Review on Monero by Susanne Cole

Name: Monero
Item: Monero
Rating: 5

September 01, 2018

Because everyone that uses Monero automatically has privacy features applied…

Because everyone that uses Monero automatically has privacy features applied to their transactions, Monero has a huge advantage over other cryptocurrencies whose privacy features are only optional. You never have to request and then verify whether other people have enabled a privacy mechanism when sending you funds, because privacy is always automatically applied to all transactions. Furthermore, the always-on nature of Monero’s privacy features means that even if the majority of Monero users are not privacy sensitive, they will still automatically participate with the strengthening of the privacy mechanisms for other users that are privacy conscious.
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Pros

Monero’s ‘Adaptive block size limit’ When transactions are announced to the Monero or Bitcoin networks, they appear as part of a ‘block’. Monero blocks are produced on average every 2 minutes, and Bitcoin blocks are produced on average every 10 minutes. Bitcoin blocks have a maximum size, so if there is no room then your transaction will be delayed. If you are desperate to have your transaction included in a Bitcoin block promptly, you will have to increase the transaction fees that you pay to the Bitcoin network. Monero, however, has been designed to have an automatically adaptive block size limit. This means it will automatically be able to handle future increases in transaction volume by automatically expanding the size of blocks to accomodate higher future transaction volumes.

Cons

Mining centralization. A large proportion of Monero mining is consumed by 4 large pools. As of writing, no single pool controls more than 20% of the total hashrate, but mining decentralization is extremely important. Smart mining is being developed to try and increase the hashrates of solo miners