise in the crypto space is down to several factors, one of which is its anonymization feature.

Users of the average token, such as BTC, get a public key or unique wallet address they use for transactions. When a sender receives the public address for whatsoever reason, they can see how many tokens the address holds and even find out the recent transactions conducted through the address.

Most blockchain networks, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Tron store or record these transactions. However, with Monero, the sender has no access to the recipient’s crypto holdings, even if they know the receiver’s public address. All deals are untraceable, and the coins given to the recipient go through a one-time randomly generated address for that transaction.

Monero’s ledger also does not store the recipient and sender’s actual stealth addresses, and the one-time generated address that it records isn’t traceable to any party’s actual address. This makes inspecting or identifying the project’s opaque blockchain ledger a fruitless activity.

Who Are the Founders of Monero?

When Monero was in the works, the cryptocurrency industry didn’t have as much popularity as now, so the developers working on the project did so out of curiosity. While there have been rumors that Satoshi Nakamoto invented XMR, it has never been confirmed.

The first Monero team had five developers—three were anonymous and known by pseudonyms, and two were publicly known. Over the years, hundreds of developers have made contributions to developing XMR. Here are members of the core development team:

• Ricardo Spagni (Fluffy Pony)
• Francisco Cabañas (ArticMone)
• NoodleDoodle
• Smooth
• binaryFate
• Othe
• Luigi1111

What Makes Monero Unique?

Monero is one of the leading privacy coins globally and is unique for many reasons, including the following:

• Monero is the first digital asset that offers users complete anonymity. An example of this feature is that the total amount reflected in your wallet isn’t made public. This is a cool feature, especially as an anti-hacking benefit, because hackers can’t see how much an address or wallet holds or know how much or little they should steal.
• CryptoNight algorithm is another reason it is unique and different from other projects. Monero doesn’t involve ASICs in mining. It allows only GPUs and CPUs making it a fair and accessible asset that truly enables decentralization and stops resourceful miners from getting bigger control over assets.
• It is completely fungible. Fungibility means that two units of XMR can be substituted for one another without any difference. Every unit is the same and has no distinguishing quality that can make them “tainted” or face discrimination since there is no way to trace where the coin had been. This is unlike USD notes that have traceable unique serial numbers or Bitcoin that reveal transaction history, showing whether the coin has been used for unlawful transactions or not.
• Amounts being transferred in any contract are also obscured, so outsiders can’t know how much the sender is transferring to the recipient.

What Gives Monero Value?

Most users consider anonymity and privacy the two factors that give Monero its value. It offers millions of users the chance to make transactions whenever they want without worrying about their wallet address being tracked by hackers, the government, or third parties.

Companies can’t blacklist XMR for suspected criminal links because there’s no way actually to trace them—they are fungible. Besides, it has value for investors who believe and hope that the demand for anonymity and privacy will increase and make the market for privacy coins bullish, driving up market cap and price.

How Is Monero Different From Bitcoin?

Bitcoin uses randomly generated alpha-numeric pseudo name addresses to shield the identity of participants but with limited privacy. Transaction details on bitcoin are registered on the blockchain and hence open to public access.

Monero uses a randomly generated one-time address for every transaction, and transactions have non-traceable history. Bitcoin relies on the SHA-256 algorithm for its mining, while Monero uses Cryptonight/GPU mining.

How Does Monero Improve Privacy?

Monero removes privacy concerns and improves them by using important concepts that are at play in some of the recent privacy-based projects.

• Ring Signatures: They allow a sender to hide their identity from other participants in a group. It is impossible to know which member’s keys were used to create a signature.
• Stealth Address: They add extra privacy because they are randomly generated addresses for one-time use for every transaction. It helps conceal the actual destination address of a transaction and obscures the recipient’s identity.
• Ring Confidential Transactions (RingCT): They enable the obfuscation of the amount within a transaction on the Monero network.

Monero’s Challenges

No doubt, the rapid adoption of Monero has been down to its privacy features, but this also brings some challenges.

• Privacy and non-traceability features allow people to use Monero for different activities and in questionable spaces like the darknet/dark web.
• A 2018 CNBC report showed that North Korean hackers created malicious software that infected people’s computers and mined Monero, which they sent back to North Korea.
• Users can use Monero for illegal and illicit activities against the law because it remains outside capital controls with zero traceability. This has made some governments consider placing restrictions or bans on cryptocurrency.

How to Use Monero

You can leverage Monero for daily transactions or simply buy and hold. It can be used the same way as fiat money, allowing holders to make deposits, transfer funds, or swap for other cryptos or fiat discretely and anonymously.

How to Mine Monero

Monero runs on all the top operating system platforms such as macOS, Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, and even Android. The mining process allows individuals to receive rewards for their activities by joining mining pools or mining individually (solo mining).

You can mine on a standard computer without using specific hardware like the expensive application-specific integrated circuits (ASICS). Your computer’s CPU or GPU can help you mine XMR with Monero’s proof-of-work mining algorithm.