Overall a really interesting and a well written book. It touches on a few important things which I'll mention here as A & B.



A) Bitcoin isn't fungible at a protocol level, which is a problem. To achieve fungibility requires privacy. Monero provides privacy, and thus fungibility through 3 things - stealth addresses (meaning that the public key you provide to receive payments doesn't get stored on the blockchain), RingCT (hiding the transaction value) and Ring Signatures (which hides who sent the

Overall a really interesting and a well written book. It touches on a few important things which I'll mention here as A & B.



A) Bitcoin isn't fungible at a protocol level, which is a problem. To achieve fungibility requires privacy. Monero provides privacy, and thus fungibility through 3 things - stealth addresses (meaning that the public key you provide to receive payments doesn't get stored on the blockchain), RingCT (hiding the transaction value) and Ring Signatures (which hides who sent the transaction).



B) Monero also adds a "tail emisison" - meaning that it doesn't have a finite supply. This could be seen as a weakness, but is proposed as a strength. As Bitcoin halvings continue, the reward to miners decreases continuously, until a point where the block reward reaches zero, and the hashing power is expected to be supported through transaction fees. This could present 2 problems; 1) transaction fees may not be enough to support a strong network 2) it requires maintaining limited block sizes to incentivize a fee market. With a tail emission, like Monero has, this solves the block size issue (it uses an adaptive block size) and some of the concern over the network strength.



The book also includes information regarding some of the core cryptography used - which was a bit above my pay grade, but fascinating nonetheless.



I'm excited to read the next edition, which will incorporate recent protocol updates.