Monero Is Our Future
I know I do not talk about cryptocurrency a lot on this blog and that is because of how fast the market can change. This coin is different though, Monero started back in 2014 and had slowly gained ground in a steady climb and often sits in the top 10 cryptos by market cap.
I overlooked Monero for a long time due to being a Bitcoin maximalist, but the more I learn about this coin, the more I love what it stands for on an independence level. It is the mixture of nerd and anarchist within me that stirs up all kinds of fuzzy warm feeling as I understand the Monero mission and development.
Why Monero
Privacy And Security
As some of you know, I am a big advocate for personal freedom, security, and privacy online and in our daily lives. I find it distasteful that our information is mined to sell to other organizations. That may sound weird being an anarcho-capitalist, but I'm not saying companies should not be allowed to use these practices, only that they need to be upfront about it.
The reason I do not like the data mining of all the data is that it creates a vulnerability in our security. That is why I go out of my way to limit the amount of information I share with free services. But how does this translate to cryptocurrency?
The majority of coins out there are on an open ledger with what we call pseudo-anonymity. This lack of privacy means that with enough effort the slight anonymity that Bitcoin, Ethereum, and others have is only so deep. If I know your public key, which I would if you send me funds, I can see your entire balance as well as every transaction you ever engaged in with that address.
Pseudo-anonymity, to me, is a significant privacy breach and a threat to user security. On the privacy side of things, we are unable to keep our income and savings secret from other people. We don't go around telling people how much money we make or save over time because that information is private.
The same scenario applies to the security side of money. If everyone knows how much we made or saved in a given year, we would be at a massive risk for crime. Given enough funds, a thieve could find out how much we have and threaten our lives for the private key to steal our funds. I don't want that for anyone let alone myself.
image from getmonero.org
Monero is different.
What Monero does is not only hide the amount we have currently but also how much we send and receive. Monero allows for greater security and privacy just we would go with our fiat currency. Keeping this information private from peeping toms (sorry if your name is Tom) removes the threat of crime against us due to the size of our wallet.
I won't get into all the math and technology behind Monero in this post since the goal is to introduce this Monero and explain why this cryptocurrency is here to stay. If you care about your private information stays private online than you need to care about your digital currency remaining hidden as well.
Mining Monero
I wrote a post a while back explaining how to set up an AMD GPU Monero miner on Ubuntu Linux. That post is still useful today and seems like it will be for as long as xmr-stak exists. Your CPU is still relevant because the Monero development team and community aim to always have the coin minable on CPUs and GPUs.
ASICs do exist for the cryptocurrency today, but with each update to Monero they get drastically reduced and are not worth the investment. That's just the way I like it! The more people that can mine a coin without losing out on the cost of electricity the more secure the coin's chain becomes.
Because of the ASIC resistant nature of Monero, this allows for all kinds of miners to exists. You can even mine right in your web browser! Check out my support page at jrswab.com/support; there you will see a box that will let you mine Monero as a way to support my content creation at no monetary cost to you.
Issues With Monero
I'm not going to get you all excited about Monero without giving you some real-world issues that I see the coin facing at the time of writing. They are not deal breakers for me because I am used to the "cost" of security over continence. However, that may not be the case for everyone, and that's ok (I guess...).
image from getmonero.org
No Hardware Wallet (yet)
Not having a hardware wallet kills me a bit because I always tell new cryptocurrency users to first buy a hardware wallet before purchasing any coin out there. The last thing I want is someone to lose either access to their funds or their funds to a malicious person. Since Monero is so secure, it makes creating a hardware wallet much more difficult which is why after four years we are just starting to get one.
As of today Ledger is working on adding Monero to the Ledger Nano S hardware wallet. There are even a few users messing around with the developer version and show it working on the Monero subreddit. I now have a reason to upgrade my Ledger from the first one they made to the new fancy Nano S.
Large Blockchain
The potential for a large blockchain is one of those trade-offs that will always exist for the security and privacy that Monero provides. Since there is more going on to keep everything private on the Monero blockchain the chain itself is more significant than other coins. The bigger the blockchain gets, leads to the need for more storage for nodes hosting the chain.
As time goes on, we may see fewer nodes with a full copy of the blockchain but only time will tell if this becomes the case. The blockchain size is not new to Monero, and I believe the devs are working on ways to lessen the load to keep more nodes around.
I don't find it to be a huge deal at this time since as I write this the entire blockchain is around 40-50GiB in size. This trade-off becomes a much more significant problem as adoption increases, and we hit hundreds of gibibytes in size. (Yes it's Gibibytes, not Gigabytes)
Nothing To Hide?
Remember, just because what you do today is not illegal does not mean a state or government can's outlaw it tomorrow. There are many places today where it is illegal to buy a Bible. Using Monero today will ensure that you stay safe even if the laws change for the worse tomorrow.
Use Monero, it's secure, private, untraceable, and fungible.
Thanks For Reading!
If you have any topics that you would like me to cover, please feel free to comment them below, and I'll add them all to my list!
All images came from royalty and attribution free sources unless specified.
Join us over at the Creators' Guild Discord group! We are here to encourage, support and increase the creation of quality content.
Like what you see?!
You can vote me as witness!
If you have any questions about the future of Steem
or my witness, please feel free to message jrswab#3134 on Discord.
Click here to vote with SteemConnect!
Or you can do the following via Steemit:
Go to https://steemit.com/~witnesses
Scroll down to the bottom.
Type "jrswab" into the box.
Click "Vote" once.
Refresh.
Looking to support my content creation efforts outside of the Steem Blockchain?
Check out jrswab.com/support
Thank you for this post
I'm thinking about getting some Monero for a long time , after reading your post I'm sure will get some , this is just the little push i was needed
Epic! The desktop wallet is not super polished and it takes a while to download the entire blockchain. So you may want to use a paper wallet to store you coins until there is a hardware wallet available for us to use.
Definitely monero is secure, private, untraceable, and fungible as you said but as you said its blockchain has reached almost 40-50GiB in size and the size will grow as the transactions increases. So, I have some questions. 1. Will this not make its network slow? 2. Can this be mined by a CPU? Please clarify.
If the blockchain gets so large that only one or two nodes exist than yes. However, I find this very unlikely to happen since hard drive compacity gets cheaper with each passing year.
Yes and is much more effective than mining with a CPU on Bitcoin. It won't make you rich but you can at least still get rewards with pool mining. It is better to GPU mine though.
Thank a lot! You removed my doubts.
Hello sir, i decided to go through all your posts when i found your first post, i also found out that you were a witness, awesome. However, thats not all to you, you also provide very tangible information about other matters too. Thank you very much for this, i joined steemit in december and i began my journey in the crypto world, i have been able to find a little understanding about blockchain and these digital currencies, but i have not come across any reliable source of information regarding minning and due to the lot of security issues surrounding it, i am very selective of information sources.
Im very interested in this Monero as the use case which you have explained is quite genius, you mentioned that it can be mined by a CPU, can you please direct me to a source of information where i can learn to set this up and start to mine monero, i will really appreciate this. Thank you so much in advance.
I just voted you as witness, thanks for all your effort in sustaining the steem blockchain
Thanks for the vote!
To learn about mining Monero head over to https://getmonero.org
Coins mentioned in post: