Monero Price Skyrockets, due to Fungibility?

Most digital currencies have seen a great spike in their prices this year, with the likes of Ethereum experiencing over 4000% rise in their prices. Monero has however been one of the more stable currencies in the market. This all changed in 2016 when it became adopted by Alphabay as a legitimate currency for transactions on their site. Alphabay is a major darknet market. The price of Monero started rising rapidly after that due to widespread use. The rise has continued consistently, with the price on Wednesday hitting an all-time high at $169. This has drawn even more attention to Monero from investors and cryptocurrency enthusiasts alike.

A brief history of Monero
Monero (XMR) was developed in 2013 when a developer under the pseudonym, Nicolas van Saberhagen launched the protocol that Monero is based upon which is known as Cryptonote. It was originally named BitMonero but its community decided to shorten the name to Monero.

Monero is the eighth most valuable digital currency with a market capitalization of $2.4 billion. It’s one of the most trusted and secure digital currencies and a lucrative investment venture. Some of the reasons behind its success are:

1. Fungibility
Fungibility is the ability of an individual currency to be substituted for another without any trace or loss of value. This, in essence, means that all coins have equal value. This is different in other digital currencies like Bitcoin where transactions are recorded on a blockchain for every individual coin. This makes it possible for the community to know and avoid coins that have been involved in malicious or illegal activities.
Monero has no such issue as the transactions are untraceable. This has made Monero the go-to currency for anyone desiring privacy and anonymity on their transactions. As a result, Alphabay which is a leading dark web market endorsed Monero for use by its community. A few months later, another dark web player, Oasis adapted Monero raising its profile even further.

2. Privacy
This is Monero’s most lucrative advantage over other currencies. Monero is the most private digital currency. It achieves this by using ring signatures which combine a user’s keys with random public keys making it impossible to link a transaction to a user. It released an update to this technology known as RingCT which also hides the amount of transaction. It also uses stealth addresses which are randomly generated on behalf of the recipient making him untraceable.
These privacy features are unique to Monero. This makes it the currency of the future as privacy has become a key consideration for users with government agencies snooping on people all day long. This will drive its demand high as more people begin to use it and its price will soar.

3. Better mining process
The efficiency of a currency’s mining process is crucial. Unlike most cryptocurrencies which require the installation of special chips known as ASICs on computers, Monero can be mined on an ordinary computer. This is a significant win for Monero as most of these ASICs are very expensive and use up a lot of power to run. This deters the masses from mining.
Monero, however, doesn’t require any special program. This creates a bigger mass of people interested in mining Monero which will see its popularity increase steadily. This will create a bigger community of users and ultimately a huge demand for Monero which will force the price to shoot up.

4. Expanding block size
The time it takes to produce a block in Monero is averagely two minutes, which is much faster than some currencies such as Bitcoin which takes ten minutes. What makes it stand out, however, is its adaptive expanding ability. It will be able to expand its block sizes automatically to accommodate higher transaction volumes in the future.

Monero is uniquely positioned to offer people the privacy they need online. More people will use it to send secure payments online which will make it highly sought after in the near future. With its competitors lagging behind in privacy and security features, Monero is poised to dominate that space for long and its price will soar high as the demand shoots through the roof.


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