Monero‘ price skyrocked to 0.018 BTC, almost double in 24 hours’ time in 29th of August, until now is still stable above 0.015 BTC. The main reasons are that darknet markets, like Oasis and Alphabay, are accepting Monero payment beyond Bitcoin. Speculators were taking this opportunity and pushing up its price.

“We have received a lot of requests about it; we’ve studied the cryptocurrency, and we’ve decided to implement it, This is what we do when users (both customers and vendors) suggest that we implement or change features. We love to hear back from everyone.” said an Oasis staff member.

Monero (XMR)

Monero is meant to be an anonymous and decentralized cryptocurrency with CryptoNight PoW hash algorithm and based on CryptoNote protocol, which is known as privacy, security, untraceability, block analysis resistance etc. All of these merits are exactly what customers demand. They are buying drugs, guns etc from there and want to hide their identity. At the same time, choosing privacy concerns currency benefits the darknet market operators as well, who prefer to hide their transactions record and don’t like to be the next Silk Road. This is just what Moneroe offers, which automatically mixes transactions at the time transactions take place, rather than having to go through complicated procedures and pay high premium to mix bitcoin transactions. Besides that, outsiders have no way to identify the senders, receivers, and the amount of transactions. Furthermore there is no way to track down the senders and get their identity exposed.

Most people probably say bitcoin transactions are anonymous but actually not. Bitcoin’s transactions are transparent and open for pubic to check from blockchain explorer. As the technology of blockchain analysis develops, it is easy to find the transactions’ original senders and even get their IP address. Customers are always concerned about privacy.

The total supply is only 18.4 million, more scarce than Bitcoin’s. It can be used for daily spending, investment tool, or a mean of storing value, has a lot of potential in different areas, especially darknet market. Some services are accepting Monero payment now, like Bitwala. More services and startups are considering to adopt Monero and build useful apps around it. Its ecosystem are in the way of becoming mature. Monero has solid community and dedicated development team, have made a lot of process.

Some people speculate it may replace bitcoin in the future. Considering current price $8, there are a lot of room for growing. How far the price will go remains uncertain in the future, depends on Monero’s development and its ecosystem. But I have to say bitcoin is still the leading cryptocurrency, its ecosystem is most advanced among all of them. Monero still have long way to go.

Compare Monero with Bitcoin