Introduction to Monero (XMR)

Monero is a privacy coin originally created with the name of BitMonero, in 2014. It’s a fork of Bytecoin, a coin that developed the Cryptonote protocol. The issue with Bytecoin that lead to the Monero fork was the premine of 82% of that coin, making the distribution unfair, and creating ground for the appearance of a more fair alternative, Monero.

The use case for Monero, unlike Bitcoin transparent and immutable blockchain, is to give anonymity to some transactions. Monero is a currency that cannot be traced, hiding addresses, balances, and transactions.

Monero is recognized as the best privacy coin, it’s digital money which development was funded by donations made by the community. More and more people want their money private from banks and governments, sometimes even their families, and Monero gives an answer to that, in terms of full privacy.

The transactions made by Monero use a technology with the name of ring signatures. Ring signatures mix the transactions in a way that makes impossible to know who owns which addresses. Monero also has Stealth addresses that hide balances, so everything is kept private.

Digging deeper into Monero’s tech we find “spend a key” and “view a key”, which are the ways to spend funds and to make public certain transactions, respectively. Companies need to be transparent with their finances and transactions, so this is where the view a key option is particularly helpful, for cases where finances need to be audited or in tax related situations.

It’s the best of two worlds, as finances are kept private, but upon request access is granted to the relevant parts. Security is achieved, as some transactions can be kept private, for a number of reasons that are not illicit, like private governmental or business transactions, or simply being private because of legal concerns.

The Monero team has seven people, but many contributors that contribute to the scheduled updates and information Monero gives to their community.

If the pros for Monero are obvious, and include anonymity and being impossible to trace, there are some cons too, namely the fact that governments can attack it for this same reason, and eventually make it illegal because of eventual money laundering.

This is a brief introduction to Monero, but if you want to know more about the coin, what people are saying about it, technical details, jump right in any of the links we present below. They are well worth reading before investing!