Today Monero is one of the most popular digital currencies. The project offers secure and extremely anonymous transactions in the world where “corporations and even governments” encroach on our financial privacy. Monero allows “businesses not to reveal their contractors and partners” and provides people with the opportunity to “escape from state pressure and control”.

Monero literally means "coin" in Esperanto . It was launched in 2014 as a fork of a cryptocurrency called Bytecoin, created two years before. As well as its “parent” currency, Monero provides very high privacy which makes it in some ways similar to other popular coins, like Zcash and Dash. Monero`s anonymity is based on CryptoNote protocol inherited from Bytecoin. This protocol uses a ring signature to ensure sender privacy and one-time ephemeral key to hide a receiver. Ring signature is a type of digital signature, when a message is endorsed by someone in a particular group of people , but nobody knows who exactly did it.

In 2016 Monero`s market capitalization and transaction volume rapidly increased. According to the magazine WIRED, it happened not least because a huge darknet-market AlphaBay, that was shut down in 2017, started using the cryptocurrency.

At the time of writing the article Monero takes the 11th place among other digital currencies by market capitalization and is fairly popular. However, law enforcement bodies (especially Europol) have often stated that Monero`s privacy is used to hide and support criminal activities.

Unlike many other cryptocurrencies and first of all Bitcoin , it is possible to mine Monero using graphic cards (GPU-mining) and even processors (CPU-mining). Therefore even an old laptop can actually deal with it. In this case, it obviously won`t bring excessive profits, however, you can still manage to make some money out of the old hardware. But here's the other side of the coin - a virus mining. Today it is rather easy to “come across” Coinhive script that makes user PC's processor to mine Monero while visiting a particular website.

Considering the future of Monero, it is necessary to summarize its advantages and drawbacks. Firstly, Monero really provides high privacy and anonymity and such a negative attitude of law enforcement authorities towards this project confirms that. Transaction privacy is crucial for many users, so Monero is not likely to face lack of attention. Secondly, XRM costs approximately less than $200 and users do not need to purchase special expensive equipment to mine this cryptocurrency. On the other hand, “heavy” Monero algorithms do not ensure fast transactions and the cryptocurrency has problems with the law. Anyway, as many digital coins, Monero has a potential to become a very profitable investment, however, as usually, to go all in will be a wrong thing to do.