Monero’s main focus is on privacy and true decentralisation. The development team have prioritised the improvement of their privacy technology over marketing and user friendliness which allows it to focus on its niche. It can bundle transactions together in such a way that provides anonymity to the users. While the obvious implications are that Monero will be used for less than legal transactions many people do and will value privacy, especially in light of current developments around net neutrality etc. Monero has created a protocol where ordinary consumer computers can still remain competitive whilst mining, as opposed to Bitcoin which required specialised ASIC computers. It should also be noted that Monero transactions are 25 times larger than Bitcoin’s which may prove difficult to scale going forward. There will be no immediate issues with this as the block size scales dynamically but the main issue becomes bandwidth.
Consensus PoW
Intended/ Current Uses Currency for untraceable transactions
Risks
- Questionable market size (smaller room for growth)
- Not scalable currently
Advantages
- Network effects
- Anonymous transactions
- Good decentralization
- If private transactions become increasingly important its market size will increase
- Strong developer community and technology
