Cryptocurrency Monero (XMR) is the world’s most widely known anonymous open-source currency. Compared to Bitcoin and other similar crypto currencies, whose blockchain allows you to see the sender and recipient addresses and even the amount of the transaction, Monero is truly anonymous, secure and completely untraceable, making it often misrepresented. Moreover, the same can be said about Quickex. You can always exchange BTC to XMR on Quickex 24/7.
What is the Monero cryptocurrency?
This coin uses the CryptoNote cryptocurrency algorithm, which originated in 2012 with the emergence of Bytecoin. Two years later, in 2014, the cryptocurrency Monero was created. Although Monero has its own unique characteristics, the underlying code was taken from Bytecoin.
A few years after its inception, Bytecoin suddenly became the subject of increased interest from the community. It is still unknown who the creator of Bytecoin is, but given the anonymous nature of the cryptocurrency, it is not very important. However, if we take into account good optimization and elaboration of this coin’s code, we can safely assume that several people worked on this project.
We can say that Monero cryptocurrency appeared by accident. The fact is that at the time when Bytecoin was much talked about, almost 80% of all coins were mined.
As a result, a group of developers separated and named the new project BitMonero, which was later renamed simply Monero. This happened on April 18, 2014. Until June 2014 the coin had the abbreviation MRO, but then it was changed to the now familiar XMR.
Monero crypto currency is a coin without pre-mining. Initially, the developers planned not to release the project code to the open source, but this caused negative feedback from the community, so it was decided to make a full-fledged open-source project.
Four months after the coin’s release, hackers tried to destroy the still young and fragile Monero coin. However, they failed. According to the team, the attackers were well aware of the coin’s code and the structure of Merkle trees (a data structure consisting of hashes of transactions included in a block).
After this incident, the team postponed work on improving the interface and continued to actively work on the system core. Work on interface improvements resumed only in 2016.
Team
The original team that pushed Bytecoin to develop BitMonero remains unknown. The decision to create a full-fledged team was not made until April 2014, when the coin was called Monero. In May of that year, Ricardo Spagni joined the team and remains the “face” of the cryptocurrency.
Monero Technology
Monero is a secure, anonymous and untraceable currency. At the moment it is actively used for trading purposes and/or long-term investments, but the main goal of the project is to use this currency as a full-fledged means of payment.
The developers managed to achieve complete anonymity of the Monero network by using a number of innovative technologies.
The Ring Signature
The Monero cryptocurrency uses the keys of user accounts and several public keys randomly selected from the blockchain using a triangular distribution method. In the process of selecting a signer, the system treats all members of the “ring” as equal participants. This makes it impossible to determine which participant was chosen to sign a particular transaction, making them untraceable.
RingCT transactions
RingCT is an acronym for Ring Confidential Transactions. This technology makes Monero transactions hidden and untraceable. Another important feature of anonymous Monero ring transactions is the use of so-called “Proof of Coverage”. Coverage Proof allows the Monero network to cryptographically prove that the sums of a transaction’s outputs and inputs are greater than 0 and less than any arbitrary number. Monero uses coverage tokens to prevent invalid transactions from being sent.
Advantages & Disadvantages of Monero
Compared to other crypto currencies, Monero has a number of significant advantages, including:
- Anonymity of transactions: achieved through the use of the technologies described above: signature and ring transactions;
- Interchangeability: makes one currency fully interchangeable with the other, which is achieved due to the fact that the XMR sending history cannot be traced;
- Unlimited issuance: The main production volume is 18.4 XMR. After all these coins are mined, mining will continue, but the reward will be significantly reduced, down to 0.6 XMR;
- Availability of mining: unlike most cryptocurrencies, which require large investments in ASIC-mainers and powerful cards for mining, the cryptocurrency Monero can be mined on ordinary processors;
- Short block search time: In the Monero network, it takes only 2 minutes to form each block, which is five times less than in the Bitcoin blockchain.
But Monero also has some disadvantages:
- Heavyweight transactions: the use of the circular signature method causes the average block size in the Monero network to be 8 times larger than the average block size in the Bitcoin blockchain;
- The problem of integration into other (“non-native”) wallets: due to the use of CryptoNote algorithm, which guarantees anonymity, the Monero protocol is very difficult to integrate into popular wallets.
Conclusion
The Monero Project is a powerful community, capable of attracting the world’s best cryptocurrency engineers and researchers.
Because of this, the Monero project is at the forefront of cryptocurrency privacy and security. The experts and development team are constantly developing new and innovative technologies. Since its launch, the project has received contributions from more than 500 developers from around the world.