Review on Monero by Arun Kaul

Name: Monero
Item: Monero
Rating: 4

June 16, 2019

The Secure, Private and Untraceable Cryptocurrency - Monero

Monero brings a very unique, but important aspect to the crypto community. Many people take their privacy seriously, and anonymity is a very large prospect for users. 
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In a world where digital information is becoming the norm, there needs to be a secure and private way to relay information while protecting the identity of the individuals involved. 
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Monero has made its position within the crypto network and will continue to grow (and hopefully be become more adopted) in the future.

Monero is different in the sense that every transaction is private. Monero hides the sender, amount, transaction broadcast, and receiver with ring signatures, RingCT, Kovri, and stealth addresses, respectively. 
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By default, every transaction on the Monero blockchain untraceable and unable to be linked to any user.
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However, you can provide a certain key to someone to let them understand what is happening. 
Coins such as Bitcoin (BTC), TRON, or Litecoin, have transparent systems in which merchants or individuals would hope the funds weren’t used for illicit reasons especially if they are using privacy features to hide information.

With Monero, merchants and users of the coin can receive these funds without fearing the source of the funds. Merchants also don’t want or need their vendors known and individually don’t want everyone to know how much they are spending.
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Pros

Several researchers dedicate their time to research projects for Monero. Combined with their team, they have an excellent team for the continuing development of Monero.
The Monero community as a whole is set on growth and they are constantly trying to improve their system.
There was no ICO. Currently, many ICO’s are trying to raise a ton of money in the beginning of their launch. This raises a bunch of reg flags and causes uncertainty in the coin.
Monero’s privacy is always on for every user except those who are allowed to see certain transaction info. Even though information on the blockchain is always obfuscated, the option is there to allow transaction information to be seen.
Monero’s mining algorithm (CryptoNight) is memory-intensive and the reward of developing specialized equipment is outweighed by the cost of developing it.
Best feature of them all and why Monero is so unique. Every transaction will be private by default.

Cons

A large proportion of Monero mining is consumed by 4 large pools, with France controlling over 25% of the hashrate and over 80% of the miners. Mining decentralization is a very important aspect regarding cryptocurrency.
Monero transactions are significantly larger than other cryptos because the amount of encryption involved.
As of now there are no real solutions. It’s very likely that scaling solutions will be ready for Monero in the future and maybe the lightning network could be implemented in XMR.