Currently Monero is at 9th place in CoinMarketCap, with a market cap of $5.6 Billion. Monero was launched on April 18th 2014 as a fork of Bytecoin. Bytecoin was the first crypto using CryptoNote algo (currently being used in Monero). Due to people, discovering all sorts of shady things on Bytecoin, the community decided to fork (split) a new coin with Zero coin in circulation!
There are several great reasons to take Monero as a legit crypto:
Monero started with no pre-mine or "instamine" (unlike Dash which was pre-mined by about 2Million coins in just the first few hours after its launch by founders).....Monero also does not tax its mining (unlike ZCash, its rival, that taxes 20% of its mining fees for the developer teams & private investors for the first 4 years)
Bitcoin started with the concept of "One-CPU One-Vote". However, due to excessive use of Application Specific Integrated-Circuit (ASIC) by mining farms this rule is no longer hold. Monero tries to solve this issue to close the gap between majority CPU miners vs. minority GPU/ASIC miners by using Memory-bound price function, in addition to CPU-intensive pricing function SHA256.
Monero has user-configurable, self-adjusting parameters such as block size limit. Block size can dynamically change, however to an extend that it will not pass 2 * M100 (M100 is median block size of previous 100 blocks). There's also penalty function in the event that miner surpasses this limit.
Monero is the only crypto that is truly fungible(i.e. any XMR is completely indistinguishable from another XMR). It uses RingCT & One-time Public key to equalize all the coins.
Monero also has "tail emission" such that after it reaches the main emission of ~18.123M coins it starts to emit 0.6 XMR per block to keep miners incentivized, this also helps for lost-forever coins!
To preserve the unlinkable payments feature, Monero uses Diffie-Hellman exchanges which gives rise to tracking key. This key can be used by third party without revealing sender/receiver & it's useful when a miner lacks bandwidth or computation power.
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