Monero: Difference between revisions
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Revision as of 10:34, 19 March 2015
Monero (XMR, ISO 4217-like ticker) is a cryptocurrency focusing on privacy, decentralisation and scalability. It was created in April 2014 and is sometimes described as "electronic cash". Its code is not based on Bitcoin.
History
Monero was launched on 18 April 2014 as Bitmonero. It was renamed Monero 5 days later.
Features
Monero is a pure proof-of-work cryptocurrency.
Its main emission curve is approximately 18 millions tokens mined in 8 years. After that, a "tail emission" will create a sub-1% perpetual inflation to prevent the lack of incentives for miners once a currency is not mineable anymore[1]. The emission uses a smoothly decreasing reward with no block halving (any block generates a bit less moneros than the previous one). The proof-of-work algorithm, CryptoNight, is AES-intensive or "memory heavy", which significantly reduces the advantage of GPU over CPU.
Privacy
Monero uses an improved version of the CryptoNote protocol, itself using both [ring signature]s (Dan J. Bernstein's Curve25519 + Ed25519, Schnorr signatures on a Twisted Edwards curve) and stealth addresses. The end result is advertised as "decentralised mixing".
As a consequence, Monero features an opaque blockchain (with an explicit allowance system called the viewkey), in sharp contrast with transparent blockchain used by any other cryptocurrency not based on CryptoNote. Thus, Monero is said to be "private, optionally transparent". On top of very strong privacy by default, such a system permits net neutrality on the blockchain (miners cannot become censors, since they do not know where the transaction goes or what it contains) while still permitting auditing when desired (for instance, tax audit or public display of the finances of an NGO).
Monero developpers are also working on implementing a C++ i2p router straight in the code. This would complete the privacy chain by also hiding the IP addresses[2].
Scalability
Monero has not hardcoded limit, which means it doesn't have a 1 MB blocksize limitatinon preventing scalability.
The Monero Core Team also released a standard called OpenAlias[3], which permits much more human-readable addresses and "squares" the Zooko's triangle. OpenAlias can be used for any cryptocurrency and is already implemented in Monero, Bitcoin (in latest Electrum versions) and HyperStake, as well as several websites such as mymonero.com and coin.space.
Limitations
Since it is not based on Bitcoin, Monero cannot take advantage of the Bitcoin technological ecosystem, like GUI wallet or payment processors. As a consequence, everything has to be rewritten from scratch[4]. Works is underway, but Monero doesn't have feature parity with Bitcoin yet. Notably, there is no Monero payment processor and Monero doesn't support multisignature yet.
External Links
OpenAlias
References
- ^ Hutchinson, Martin. "Breakingviews: Bitcoin's defects will hasten its demise in 2015". reuters.com. Retrieved 19 March 2015.
- ^ Latapie, David. "Why we chose i2p over TOR". getmonero.org. Retrieved 19 March 2015.
- ^ "OpenAlias official website". openalias.org. Retrieved 19 March 2015.
- ^ Latapie, David. "Why is the official GUI wallet not released yet". getmonero.org. Retrieved 19 March 2015.