Monero

It is private. It is decentralized. It keeps your money secured. Welcome Monero.

Basic info

As many other cryptocurrencies, Monero, or XMR, is an open-source cryptocurrency which is also very much privacy-oriented. The XMR was lunched in 2014 and its main goal is to achieve anonymity and fungibility.

Price

As of today the XMR holds rank number 47. Its price is $145 with market cap standing at $2,623,109,969. The trading volume for last 24 hours is $169,463,318. Its ATH was $542.33 which happened about 4 years ago. Since then, XMR is down 73%. Also, it has an unlimited total supply of tokens.

Usage

If you want to use XMR you need to own supported wallet where you can store your Monero tokens. Monero has whole list of supported wallets on their website. Some of the wallets are Monero GUI wallet or Monero CLI wallet. Additionally, Monero is supported by some models of Ledger or Trezor (hardware wallets).

Mining

Same as BTC or the currencies, you can also mine XMR. Monero runs on all major OS platforms (Windows, macOS, Linux, Android). You can mine coins on your own, individually, or you can join mining pools. Both of these options are supported by Monero.

The actual mining can be done on normal PC. It does not need to be somehow enhanced to achieve huge processing power. You can simply use your own CPU or GPU which is already installed in your pc. But you can still use some special hardware (list of the hardware can be again found on Monero website).

It takes about 2 minutes to mine one token. The reward for one block is 1.16 XMR and it will never drop below 0.3 XMR.

Improvement of privacy

One of the main goals of Monero is enhanced privacy. It is trying to lessen privacy concerns by using concept of ring signatures and stealth addresses. Now what does that mean? Well, the ring signatures are something that allows you, as a sender, to hide your identity from other people or participants in the group. These signatures are anonymous. It is a digital signature, but you will not know which one of the participants makes it.

Stealth addresses. These addresses add more privacy. They are generated randomly and they can also be used only once. It not only hides the identity of the receiver, but also hides the actual destination for which the transaction is addressed.

Ring Confidential Transactions (or RingCT) is used on the Monero network. This allows to hide the exact amount of a transaction. It was released in January 2017 and is now mandatory for every transactions that is made on the Monero network.

But it can still be selectively transparent. You can choose who you want to see your transactions.

Availability

XMR can be found on many exchanges like Binance, Kraken or DigiFinex. It can be purchased through a digital or virtual currency exchange. Eventually, it can be found on specific ATMs that are enabled for cryptocurrencies.

Pitfalls

The privacy is on one side really important and it significantly helps with fast adoption of Monero. But it is bringing along many pitfalls and challenges. For example, if we take non-traceability. In this case it is very affable to be used at questionable marketplaces and by that we mean marketplaces where you can get drugs, gamble or buy other illegal things (= black markets). The markets on dark web often showed increased use of Monero.

Thank you for reading.