Spotlight on Cryptocoins -- Monero/XMR -- 6th feature "private" coins

Hello Steemians

In this series of articles I want to put a spotlight on a specific cryptocurrency and write about the details in all these aspects:

• Aim of the currency

• Technical details

• Market position

• Forecast

The cryptocurrency in focus currently will be one of the so-called "private" coins. Coins that create the possibility to be more or less in private while doing transactions. How private you are is one of the main questions to be answered in this articles.

In this 6th article of the series, the spotlight will be on Monero.

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Aim of the Currency

What is this currency about? What does it do differently than the rest?
Where is the unique selling point and at what audience is this coin targeted?

All that questions and more will be answered in the following paragraph.

Monero is currently the biggest of the so-called private coins and in comparison to most of them also not based on the Bitcoin core code. Monero features, in difference to most of the big other crypto coins only an encrypted blockchain, so sender, receiver, and amounts are not readable for the public. Most other private crypto coins feature also the possibility to send transparently, this is not possible with Monero.

Monero is around since April 2014 making it one of the older cryptocurrencies, it is designed as a PoW (Proof of Work) coin with an infinite amount of coins. Back in 2014, there was no premine, no founders fee is included and no presale has happened.

The privacy aspect of Monero is currently only existing in the encryption of the transaction data, a module called kovri is in alpha stage, with this tool using l2p technology it will also be possible to obfuscate the IP addresses and have increased privacy in terms of location.

Technical Details

Monero, as being one of the big cryptocurrencies, features multiple wallets (also a light version of the wallet) for diverse hardware setups, also hardware wallets and the integration into the ledger hardware wallets is currently in the making.

Since Monero is a PoW Coin, new coins are only created trough block rewards by miners. There is an infinite number of coins going to be created, the block rewards are smoothly decreasing though until they reach 0,6 XMR per block somewhere after 2022.
Monero uses the CryptoNight algorithm for the PoW hashing, which is said to be resistant to ASICs, on the other hand, the rewards checking Whattomine.com are relatively low and I would not consider mining this with a PC currently.

Privacy of transaction is currently done via a threefold approach, sender privacy is secured by using ring structures, recipient privacy by using stealth addresses and the amount is obfuscated using ring confidential transactions. I will not go further into the details of each of this solutions, this would be an article of its own.

Market Position

At the time of writing this article (12/29/2017), Monero is placed 10th in market capitalization, with the total value of $6.015.110.386 USD. The 24h Volume was $179.177.000 which is a high number compared to the last month.

The team around Monero is extremely active and they are delivering updates and new software quite regularly.
Most of the cryptocoins have had a massive boost of price in the last month and Monero profited from this tendency as well.
Looking back one month into the past, we see that the price is now more than 2 times what it was at the end of November. 387$ today versus 170$ on Nov,30 .

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If we are looking back one year into the past we see that Monero was traded for 12 Dollars on January 17, making it an impressive span of 370 Dollars to today's price.

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Forecast

Just like all the other private coins Monero for sure has a valid point in trying to keep the privacy of the sender and receiver.
The fact that this is the biggest private coin currently will for sure help to secure the market position that Monero currently has.
The forecast is quite positive, if the development team delivers the module for IP obfuscation Monero can bridge the gap to some other coins in functions and we will see another boost in price.
The quite impressive track record together with the Roadmap is also a strong indicator that this coin will perform quite nicely.

Conclusion

Monero is keeping your transaction details encrypted and therefore completely private, yet IP obfuscation is not yet implemented. This module is called Kovri and is currently in pre-alpha status.
Monero is developed by a huge number of contributors coordinated by a team of experts, the code is completely open source and written mostly in C++.

Last but not least there are also some drawbacks and they should not be unmentioned:

• PoW Coin, mining can be seen as a waste of energy.

• Privacy of transaction has been also viewed with criticism.

Authored by: @jedigeiss






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