Monero seems a bit like the new kid on the block in cryptospace. But the truth is that it’s around for over 3 years now. According to the project’s website Monero is a secure, private, and untraceable cryptocurrency that is open-source and accessible to all. If I explain it to people I most of the time compare it to Bitcoin but with completely invisible transactions. So where is this momentum coming from? I guess one of the reasons is the launch of a nice user interface (GUI) in 2016. Most people don’t use the terminal especially when there are some long addresses (like Monero’s public keys) involved. Another reason is the determination of a group of devs that never pre-mined any coins or took a huge ICO-amount of money to fill their pockets. They actually crowdfund money when they need some. So how’s the Monero momentum going?

9 fold improvement in about 6 months

This chart shows us that the number of daily transactions stayed around 500 for quite some time. But since a few months ago things really changed. It’s safe to say the number of average daily transaction has climbed to around 4500 a day. That’s a 9 fold improvement in half a year. That’s not even close to the 300.000 daily transactions Bitcoin has, but one gotta start somewhere isn’t it? And the growth is impressive for sure.

Monero’s advantages over Bitcoin

Transactions are private. You can share your public key with people without the fear of anyone looking at your funds and transactions in a blockscanner somewhere. Your funds and transactions are “dark” so to speak.

On IP-level Monero uses Kovri

Monero offers a dynamic blocksize

Monero is fast. With a new block every 2 minutes your transaction should be confirmed faster than with the 10 minute blocktime Bitcoin uses.

Monero is more ASIC-proof. This means that the average user can still mine some XMR using a GPU or even CPU. If there would ever be a “hard fork” planned by some group to take over Monero even the users (so not only the miners) can prevent this from happening. They could join pools on their preferred official chain to keep the difficulty high.

Bitcoin’s advantages over Monero

Bitcoin is still king of the castle. Bitcoin Cash, SegWit2X and Bitcoin Gold will probably all fail. Bitcoin Core is the main chain and will keep it’s position for now. With a 92 billion dollar marketcap they are almost 3 times bigger than the number 2 (Ethereum). This attracts more research, more attention and therefor more “free publicity”.

The Bitcoin “Lightning Networks” are developed at a strong pace. There will be a moment in the near future (months to a year?) that the first exchanges will support these systems and then it will even be possible to make micro transactions like a 100 Satoshi from one person to the other. It will probably be after that moment that some really fast mobile apps show up to attract the rest of the planet into Bitcoin as well. Our current world is to fast to have people waiting for “confirmations” after making a payment.

Bitcoin supports altcoins but it also has alcoin-support. You can’t trade most altcoins directly for fiat money which assures that BTC is used as the proxytoken.

Conclusion

Monero brings quite some new things to the table. Especially the “privacy” aspect is a big one. Using Monero feels a bit like end-to-end encryption on your favorite messaging app. Once used to it you don’t want to go back to “plain text” messages which can be spied on by some government or a big commercial company. Privacy is becoming really an issue these days and cryptocoins should protect our privacy as good as they can.

Bitcoin on the other hand already feels like digital gold. So many people are “hoddleing” their coins for the long term as they suspect that BTC might rise to 25K or even 50k dollar. Personally I wouldn’t be surprised if Monero reached 10% of Bitcoin’s marketcap and transactions. That’s 30K daily transactions with a marketcap of around 9 tot 10 billion dollar. I guess I just hoddle them both for the coming years.

Yo Banjo