Monero

Before the portentous arrival of Zcash, it used to be said that Monero was the most private and secure cryptocurrency of all. However, perhaps what has made her famous is that this did not take long to attract the attention of the DarkNet markets, which began to use it as a means of payment much more anonymous than Bitcoin.

But, beyond all this, what is it and how does Monero work? Is it really only useful on the Deep Internet?

To begin with, it must be said that his birth occurred in April 2014 as a Bytecoin fork, the first cryptocurrency to use the CryptoNote protocol instead of the one used for Bitcoin. This is a cryptographic system first described at the end of 2012 by Nicolas van Saberhagen, where the transactions are also recorded in a blockchain, but without revealing either the sender or the receiver or the actual amount: you can only know that the amount shown It is always less than the true one.

In principle, Monero (XMR) is born with the name of BitMonero, a union between Bitcoin 'bit' and, literally, 'currency' in the Esperanto language. So far, faithful to the philosophy of privacy as a fundamental human right, of its group of seven developers only two have revealed their names: Ricardo Spagni, software expert originally from South Africa, and Francisco Cabañas, a Canadian physicist; both also cryptocurrency enthusiasts.

After the bifurcation and the name change, the developers undertook to improve their original code and integrate the CryptoNight algorithm for mining, where the order of transactions is voted on, new features in the protocol and the fair distribution of money. On the other hand, specifically, the technology that allows the absolute privacy of Monero is called ring signatures (ring signatures). This is a group of cryptographic signatures in which only one of the ones that appears is real, but there is no way to indicate which one it is or where it came from, because when they are mixed, they all seem valid. So when making a transaction anonymity is maintained except for the parties involved.

Unlike other cryptocurrencies, the maximum amount expected for Monero is virtually infinite. Its main emission curve will be given over the next 8 years and will reach around 18.4 million coins. After that, a constant 'emission queue' of 0.6 XMR per block every two minutes will cause a 1% inflation that will continue to fall, although the system has been designed so that miners can always get at least 0.3 XMR per block. In this way, there will be no shortage of rewards for them, which will keep the blockchain safe.

The latter, of course, is proprietary to the platform and is based on the already described CryptoNote protocol, much more opaque than the original Bitcoin blockchain.

DECENTRALIZATION, SCALABILITY AND FUNGIBILITY

A true decentralization is another of the main features offered by Monero, alluding to that no government, foundation or central body is responsible for the platform, and that the maintenance is on behalf of its developers, who in turn have had various partners without anyone occupying any particular position. Also, it is emphasized that its mining algorithm will not allow the centralization of this by large companies, as has happened with Bitcoin, since until now it is not possible to develop ASIC devices for its algorithm.

Scalability is another difference in which they focus, because the size of the block has no predisposed limits. This is calculated automatically after a trial period, and there will always be enough reward for the miners with a subsequent inflation of 1% after its first emission curve. In addition, a block size larger than Bitcoin implies being able to handle a larger number of transactions per second.

Its last fundamental characteristic is the fungibility, that is to say, all the coins of this blockchain are identical and can be exchanged indifferently among them, such as fiduciary coins. It is not just a token or a reward: it's real money.