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Monero

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Fireice (talk | contribs) at 12:54, 19 September 2018 (Rename of "implementations" to "illicit uses"). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Monero
Monero Logo
Denominations
PluralMonero, moneroj
Symbolɱ
CodeXMR[a]
Previous namesBitMonero
Subunits
 1⁄1000000000000piconero
Development
Original author(s)Nicolas van Saberhagen
White paperCryptoNote v 2.0
Initial release18 April 2014 (10 years ago) (2014-04-18)
Latest release0.12.3.0 / 26 July 2018 (5 years ago) (2018-07-26)
Code repositorygithub.com/monero-project
Operating systemWindows, Linux, macOS, BSD, Solaris
Source modelBSD 3-Clause
Ledger
Timestamping schemeProof-of-work
Hash functionCryptoNight
Issuance scheduleDecentralized, block reward
Block time2 minutes (previously 1 minute)
Block explorerxmrchain.net
Circulating supply16,250,168 XMR (as of 22 July 2018)
Valuation
Exchange rate$114 (as of 6 September 2018)
Demographics
Official user(s)Worldwide
Administration
Date of introduction18 April 2014; 10 years ago (2014-04-18)
Website
Websitegetmonero.org
  1. ^ Compatible with ISO 4217.

Monero (XMR) is an open-source cryptocurrency created in April 2014 that focuses on fungibility and decentralization. Monero uses an obfuscated public ledger, meaning anybody can broadcast or send transactions, but no outside observer can tell the source, amount or destination. Monero uses a Proof of Work mechanism to issue new coins and incentivize miners to secure the network and validate transactions.

The privacy afforded by Monero has attracted illicit use by people interested in evading law enforcement during events such as the WannaCry Ransomware Attack, or on the dark web buying illegal substances.[1][2] This has been acknowledged by Monero, and not entirely disavowed. Despite this, Monero is actively encouraged to those seeking financial privacy, since payments and account balances remain entirely hidden, which is not the standard for most cryptocurrencies.[3][4]

The egalitarian mining process of Monero has made it an alternative choice for websites and applications looking for substitute sources of income. In 2018, Change.org led the way by implementing a Monero miner on their screensaver to raise funds for the Change.org Foundation. While some organizations use Monero miners to cover hosting costs as an alternative to paywalls or advertisements, malicious hackers have also used it via covertly embedding mining code into websites and apps seeking profit for themselves.[5]

Architecture

Unlike many cryptocurrencies that are derivatives of Bitcoin, Monero is based on the CryptoNight proof-of-work hash algorithm, which comes from the CryptoNote protocol. It possesses significant algorithmic differences relating to blockchain obfuscation.[6][7]

In particular, the ring signatures mix the spender's input with a group of others, making it exponentially more difficult to establish a link between each subsequent transaction.[2][8] Also, the "stealth addresses" generated for each transaction make it impossible to discover the actual destination address of a transaction by anyone else other than the sender and the receiver.[9] Finally, the "ring confidential transactions" mechanism hides the transferred amount.[10][2]

Monero is designed to be resistant to application-specific integrated circuit mining, which is commonly used to mine other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. It can be mined somewhat efficiently on consumer grade hardware such as x86, x86-64, ARM and GPUs.

History

In 2014 Bitcointalk forum user known as thankful_for_today forked the codebase of Bytecoin into the name BitMonero, which is a compound of Bit (as in Bitcoin) and Monero (literally meaning "coin" in Esperanto).[2] The release of BitMonero was very poorly received by the community that initially backed it. Plans to fix and improve Bytecoin with changes to block time, tail emission and block reward had all been ignored, and thankful_for_today simply disappeared from the development scene. A group of users lead by Johnny Mnemonic decided that the community should take over the project, and five days later they did while also changing the name to be Monero.[6]

Due its privacy features, Monero experienced rapid growth in market capitalization and transaction volume during the year 2016, faster and bigger than any other cytocurrency that year. This grown was driven by its uptake in the darknet market, where people used it to buy stolen credit cards, guns, and drugs.[2] Two major darknet market were shut down in July 2017 by law enforcement.[11]

On January 10, 2017, the privacy of Monero transactions were further strengthened by the adoption of Bitcoin Core developer Gregory Maxwell's algorithm Confidential Transactions, hiding the amounts being transacted, in combination with an improved version of Ring Signatures.[12]

After many online payment platforms shut down access for white nationalists following the Unite the Right rally in 2017, some of them, including Christopher Cantwell and Andrew Auernheimer ("weev"), started using and promoting Monero.[13][14]

As of May 2018 Monero was led by 7 members, 49 developers and 3 researchers, with the unofficial figurehead of pseudonymous Luigi1111.[15]

Transaction linkability

In April 2017 research highlighted three major threats to Monero users' privacy. The first relies on leveraging the ring signature size of zero, and ability to see the output amounts.[16] The second, described as "Leveraging Output Merging", involves tracking transactions where two outputs belong to the same user,[16] such as when a user is sending the funds to himself ("churning"). Finally the third threat, "Temporal Analysis", shows that predicting the right output in a ring signature could potentially be easier than previously thought.[16]

