Monero Review: Beginners guide
Monero : Untraceable privacy-focused coin
Industry type: Decentralised anonymous economy.
What is Monero? Monero is a decentralised privacy-focused coin that is favoured by users who need anonymity when most cryptocurrencies are viewable by the public. Monero was released in 2014 when it was cloned from the Bytecoin source code to create its own genesis block.
What gives it value?
- It is decentralised.
- It hides the identity of users.
- It hides the geographical location of users.
- It hides the transaction amounts.
- Its stealth technology is cutting edge and unique.
Interesting Technology:
- A Ring Signature is a kind of digital signature that is attached to several other random signatures from the Monero blockchain as decoys to hide the true identity of who sent the transaction.
- Stealth Addresses hide the identity of the sender and receiver by acting as a single-use bridging-address that is destroyed once the transaction is complete.
- Ring Confidential Transactions is a protocol that is hard-wired into the Monero blockchain to hide the transaction amount.
- Kovri is a decentralised stealth technology used to hide the geographical location of the sender and receiver through end-to-end encryption.
- It uses ‘elastic block sizes’ where each blocks size is made relative to the median size of the previous 400 hundred blocks, rather than having a set block size limit.
Notable team:
- Monero has a crash hot development team of 7 members, five of which are unknown whilst two of them act as educators and public figures.
- Riccardo ‘Fluffy Pony’ Spagni is a core developer of the Monaro network based in South Africa. Spagni is a popular figure in crypto especially for his activity on Twitter.
- Francisco ‘ArticMine’ Cabanas is the other known core developer although not much is known about him.
Notable partnerships:
- The dark web favours the use of Monero due to its privacy features.
Review: The Good.
- Great technology that is arguably superior to other privacy coins.
- One of the few coins used in commerce.
- Expert team that is transparent with its community.
- It is fungible, meaning that each coin is wiped of its history, unlike most cryptocurrencies whose entire history is publicly transparent.
Review: The Not So Good.
- The transaction sizes are much bigger than most other cryptocurrencies due to the extra data needed to keep transactions private.
- Monero will need to use off-chain solutions to address future scalability.
- Transaction fees can spike during peak periods due to block sizes.
- Because it is favoured by the dark web, it tends to get a bit of a bad name as a crypto that is used for illegal activities.
Future Roadmap:
- Second layer solutions are in development to enhance speed and scalability.
- The Kovri technology is still in development with its alpha release set for 2019.
CONCLUSION:
In my opinion, Monero is a fantastic technology that supplies a much-needed demand for cryptocurrency transactions. It is developed by a well-respected team who are often times as humorous and lighthearted as they are serious and careful. As of now, due to its massive block sizes it needs to find scalability solutions to meet its rising demand, and if its developers can find these solutions then Monero has the potential to be a comprehensive coin.
Monero Price:
The current Monero price, market cap and charts.
Local exchanges:
Coinspot: www.coinspot.com.au
Cointree: www.cointree.com
Overseas exchanges:
CoinBase: www.coinbase.com
Binance: www.binance.com
Bitfinex: www.bitfinex.com
Kraken: www.kraken.com
Changelly: https://changelly.com/
Where to store this crypto:
Hardware waller: www.bitgear.com.au
Desktop wallet: https://getmonero.org/downloads/
Online wallet: https://mymonero.com/#/
Mobile wallet: https://www.monerujo.io/
Similar coins:
Zcash (TUSD) – A privacy coin that uses zk-snarks.
Dash (DASH) – A popular privacy coin.
PIVX (PIVX) – A privacy coin on proof of stake.
Komodo (KMD) – A privacy coin that uses zk-snarks
Further information:
Tether whitepaper: https://getmonero.org/resources/research-lab/
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/
Website: https://getmonero.org/
