When most of us were initially introduced to Bitcoin in the early days, we falsely believed that Bitcoin was anonymous and couldn’t be tracked. However, this misconception couldn’t be further from the truth as governments have actively been working with companies to analyze the blockchain.

Community Growth

I first discovered Monero in August of 2016 and in my humble opinion, still feels like one of the few remaining projects in this sphere that holds its grassroots approach. The more I dove into understanding Monero and the technology behind it — the more I realized how aligned it was with Satoshi Nakamoto’s vision with Bitcoin. From an idealogical standpoint, to me it seemed like Monero was what Satoshi originally envisioned Bitcoin to be.

Since August of 2016, I have seen a tremendous amount of growth in its community on Reddit along with its price from $2 to around its ATH at $147 back in August of 2017. With more than 30K subscribers in r/Monero and 7K on r/XMRTrader, it has been incredible watching the community continue to grow and attract more people. With more than 122 contributors to the Monero Project, it’s also worth noting the community effort by developers working to make the Monero community better with the ongoing developments of independent mobile wallets such as Monerujo. A list of projects that still need development funding can be seen here.

Fungibility

At the moment, Bitcoin suffers the issue of fungibility. Let’s say you receive 0.2 BTC from someone and you go to cash that out via Coinbase. However, it turns out that the 0.2 BTC you received came from stolen funds traced back to a ransomware attack, triggering a report on your Coinbase account due to being associated with a Bitcoin address with that given history. This is simply one of the hypothetical cases where your Bitcoin will not even be accepted due to its associated transactional history because of the nature of its transparent blockchain.

Monero has a different approach to its network as it has a sort of opaque blockchain. As opposed to Bitcoin, Monero hides the sender, receiver, the amount transacted, and balances of Monero addresses though the implementations of Ring Signatures, Ring Confidential Transactions, Stealth Addresses, and the recently merged Subaddresses — all working together to solve the issues of privacy. With Monero, privacy is not an option and is mandatory at the protocol level. This means that privacy is not just another extra feature that you can utilize such as Ethereum’s plan to adopt zk-SNARKs. While having an opt-in privacy feature has its use cases — it is inferior to a cryptocurrency that automatically enforces complete privacy. Fungibility cannot exist without complete privacy & anonymity.

Note: I am not here to make comparisons to other privacy centric cryptocurrencies such as Dash, Zcash, PIVX, Verge, or Nav Coin— they all have their pros/cons.

If you need further conviction on how important fungibility is — watch Andreas Antonopoulos’s video below

Growth Potential

If you take a step back and look at the current total cryptocurrency market capitalization of around $169 Billion, we have seen exponential growth in the last few years. With the current explosion in growth we have seen in 2017 alone shows how many new people are getting into this space. Just over a year ago in August of 2016, Monero was sitting above a $100 Million market cap and now rests at around $1.3 Billion.

Projects that focus on fundamental issues in the cryptocurrency space such as privacy, decentralized exchanges, and the need for new development tools that allow developers to innovate and build new technologies, will bring the digital age to the next level.

Privacy is a fundamental human right and is unfortunately being completely eradicated due to intrusive & oppressive governments from all over the world. You should not have to feel guilty of wanting more privacy in todays digital age. Those who are already invested in cryptocurrencies (and new), will eventually realize, if they haven’t already, the importance of privacy as the ecosystem continues to grow.

Privacy-focused projects are only a small blimp in the whole ecosystem, but in my opinion, the most important problem to overcome first. The common saying: “If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to worry about” is a completely flawed argument. That is similar to saying we should all get rid of the locks on our doors or get rid of our window blinds.