This article is a part of the Monero Guide, an initiative by @crypto-guides on LeoFinance.
If you don't know or would like to know more about Monero, make sure to check out the other sections of the guide.
PROS of Monero
Here are some of the main aspects of Monero that I consider to be positive:
Privacy
Monero is one of the so-called privacy coins, meaning it was designed to provide anonymity and untraceability. In practical terms, that means that, unlike with traditional coins, such as Bitcoin, for example, the identity behind a Monero transaction is hidden and it's also virtually impossible to track the trail of transactions using a block scanner, for example.
Fungibility
This goes hand in hand with privacy. Monero tokens are fungible, meaning they are indistinguishable from one another so, if some tokens that were used in a previous illegal transaction somehow find their way to your wallet you don't need to worry about any headaches because it's not possible to trace them.
Large development team
The Monero team really takes privacy seriously and has a dedicated team to research and develop privacy features for the project. While most of the core team prefer to remain anonymous, the open-source project is a big success among developers and some sources put it as the third largest developer community in cryptocurrency, only behind Bitcoin and Ethereum.
ASIC resistance
Most large-scale coins nowadays are mined using Application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), but Monero discourages that and is mined with CPUs instead.
The advantage in that is because more users can afford to participate in the mining process since they don't have to spend thousands of dollars in specific hardware to do so. LeoFinance author @edicted talked about that in this very good article.
Dynamic scalability
Monero doesn't operate on a pre-set block size, which means that the block size can be increased based on demand and that is very good for scalability.
Monero CONS
Here are some of the main aspects of Monero that I consider to be negative:
Not the fastest network
Even though a new block is mined every 2 minutes on average, a transaction on Monero takes about 30 minutes on average to be processed, which is a bit on the slow side of things.
Prone to FUD
Because of the anonymous transactions it can be used for illegal activities and the mainstream media often highlight that to associate it with criminal activity.
Final thoughts
I believe privacy is still very underrated but I think it will gain more and more importance in the future, especially with all the talks on regulations and things like that.
Many experts say that it shouldn't have many scalability issues so it has a real potential to become a central project in cryptocurrency once mass adoption takes place.
Keep in mind that this is only a starting point and those who are considering investing in Monero (XMR) should always do their own research and never risk any money they can't afford to lose.