Beginner's Guide to Cryptocurrencies

Monero (XMR)

Monero has been marketed as the one true king of privacy coins. It merits this designation because every part of the transaction chain is obfuscated, rather than just one pillar. Monero transactions have all data relating to the sender, to the receiver, and transaction amounts obfuscated by default on every transaction. If you go to the Monero explorer and look at the "rich list" (the list of the 100 addresses with the most funds), you'll see a notice reminding visitors that there is no rich list because it's impossible to see how many coins anyone is holding. The need for privacy for a coin extends far past a few unsavory aspects such as criminal activity. Monero was not designed to aid criminals, however, Dark Net Markets are all switching to Monero as the safest cryptocurrency for private transactions. This seems to be an indirect but ringing endorsement of the success of Monero's technology.

Mining/Staking

Monero operates under a proof-of-work (mining) consensus system. Monero had no pre-mine, no insta-mine, no tokens were sold, and there was no pre-sale of any kind. The current cryptographic algorithm for mining is the CryptoNight algorithm (which could be subject to change in the future). Difficulty is adjusted every block, based mostly upon the rolling average of the last 720 blocks (with some outliers ignored), and the target average block time is 2 minutes. The block size is dynamic, but any individual block has a maximum size that cannot exceed twice the average size of the previous 100 blocks. The maximum supply is infinite, but will only hit about 18.1m coins by mid 2022, and after that, the inflation rate will be decreasing slowly (starting out at no more than 1% per annum).

Development Team

The core Monero team is small, and the most publicly-recognized face of Monero is Riccardo "FluffyPony" Spagni. However, despite the small size of core, there is a very large group of developers (over 200) contributing the project, and significant work is done on an ongoing basis thanks to a series of initiatives designed to fund various parts of the project.

Criticisms, Caveats, and Competitors

Monero has not done enough work to differentiate itself from other allegedly private cryptocurrencies, and needs the entire market to understand that it provides the best all-round privacy mechanisms of any existing cryptoasset. The market needs to understand that privacy should be a default rather than an option.

Additional Resources

The project's main website: https://getmonero.org

Link to Wikipedia Page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monero_(cryptocurrency)

Link to Reddit Community: https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero

Link to Twitter account: https://twitter.com/monerocurrency

Link to Team information: https://getmonero.org/community/team

Link to data on Live Coin Watch: https://www.livecoinwatch.com/coins/XMR

Whitepaper: https://github.com/monero-project/research-lab/tree/master/whitepaper

Monero (XMR)

Mining/Staking

Development Team

Criticisms, Caveats, and Competitors

Additional Resources

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