What Monero is And Why You Should Care

Monero (XMR) took the cryptocurrency world by storm recently when it surpassed Ethereum in price. Monero isn't based on the Bitcoin code like most altcoins are. Monero was built from the ground up to accomplish what no other altcoin has been able to do; not be all about privacy, transparency, or ease of use, but to be all three.

Monero was started in 2014. Eventually the community decided that what the creator was doing wasn't right, so they made a fork and won the battle for the most support. Since then it has been maintained by a few, mainly anonymous, developers. But that doesn't matter that much, what makes monero so cool is how it works.

When you do a transaction within Monero, all of your money reroutes it's self through multiple different people's wallets in different amounts automatically so that it's impossible to tell who got what money, yet your target always receives the full amount. This makes Monero much more private, and secure from prying eyes (like governments) from seeing who sent what where. Normally this would have implications though. It's hard to track who you've sent money to, and it's hard for the receiver to see who sent what making it very difficult for businesses or governments to use or regulate anything.

But Monero solves this with something called a view key. Every wallet has a view key that allows you to see the details of the transaction, completely de-anonymising it. But you get to control who sees your transactions. You get to decide whether to be completely anonymous, or if you want people to see your transactions. Anyone with your view key can see all of your transactions. This is extremely helpful especially for business like non profits that need money transparency. And yet, at the same time you can be completely anonymous by not giving your view key to anyone if you wish.

Monero let's the people take control of their own privacy.

You can find out more about Monero here (http://getmonero.org/).