The Monero Moon is a new curated weekly newsletter regarding all things Monero.

September 10th 2018 — September 17th 2018

Development, Releases, and Tech

The recent Developer Meeting logs from last Monday can be found over on MoneroBase.

As a part of the October Hard Fork (Network Upgrade), a Proof Of Work change to mitigate any potential centralisation from ASICs (Monero promotes decentralisation via CPU/GPU mining only) has been taking place over on Github here.

The code merge of BulletProofs to testnet took place early last week. Bulletproofs improve scalability, providing an ~80% reduction in transaction size and cost.

Gingeropolous notified everyone that killallasics.moneroworld.com is up for testing miners with the new CNV2 algorithm. Gingeropolous gave simple instructions, stating that “Banning is disabled, so be nice. Please don’t throw tons of hash on it, and just test with 1 card, not your whole rig”.

The Kovri Project has shifted over to GitLab due to Github recently being acquired by Microsoft. It is highly likely The Monero Project will follow suit sometime in the near future.

The Kovri Project also have a new official website — kovri.io

XMRwallet.com is now available on Tor with their own unique .Onion address to access your Monero wallet anonymously. As with any webwallet, you are probably best off only using this wallet to store small amounts of Monero for short periods of time. The onion address is: http://xmrwalletdatuxds.onion/

The packaging of Monero for Debian so it can eventually be added to privacy focused projects like Tails is slowly taking place. Links here and here.

Whonix, an anonymity focused operating system, reached out to Monero with the notion of working together to promote the vision of enhanced privacy and security.

With Tralex Web Miner, you can monetize your website and support the Monero network with an opensource background CPU webminer that has “no fees”. This allows your website to convert users’ CPU power into Monero for yourself. Be sure to check they upgrade with every biannual network upgrade (hard fork).

u/patoshii announced they have been working on a project to integrate Monero donations into GoFundMe. It is still unclear how they will arrange the backend details, however being able to privately donate to fundraisers is of great significance. For example, you may want to financially support political party X, but risk persecution from the current political regime. Private Monero donations would help enable this. Head here to chime in on the discussion.

General News

Throughout the week Monero Outreach has been releasing Monero Best Practices information sheets. These are great for newcomers and cover topics such as wallet security and understanding Monero’s hard forks, so be sure to check them out and share them with others.

Bitcoin Magazine published Battle of the Privacycoins: Why Monero Is Hard to Beat (and Hard to Scale). This is one of the more accurate and well written articles regarding Monero, however fails to mention the possibility of Monero scaling via second layer solutions such as Lightning Network or MimbleWimble.

Diego ‘rehrar’ Salazar was a fantastic ambassador for Monero when he appeared on the New Kids on the Blockchain Youtube channel to discuss all things Monero. Watch it here.

Riccardo “FluffyPony” Spagni and Naveen Jain appeared on Simon Dingle’s YouTube channel to discuss Tari - the new decentralised digital asset protocol being built on Monero.

Additionally, Riccardo “FluffyPony” Spagni featured as a guest on the What Bitcoin Did podcast. What Bitcoin Did is one of the better cryptocurrency podcasts, and is a highly recommended podcast for anyone new to cryptocurrency. Listen in here, or search for the episode wherever you get your podcasts.

The initial Monero Talk episode with Globee CEO Felix was cancelled due to technical difficulties, however they rescheduled and broadcast the episode on their YouTube channel here. There is also a new episode with Justin Ehrenhofer where they discuss things such as the Monero Work Group and Blackballing.

Thomas Rhys shared a YouTube video titled Monero (XMR) — What is this privacy coin and is it a good investment? This video is aimed at people new to Monero.

The Monero Munich Meetup is happening on the 27th of September. If you’re in Munich, forget Oktoberfest, attend the Monero meetup instead. More info can be found here.

Also on the 27th of September is the Monero NYC meetup hosted by xCubicle. Special guests include the Cake Wallet IOS Monero Wallet App founder, Monero contributor Diego “rehrar” Salazar, and the Monero Talk podcast hosts. More info can be found here.

u/MoneroSheffield gave a successful Monero talk at a recent Chesterfield (UK) Bitcoin meetup. It was about 30 minutes long and in front of a crowd of 12 cryptocurrency enthusiasts. u/MoneroSheffield reported that it was well received and people commented there was a lot they didn’t know about Monero, but now do. Check out his slides, and read his summary here.

Xeagu shared the Church of Monero’s Monero Mass Week 3 Report. If you want to participate join the Telegram group @churchofmonero. Mass is on every Sunday 18:00 UTC.

u/castypasty shared an image on r/Monero with the title: Probably the coolest socks I’ve ever bought just arrived today.

u/castypasty’s socks

A Monero article written in Spanish titled: Monero, la criptomoneda más anónima del mundo, can be found here.

XMR.ru, the group of Russian and Ukranian Monero enthusiasts, recently celebrated their first birthday, and provided a list of Russian translations completed throughout the past month.

Monero translators are in high demand at the moment. The Monero Outreach group are in need of translators. If you think you can help out translating fact sheets then you can find all the information here.

There has been a call out for Monero Ambassadors to speak at 35C3–35th Chaos Communication Congress. If you would like to submit a proposal to present at 35C3, head over to this page here, or reach out on the #monero-community IRC channel for guidance.

u/Vespco shared a list of articles to be used in rebuttal to the somewhat common question: “Isn’t Monero just for criminals with something to hide?”. A common theme within the articles is that just because authorities deem something to be illegal, doesn’t mean it is necessarily bad, and can actually lead to positive change within society. Recent examples of this are same sex marriage and marijuana legalization. Even well known Bitcoin champion Andreas Antonopoulos has been quoted saying, “Almost every important innovation in history starts off being illegal. All of the interesting things that happen in technology were started by people who forgot to ask for permission”. In the context of Monero, while it is likely a minor number of users will utilize the technology to conduct illegal activities, authorities should not throw the baby out with the bath water, as a private cryptocurrency has the potential to bring positive change and freedom to the world.

An empirical analysis of anonymity in Zcash was published a while back, but has been doing the rounds on social media again, highlighting why optional privacy is a risk. The paper explains that “…our study has shown that most users are not taking advantage of the main privacy features of Zcash at all. Furthermore, the participants who do engage with the shielded pool do so in a way that is identifiable, which has the effect of significantly eroding the anonymity of other users by shrinking the overall anonymity set”.

For most Monero enthusiasts and investors, Bitcoin news and development is important to follow. This week Bitcoin Core advocate Jimmy Song declared that he’s souring to on chain privacy for Bitcoin. It appears there may continue to be disputes within Bitcoin Core (even with Bitcoin Cash already forked away), and achieving true privacy may also prove to be difficult for BTC due stakeholders’ differing idealogical beliefs and political agendas. In addition and in case you missed it, the Blockchain cruise took place early in the week, and hilarity ensued. Jimmy Song’s debate with Bitcoin Cash’s Roger Ver echoed a Jerry Springer episode.

u/xm-argghhh-pirate recently shared an image in honor of the Bitcoin wizard advertisement. It would be great to see this as an advertisement on Reddit.

u/xm-arghhh-pirate’s advert

u/manicminer5 has been minting Monero!

u/manicminer5 minting Monero

Exchanges and Merchants

Cryptosmate.io has added Monero to their exchange and only has a 0.10% fee.

Monero is now available on ChangeNOW’s Android app. According to ChangeNOW, they offer “limitless swaps with more than 150 cryptos”. In using this service, do so knowing that you may be required to comply with KYC/AML. Find the app on Google Play here.

Decentralized exchange BISQ is promoting a ‘market kick-start day’ on September 20. If you can help increase liquidity on the exchange, and also launch their newest release. There will be rewards $10 BISQ for participants. More info can be found here.

While on the topic of BISQ, u/geozdr brought it to attention that XMR/BTC transactions make up for ~98% of volume on their open-source and decentralised cryptocurrency exchange.

u/ShowMeTheBlueprint launched an e-commerce store where you can buy greeting cards with Monero.

A collection of Monero apparel is for sale at CryptoApparel.org.

Forum Funding and Proposals

Funding for Dr Brandon Goodell’s (Monero Research Lab’s first postdoctoral researcher into cryptocurrency) next quarter is still open, so it would be great if you could help financially support the MRL by sparing a few Monero. Contribute to the FFS here.

Dr Sarang Noether’s (also part of the MRL) next funding request has been moved to Funding Required. The MRL focuses on exploring concepts such as - atomic swaps, payment channels, sublinear ring signatures, zero-knowledge proof technologies, balance proofs, and spent output analysis - all in the context of Monero. Contribute here.

GoodEnough is proposing to offer a 3 XMR bounty for whoever can improve the Forum Funding System by increasing visibility and integrating QR codes. However, there are already improvements in the works, so it will be interesting to see which changes come to fruition.

There are a number of other proposals to improve the Monero ecosystem that have been put up for discussion, and are likely to be moved to Funding Required this week. Feel free to check out the Ideas/Proposals page here (just be sure to ignore any spam posts), or the Funding Required page here.

Performance

While trivial, the Monero-Zcash flippening occurred on the weekend, with Monero finally increasing in price past Zcash.

Josh Olszewicz, a highly popular crypto Twitter personality going by the handle @CarpeNoctom, shared an opinion piece titled — Monero Price Analysis — Potential bullish trend transition. Olszewicz predicts that “a clean breach of the US$150 zone with significant volume would likely lead to the longer term mean reversion target of US$280”. Check it out here.

Total Monero in Circulation — 16,413,534 XMR

Monero Total Marketcap — $1,902,375,278 USD (last week: $1,695,427,223 USD)

Monero Coinmarketcap Ranking — 9 (last week: 10)

USD Price — $115 USD (last week: $106 USD)

BTC Price — 0.0179 BTC (last week: 0.0167 BTC)

LocalMonero.co Street Price — $138 USD

Average Transaction Fee — $0.23 USD (last week: $0.22 USD)

Hashrate — 589.7Mh/s (last week: 574.8Mh/s)

Monero Mining Pools Hashrate Distribution —

Memes

u/RoyalMayonnaise from r/Moonero

u/phloating_man from r/Moonero