What is Monero (XMR)?

Created in 2014, Monero (XMR) cryptocurrency is a privacy coin that allows for anonymous transactions. Monero uses technology known as “ring signatures,” which makes it extremely difficult to see from which wallets coins were sent from and delivered to.

Monero has become one of the top cryptocurrencies. In mid-January 2021, XMR was the 15th largest cryptocurrency by market cap, according to data from CoinMarketCap. At the time of writing, XMR has a market cap of $2.7 billion. Prices in mid-February were $185.41.

While some private cryptocurrencies require the privacy feature to be “turned on,” the Monero blockchain functions in an anonymous manner by default. XMR is often thought of for being the currency of choice for illicit activity on the dark web and has faced controversy as a result.

Monero uses a technology called “ring signatures” to make their transactions opaque, meaning observers can’t see who sent the transaction, what amount of money the transaction involved, or who received it. Basically, ring signatures string transactions together in a way that makes it difficult (but not completely impossible) to differentiate between them.

It uses a public distributed ledger with privacy-enhancing technologies that obfuscate transactions to realize anonymity and fungibility. Observers cannot decipher addresses trading monero, transaction amounts, address balances, or transaction histories.

The protocol is open source and supported CryptoNote, an idea described during a 2013 white book authored by Nicolas van Saberhagen. The cryptography community used this idea to style monero, and deployed its mainnet in 2014. Monero uses ring signatures, zero-knowledge proofs, and “stealth addresses” to obfuscate transaction details. These features are baked into the protocol, though users can optionally share view keys for third party auditing. Transactions are validated through a miner network running RandomX, a symbol of labor algorithm. The algorithm issues new coins to miners, and was designed to be immune to ASIC mining.

Monero has the third largest developer community among cryptocurrencies, behind bitcoin and Ethereum. Its privacy features have attracted cypherpunks and users desiring privacy measures not provided in other cryptocurrencies. it’s increasingly utilized in illicit activities like concealment , darknet markets, ransomware, and cryptojacking. The us tax income Service (IRS) has posted bounties for contractors which will develop monero tracing technologies – Wikipedia Page .

Monero XMR background:

Monero’s roots can be traced back to CryptoNote, a cryptocurrency protocol first described in a white paper published by Nicolas van Saberhagen (presumed pseudonymous) in October 2013.The author described privacy and anonymity as “the most important aspects of electronic cash” and called bitcoin’s traceability a “critical flaw”. A Bitcointalk forum user “thankful_for_today” coded these ideas into a coin they dubbed BitMonero. Other forum users disagreed with thankful_for_today’s direction for BitMonero, so forked it in 2014 to create monero. Monero translates to coin in Esperanto. Both van Saberhagen and thankful_for_today remain anonymous.

Monero has the third largest community of developers, behind bitcoin and Ethereum. The protocol’s lead maintainer was previously South African developer Riccardo Spagni. Much of the core development team chooses to remain anonymous

How does a transaction in a cryptocurrency work?

Every transaction has two sides to it, the input side and the output side. Suppose Alice needs to send some bitcoins to Bob how will it look like?

Transaction Input

In order to make this transaction happen, Alice needs to get bitcoins which she has received from various previous transactions. Remember, as we said before, in bitcoins, each and every coin is accounted for via a transaction history. So Alice can make the outputs of her previous transactions the input of the new transaction. Later on, when we talk about “outputs”, especially in the ring signature section, we mean the outputs of the old transaction which become the inputs of the new transaction.

So, suppose Alice needs to pull bitcoins from the following transactions which we shall name TX(0), TX(1) and TX(2). These three transactions will be added together and that will give you the input transaction which we shall call TX(Input).

How is Monero Different From Bitcoin?

Monero crypto is like Bitcoin in the sense that both are minable, proof-of-work cryptocurrencies.

The main differences involve how their blockchain technologies work, how many people use them, and how much value gets transacted over their respective networks on a regular basis. The bitcoin blockchain is transparent. Every Bitcoin transaction that has ever been made can be seen by anyone using publicly-available block explorer websites.

Still, it can be difficult to link users to specific wallets, meaning Bitcoin is still “pseudonymous.” The transactions are public, but there isn’t a name attached to every public Bitcoin address like there might be with many other financial transactions. Some companies even specialize in making sophisticated software that tracks transactions or users for this reason.

How To Get Monero Coins/How To Purchase XMR

You can acquire Monero coins (XMR) by purchasing them on cryptocurrency exchanges. If you don’t want to purchase Monero, you can mine it using mining software. Miners are paid with XMR for facilitating the settlement of transactions and securing the network. This is called block rewards. Miners are also paid the transaction fees incurred when you do transactions.

Also CheckOut: What Is Bitcoin And How Does It Work?