This time I had the pleasure to interview the Monero team. Pioneers of the private cryptocurrencies. A open source project aiming to empower the citizens giving them the control and responsibility of their own funds.

How would you describe the main pillars of the project?

Security, privacy and fungibility. Especially fungibility is key for Monero since no coin can be distinguished from any other. There are no coin tainting or blockchain analysis possibilities in order to blacklist specific coins, since every single coin equals any other and has no visible history.

About the team, what are your strengths?

Monero is an open source project without any centralized organization or company behind it. Any developer interested in the project can join and most of them contribute voluntarily, however there is a forum funding system (FFS), which allows anyone to suggest an idea which needs funding and the community is free to support it: https://forum.getmonero.org/#category-2

I will mention just some projects funded this way:

- Kovri, an I2P implementation for Monero, which completely hides the users’ IP addresses similar to TOR

- Two full time mathematicians and researchers for several months ongoing in the Monero Research Lab

- Dedicated Monero open hardware wallet development

- Monero integrations for several online shop systems without middlemen

- Kasisto, a Monero based point of sale solution

Beside that Monero has a very strong core developer team which is providing continuous contributions to the project. Just this year we finally got a GUI wallet, mandatory RingCT transactions and faster node sync.

Every decision is openly discussed with everyone who is willing to contribute and there is no centralized leadership.

Monero Research Lab is independent from the developers and reviewing new code, researching improvements to the protocol and releasing research bulletins on top of the cryptonote whitepaper.

Do you have any concern about the Monero block size in a mass adoption scenario?

Monero transactions are much larger than Bitcoin transactions due to the ring signatures. Real privacy comes with a price but there is ongoing research how to optimize it. However, Monero already has a dynamic block size and dynamic minimum fees. Based on the median block size of the last 100 blocks a miner is allowed to increase the size of his block up to 10% for free or even more but then gets a penalty on the block reward. This mechanism ensures that very low fee transactions will not increase the block size to spam and try to disturb the network.

The Cryptonote codebase on which Monero is based is completely different than Bitcoin’s so it’s much harder to integrate it in existing wallets or other applications, since everything has to be coded from scratch. However, we can see much interest from multi coin wallets like Coinomi or Exodus and also Hardware wallets of which at least Ledger is already making good progress.

There are already thoughts on Layer 2 solutions and sidechains for better scaling, but there is no urgent need yet to implement them yet, since we have a dynamic block size and for now most blocks don’t even hit the minimum block size.

What’s the added value of Monero in comparison with other competitors like ZCash, Dash, PIVX, or Verge?

All Monero transactions require full mandatory privacy unlike the mentioned coins. In all other private crypto currencies so far privacy is optional and hardly used, since it’s complicated and/or isn’t supported by wallets. Zcash has not even 400 fully shielded transactions a month, Dash uses CoinJoin mixing over Masternodes where you have to wait for partners to mix with and it takes hours. PivX does exactly the same like Dash, but it’s even smaller and you have less partners to mix with. When it comes to Verge, there is no difference in privacy compared to Bitcoin over TOR and all transactions and balances are transparent.