In the last 3 weeks since my post about Monero a few interesting things have happened.
Firstly, Monero has climbed significantly in value since then.
In fact, it's currently around a two year high, shortly passing it not too long ago.
Why is this the case? Well, there were several major bits of news.
Firstly, Monero is about to undergo a major network upgrade in just a few days on October 17th. As similarly seen with Hive's HF24 upgrade, a network upgrade can produce renewed interest and excitement around a blockchain.
Secondly, the USA's Internal Revenue Service offered up a bounty of USD$625k to anyone who can develop a method for tracing Monero and other privacy coins. Many have seen this as somewhat of an approval stamp as it means Monero has been successful in its goals of providing private transactions. Additionally, even if someone found a way to trace Monero as it is now, it would be patched out shortly much like what happens when an exploit is found with the Tor network.
On top of those two, several major governments have shown renewed interest in backdooring encryption. Given that doing so is mathematically impossible to do in a safe manner, governments taking interest in doing so makes many people uneasy.
As people grow ever more untrustworthy of centralised authority, such as that of governments and banks, Monero will continue to grow in popularity and usage.
Consider picking up some Monero if you don't have any already, governments will very likely make it harder to obtain should they fail at tracking it like they've done with other coins. Some, such as Australia, have already made attempts at doing so.
If governments feel threatened enough, they'll try to ban Monero. That will mean it'll only be purchasable through a DEX such as Bisq as governments can't regulate those.
