What is Monero?
One of the most popular altcoins and potential front runner for the “most private” crypto currency, Monero (XMR) was started in 2014 by “thankful_for_today” on the bitcointalk forums. A fork of a coin called Bytecoin that introduced CryptoNote, a completely different crypto currency protocol from Bitcoin and Ethereum. Bitcoin adopters at the time, respected the underlying code of CryptoNote, however Bytecoin had been created and mined for 2 years before being released publicly on the forum. This lead many to believe the project should start from scratch, with coin mining available to everyone rather than joining a project with 80% of the coins pre-mined. Enter BitMonero, renamed Monero 5 days later.
Monero’s aim is to obscure the sender, recipient and amount of every transaction, in addition to making the mining process easier and cheaper than Bitcoin mining. Custom made chips (ASICs) are required to mine Bitcoin, whereas Monero can be mined on a laptop or PC.
What value do buyers of Monero see in it?
Bitcoin and many other crypto currencies are stored and transferred on a public blockchain, allowing anyone who knows your bitcoin address to see other transactions made to and from your wallet. The concept of private transactions or “privacy coins” has grown enough since Bitcoins release that many altcoins focusing on this have been created.
In addition to Bitcoin Private and “project Dandelion,” released on the Bitcoin Improvement Protocol (BIP) in June of 2017, there are many privacy focused altcoins for crypto lovers. Adding Dandelion to the Bitcoin protocol would “break” the transactions into two parts to obfuscate transactions on the public blockchain.
Monero being one of the first highly used privacy coins, with a completely different protocol, would still show value to users of this coin even if the bitcoin protocol were updated to add a privacy feature. Current “competitors” in privacy coins include Dash, Zcash, Zcoin and Verge, all with different advantages and drawbacks for crypto lovers.
What do critics of Monero say?
Difficulty of use is a common complaint for most crypto currencies, Monero is considered more difficult to get started with than Bitcoin and many Altcoins. No major hardware wallet (Trezor, Ledger) can store Monero yet, leaving new users to use mymonero on laptops, Cake Wallet for iOS or Monerujo for Android. Ledger is however working on a solution to store it in their hardware wallet in the future.
| Name | Price | 24H (%) |
|---|---|---|
 Monero (XMR) | $130.79 | -2.88% |
Where can I buy Monero?
Local Monero is the new favorite among a lot of the Monero buyers and sellers. Peer to Peer, anonymous transactions around the world. US, UK, Brazil, Venezuela, India, China and all over Europe are the countries we’ve seen so far selling in person, through gift cards or bank wires.
