Monero (XMR)

[pmbug]

Monero is the largest (#40 in CMC list by market cap with $3.7B) "privacy coin" in crypto right now:

...
Whereas each Bitcoin in circulation has its own serial number, meaning that cryptocurrency usage can be monitored, XMR is completely fungible. By default, details about senders, recipients and the amount of crypto being transferred are obscured — and Monero advocates says this offers an upper hand over rival privacy coins such as Zcash, which are “selectively transparent.”

Obfuscation is achieved through the use of ring signatures. Here, past transaction outputs are picked from the blockchain and act as decoys, meaning that outside observers can’t tell who signed it. If Ian was sending 200 XMR to Susan, this amount could also be split into random chunks to add a further level of difficulty.

To ensure that transactions cannot be linked to one another, stealth addresses are created for every single transaction that are only used once.
...

Monero price today, XMR to USD live price, marketcap and chart | CoinMarketCap

The live Monero price today is $203.01 USD with a 24-hour trading volume of $50,089,248.02 USD. We update our XMR to USD price in real-time.

coinmarketcap.com

Today, they are claiming an upgrade that makes the system quantum computing proof:

 

[pmbug]

Maybe the announcement isn't telling the whole story though. Found in the replies to that X post:

In my previous articles I’ve explained how Monero today is completely traceable via a process known as key image analysis. ...
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Monero’s developers are currently working on a new type of proof, Full Chain Membership Proofs, that will get rid of rings. Theoretically, this should at least mitigate key image analysis because there will no longer be decoys. If you have read my previous articles, however, you should know that the real vulnerability aren’t rings, but key images and TXOs.

By introducing FCMP++ and eliminating rings, it is believed that at least future transactions will be private (FCMP++ does not add privacy to past transactions). Contrary to RingCT which proves that the specific input, to which the key image tied to the ring of TXOs belongs, is indeed part of the ring, FCMP is a proof of inclusion. In other words, it proves that the key image included in a specific transaction does indeed belong to one of the existing TXOs. This kind of new proof however doesn’t come without trade-offs. In the next paragraph I will explain how FCMP++ not only doesn’t fix Monero, but actually breaks it completely by making it unusable and increasing further the reliance on public nodes. Public nodes compromise privacy because they collect offchain metadata about transactions.
...

More:

FCMP++: The Hopeless Last Ditch Attempt To Cover Up Monero's Obsoleteness That Breaks It Completely

In their developers' own words.

techleaks24.substack.com

I don't pretend to understand all the details, but caveat emptor - Monero might not be as private as it seems.

 

[pmbug]

Somewhat related tangent - it appears that the Zcash devs are tight with government?

 

[pmbug]

Monero becoming centralized with all the risks that entails:

Qubic just reached 51% share of Monero. This is a huge feat. They will be the first to manipulate a cryptocurrency with a 51% attack. They intend to orphan all blocks from every other miner, making themselves the only mining entity of Monero. The only way to mine Monero will be through them and they are 3X more profitable than mining Monero directly. They are giving half the profit to miners and selling the other half of the profit to buy QUBIC and send it to the burn wallet. If they mine 100% of the Monero blocks this gives them 432 Monero mined per day. This is $118,342.08 at the current Monero price. They keep 50% of that and give the rest to miners making their profit $59,171.04 of Qubic being burned every day. $414,197.28 burned a week and $1.656 million burned every month. This is insane.

This is history being made here. Qubic a less than 300 million dollar market cap will be the sole miner of a 6 billion dollar market cap coin.

 

[Voodoo]

Interesting, how can they possibly be 3x more profitable than anyone else? That goes against logic.

 

[pmbug]

3x more than solo mining. It's like putting your desktop PC against the total computing power of a cloud computing network. You won't win often enough to be profitable.

 

[Voodoo]

So in reality we need Math problems that get harder and harder but easier to solve in a decentralized manner.