Monero (from Esper, Monero - "coin") - crypto currency based on the protocol CryptoNote, focused on increased anonymity of transactions.
Crypto currency appeared on April 18, 2014 as fork Bytecoin (not to be confused with Bitcoin). When it became clear that more than 80% of the maximum amount of Bytecoin was already distributed, the community decided to re-issue under the name "Monero", starting with zero preliminary mining.
The principle of anonymity was the reason for accusations that Monero can be used for drug trafficking, the spread of child pornography, etc. In this regard, Europol even officially expressed concern about the growing popularity of Monero [4].
The level of anonymity Monero is sometimes questioned, in particular, Edward Snowden called it "amateur crypto currency" [5].
Other popular anonymous crypto-currencies with a similar purpose are Zcash and Dash.
According to data for May 2017, Monero is among the top ten crypto-currencies with the highest market capitalization [6].
History
Monero was launched without prior mining [7]. The name of the crypto currency was received in April 2014 from the word "coin" in Esperanto [8]. A few weeks after the launch, a program was created for Monero's mining on the GPU [9].
In September 2014, the system underwent a planned attack, however, the attackers failed to destroy Monero [10]. According to the researchers, the attackers were well versed in the algorithm of the Merkle Tree and the source code Monero [10].
On January 5, 2017, the Montero "hardforks" planned by the founders of the Montero crypto currency
Features
Monero is an open source software. Crypto currency uses the principle of Proof-of-work ("proof of work performance").
Unlike Bitcoin, the total emission of Monero is unlimited: after the initial release of 18.4 million XMR, the subsequent mining will bring 0.6 new XMRs for each two-minute block. This was done in order for the miners to maintain the system even after completion of the main emission [12].
The algorithm for mining in Monero differs in that it actively uses the AES command system for x86 microprocessors and a large amount of memory, which makes the GPU mining less efficient [13] than for Bitcoin.
The main feature of Monero is the use of the protocol CryptoNote, working on the basis of ring signatures [14]. The cryptographic basis of the protocol was created by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Yael Taumann in 2001 [15] and revised by E. Fujisaki and K. Suzuki in 2007 [16] [14]. The EdDSA scheme, proposed by the American mathematician Daniel Bernstein [en] [17], is used as the signature algorithm. To this basis, additional transaction obfuscation was added
Due to CryptoNote and the obfuscation added to the protocol, passive mixing is provided: all transactions in the system are anonymous, and all participants in the system can use plausible negation in the case of capture [7]
