Monero Warrior – Interview with Riccardo Spagni aka Fluffy Pony

 

Who is Fluffy Pony?

In many ways, Riccardo “Fluffy Pony,” Spagni’s background positions him as a near-ideal candidate to act as the face of a privacy coin such as Monero (for a basic primer on privacy coins, head over to this post). 

Being a dual citizen of Italy and South Africa, Fluffy has a global perspective on life. A strong worldview is something a decentralized currency must absolutely reckon with if it is to appeal to the masses. Riccardo has also had a hand in software for some time, having originally worked as a developer in corporate environment. He found that world a dehumanizing environment, however, and left to start an import/export business with wife. The venture found success. This afforded him an abundance of free time which coincided with his discovery of Bitcoin around 2013. 

After briefly pursuing mining, he found it’s profitability to be a shaky prospect at best. Instead, he leveraged his previous entrepreneurial flair by capitalizing on the needs of miners rather than competing against them. He developed a business which developed rack setups for GPU mining, and was again successful. His intimate knowledge of the cryptocurrency landscape, business acumen and strong belief in the value of privacy finally led him to Monero (XMR). 

But Fluffy is no shadowy figurehead such as Satoshi Nakamoto, neither is he a wunderkind like Vitalik Buterin. Instead he is a successor to a series of discarded leaders who originally developed the Monero project. Drawn to the initially contribute code to Monero, Fluffy later assumed the role of steward for the cryptocurrency. 

 So what is Monero, anyway?

Monero was originally known as BitMonero (The word Monero itself is Esperanto for “coin,”) and is based on the Cryptonote protocol. It uses a proof-of-work algorithm which is quite different from Bitcoin’s as it uses ring-signatures to mix the output amounts being sent with other transactions and stealth addresses to obscure which addresses have received funds. A commitment to avoiding transactional censorship is a key facet of Monero.

Using discreet methods to make private the amount of funds and parties involved in transactions led to the rapid growth of Monero’s market capitalization when it was used extensively on AlphaBay, a darknet marketplace.  

 The Community

While this growth was a beneficial for Monero, it cannot be taken to mean that the community condones such uses. Rather, it supports the concept of privacy on principle for better or worse. A fair comparison could be made with the concept of free speech. To enjoy the positive benefits, we must also protect minority and potentially reprehensible viewpoints. 

The Monero community’s belief that mining should be decentralized and egalitarian is equally important. Monero’s code undergoes hardforkingevery 6 months to stay ahead of the cat-and-mouse game that developers and hackers play. As Fluffy points out, security isn’t a final state that software arrives at. Instead it is a state of health for the network and routine maintenance (aka forking). The most recent hard fork also demonstrated the community’s stance on ASIC-resistance. 

If any of this post has inspired you, look further as there is an extremely active Monero Reddit community, a lot of detailed information about the project on Stack Exchange, and of course their Github. The project is open source and permissionless (you don’t need anyone’s consent to begin making improvements). Feel free to learn and contribute. 

Monero need not be all serious and dry, however. Fluffy has a friendly and humorous approach both in person and online, you can get to know a bit more directly from him on Twitter or this Steemit post. 

 Check out the Crypto 101 Podcast interview with Fluffy Pony of Monero Here

Written by: Scott Wehman - CRYPTO 101 Blog Writer