Crypto was made to solve issues with the old financial system, giving people full control of their money without a middleman. This also means that there'd be no central body that can track and control you based on where your money is kept. Bitcoin failed to achieve full privacy as wallet addresses prevents full anonymity, Monero exists to solve that.

Background

Monero doesn't have a strict founder or company behind it, it's open source and is based/forked off of bitmonero. Bitmonero was also in its turn based off bytecoin which was a rugpull. Both Monero & Bitmonero used a consensus protocol called CryptoNight which emphasizes anonymity & mainly is mined using CPUs. The development team currently consits of several developers in a spread out community, the original creator left the project after the community overtook his work as he refused to listen to the vocal majority. The coin has remained largely unchanged with only changes relating to preventing and patching vulnerabilities.

Network

Monero is a Proof-of-Work coin that is meant to be fully anonymous. The hashing algorithm is known as CryptoNight and works best on CPUs and is ASIC resistant. The community behind Monero based the coin on this algorithm to avoid centralized mining supporting the project as CPUs are easier to come by and run a node on.

Monero doesn't save any transaction record and allows the creation of stealth addresses, temporary addresses that receives coins and then forwards it to the proper recipient before being deleted. This allows privacy for users that want to avoid being tracked based on transaction history.

Use cases

Monero is fairly simple, it allows the same function as Bitcoin while remaining anonymous and having a more decentralized network of nodes. The coin is inflationary, this is to allow miners to be rewarded with block creation. This inflation rate is just under 1%, adding roughly 0.3 Monero every minute. A stable self funding coin that is meant for transaction for people that prefer that these purchases/transactions remain unkown. Monero does this so well that the IRS has placed a bounty for $625.000 in rewards for anyone that can crack or get insight into the transaction history on the blockchain.

Monero today

Monero is one of the older crypto coins that is still around today. It has a strong community supporting it, but it also attracts people that want to stay private for more morally questionable actions. The full private nature has also associated Monero with being used by criminals that want to avoid being traced, if crypto is regulated this will be one of the coins that will be hit the hardest. Apart from this Monero is also facing stronger competition as there are more efficient privacy coins that also host smart contracts. Monero is a simple novel idea and performs what it was made for exceptionally, will it survive the younger more efficient cryptos is yet to be seen.

Pros:

• Privacy
• Good development team
• Good hashpower spread

Cons:

• Simple/limited use case
• Possibly target of regulators
• Growing competition