Monero

 


 

Monero (/məˈnɛroʊ/; XMR) is a decentralized cryptocurrency. It uses a public distributed ledger with privacy-enhancing technologies that obfuscate transactions to achieve anonymity and fungibility. Observers cannot decipher addresses trading monero, transaction amounts, address balances, or transaction histories.

The protocol is open source and based on CryptoNote, a concept described in a 2013 white paper authored by Nicolas van Saberhagen. The cryptography community used this concept to design monero, and deployed its mainnet in 2014. Monero uses ring signatures, zero-knowledge proofs, and "stealth addresses" to obfuscate transaction details. These features are baked into the protocol, though users can optionally share view keys for third party auditing. Transactions are validated through a miner network running RandomX, a proof of work algorithm. The algorithm issues new coins to miners, and was designed to be resistant to ASIC mining.

Monero has the third largest developer community among cryptocurrencies, behind bitcoin and Ethereum. Its privacy features have attracted cypherpunks and users desiring privacy measures not provided in other cryptocurrencies. It is increasingly used in illicit activities such as money laundering, darknet markets, ransomware, and cryptojacking. The United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has posted bounties for contractors that can develop monero tracing technologies.

Monero's roots can be traced back to CryptoNote, a cryptocurrency protocol first described in a white paper published by Nicolas van Saberhagen (presumed pseudonymous) in October 2013. The author described privacy and anonymity as "the most important aspects of electronic cash" and called bitcoin's traceability a "critical flaw".A Bitcointalk forum user "thankful_for_today" coded these ideas into a coin they dubbed BitMonero. Other forum users disagreed with thankful_for_today's direction for BitMonero, so forked it in 2014 to create monero. Monero translates to coin in Esperanto, and the Esperanto "Moneroj" is sometimes used for plural.Both van Saberhagen and thankful_for_today remain anonymous.

Monero has the third largest community of developers, behind bitcoin and Ethereum. The protocol's lead maintainer was previously South African developer Riccardo Spagni. Much of the core development team chooses to remain anonymous

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