Monero development team addressed the first concern in January 2017, prior to the actual release of the research paper, with introduction of Ring Confidential Transactions (RingCT)[17] as well as mandating a minimum size of ring signatures in the March 2016 protocol upgrade. Monero developers also noted that Monero Research Labs, their academic and research arm, already noted and outlined the deficiency in two public research papers in 2014 and 2015.[17]

Monero GUI 0.12.3.0 on Windows 10

Illicit uses

The feasibility of CPU mining Monero has made it viable for malicious actors to covertly distribute miners embedded in malware, using the victim's hardware and electricity for the financial gain of the malware developer as well as legitimate uses with user consent.[18][5]

The JavaScript implementation of Monero miner Coinhive has made it possible to embed the miner into a website in such a way to use website visitor's CPU to mine the cryptocurrency while the visitor is consuming the content of the webpage. While this can be done with user's consent in an effort to provide an alternative funding model to serving ads,[19] some websites have done this without informed consent which has prompted the in-browser miners to be blocked by browser extensions and ad blocking subscription lists.[18]

Monero is sometimes employed by Bitcoin users to break link between transactions, with bitcoins first converted to Monero, then after some delay, converted back and sent to an address unrelated to those used before.[8] Researchers have reported that the operators behind the global ransomware incident WannaCry have converted their proceeds into Monero. It is also the payment method of choice for The Shadow Brokers.[1] In the first half of 2018, Monero was used in 44% of cryptocurrency ransomware attacks.[20]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b Gallagher, Sean (4 August 2017). "Researchers say WannaCry operator moved bitcoins to "untraceable" Monero". Ars Technica.
  2. ^ a b c d e "Monero, the Drug Dealer's Cryptocurrency of Choice, Is on Fire". WIRED. Retrieved 2017-11-22.
  3. ^ Somerset Webb, Merryn (2018-03-23). "Trust is in increasingly short supply for investors". Financial Times. Retrieved 2018-07-24.
  4. ^ "Edward Snowden: Public Ledger Is Bitcoin's Big Flaw - CoinDesk". CoinDesk. 2018-03-22. Retrieved 2018-07-22.
  5. ^ a b Tung, Liam. "Android security: Coin miners show up in apps and sites to wear out your CPU | ZDNet". ZDNet. Retrieved 2017-11-22.
  6. ^ a b Rizzo, Pete (February 4, 2017). "Drugs, Code and ICOs: Monero's Long Road to Blockchain Respect". CoinDesk.
  7. ^ Lopp, Jameson (April 9, 2016). "Bitcoin and the Rise of the Cypherpunks". CoinDesk.
  8. ^ a b van Wirdum, Aaron (September 1, 2016). "How Bitcoin Users Reclaim Their Privacy Through Its Anonymous Sibling, Monero". Bitcoin Magazine.
  9. ^ Courtois, Nicolas T.; Mercer, Rebekah (2017). "Stealth Address and Key Management Techniques in Blockchain Systems" (PDF). Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy (ICISSP). SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda.: 559–566. doi:10.5220/0006270005590566. ISBN 978-989-758-209-7. Retrieved 2017-07-24.
  10. ^ Noether, Shen; Mackenzie, Adam; the Monero Research Lab (21 December 2016). "Ring Confidential Transactions". Ledger. 1 (0): 1–18. doi:10.5195/ledger.2016.34. ISSN 2379-5980. Retrieved 2018-08-03.
  11. ^ Popper, Nathaniel; Ruiz, Rebecca R. (20 July 2017). "2 Leading Online Black Markets Are Shut Down by Authorities". The New York Times.
  12. ^ O'Leary, Rachel Rose (September 8, 2017). "Increased Hashrate Forces Premature Monero Hard Fork Sep 8, 2017 at 15:00 UTC by Rachel Rose O'Leary". CoinDesk.
  13. ^ Hayden, Michael Edison (27 March 2018). "White supremacists are investing in a cryptocurrency that promises to be completely untraceable". Newsweek.
  14. ^ Cox, Joseph (5 March 2018). "Neo-Nazis Turn to Privacy-Focused Cryptocurrency Monero". Motherboard.
  15. ^ "Leadership Shifts to Usher in New Era for Monero Cryptocurrency - CoinDesk". CoinDesk. 2018-05-27. Retrieved 2018-07-22.
  16. ^ a b c Kumar, Amrit; Fischer, Clément; Tople, Shruti; Saxena, Prateek. "A Traceability Analysis of Monero's Blockchain" (PDF). eprint.iacr.org. Retrieved 6 November 2017.
  17. ^ a b "You Can Link Monero Transactions – But Which? And What's the Impact? - CoinDesk". CoinDesk. 2017-04-22. Retrieved 2017-11-15.
  18. ^ a b Goodin, Dan (October 30, 2017). "A surge of sites and apps are exhausting your CPU to mine cryptocurrency". Ars Technica.
  19. ^ Thomson, Iain (October 19, 2017). "Stealth web crypto-cash miner Coinhive back to the drawing board as blockers move in". The Register.
  20. ^ Rooney, Kate (2018-06-07). "$1.1 billion in cryptocurrency has been stolen this year, and it was apparently easy to do". CNBC. Retrieved 2018-09-06.
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