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One of the most popular cryptocurrencies for the protection of privacy, monero, celebrated its five years of existence this week.
Launched in April 2014, monero has been fully co-financed since its creation. And in keeping with this decentralized structure and at the base, monero is almost entirely developed by volunteers.
"Monero is very attached to its decentralized structure and to the base, which means that we have not taken any premise. We do not take a percentage of the reward blocks. There was no [initial coin offering,]"Diego Salazar, Monero's contributor, told CoinDesk. Salazar estimated that "according to the time and the availability of the people", 100 to 200 volunteers worked on the project monero.
Moreover, the project itself, according to Salazar, is not just about creating a blockchain protocol. It is about redefining and strengthening a global movement focused on digital privacy.
Salazar told CoinDesk:
"We are not just trying to make global Internet money. We try to teach people the importance of things like protecting privacy … It's a very powerful tool and I think it's a very necessary tool nowadays. "
To this end, Italian developer and contributor Monero, "SerHack", has published a free PDF version of the book "Mastering Monero" in commemoration of the fifth anniversary of the play. Originally published at the end of 2018, the book was fully funded by the monero community and taught unencrypted users the importance of "private and censorship-resistant transactions". The online community of the project also commemorated this anniversary with events and, in one case, a celebration puzzle.
Although monero is not the only blockchain to boast of private chain transactions, it is the largest of its kind in terms of market capitalization, with a valuation of one billion dollars , according to the data of CoinMarketCap.
During this five-year period, the project undertook a series of major improvements to improve it, including enhancing the fungibility and confidentiality of transactions.
Minimum size
"It is extremely important for monero's fungibility not to know which source of funding you receive," contributor Justin Ehrenhofer told CoinDesk. "In this way, you will not know if you accept funds that have been used for other purposes."
From the beginning, monero's objective was to hide the sources of funds through so-called "ring signatures". With ring signatures, transactions are signed by a member of a group of participants (each with a private key), but with the goal of making it more efficient. difficult to know who among the group really contributed to a particular digital signature.
As Ehrenhofer explained:
"With monero, for each entry you spend, you extract other entries from the blockchain, random entries from other people … and you give the impression that all those entries are spent. This gives the mathematical look of any of these things. [inputs] could possibly have been the [transaction] signatories. "
However, at launch, retrieving transaction entries from other random users called ring signatures was not required. Cryptocurrency exchanges, public mining pools, and other people who do not care about the confidentiality of transactions could opt for a "ring size" of zero.
Monero researchers understood that with the number of users sufficient not to conceal their transaction sources, the privacy of other users might be compromised.
"If I sent a transaction that revealed the real product I had spent, that is, if everyone seemed to have spent my product, everyone would know it was a good idea. false expense because in my transaction I obviously spent, "Ehrenhofer told CoinDesk.
This is why, on March 22, 2016, monero ran a rigorous fork to prevent all users from obscuring the sources of their transactions with a minimum size of three. This meant that users would need to extract at least three other random transaction entries from the network when they were doing their own transaction and thus participate collectively in strengthening the privacy levels of the network. set of the blockchain.
"One of the big challenges that monero had to overcome in the beginning was the improvement of the existing infrastructure," Ehrenhofer said. "It basically meant forcing people to use best practices and forcing those ring signatures to actually be used."
RingCT
The second most influential change in monero's story is also about ring signatures.
Called Ring "Confidential Transactions" (CT), this upgrade was performed on January 5, 2017 using a rigid fork. It has effectively added an extra layer of privacy to cancel signatures by hiding monero transaction amounts.
The activation of RingCT meant that in addition to the impossibility of identifying transactions with a source or address, Monero made it virtually impossible to find transferred transaction amounts.
"The exits were already disconnected from addresses," explained Ehrenhofer. "[RingCT] We went a little further and said that when these products are processed, we do not know what their value is. "
In fact, when looking for a monero address on a string explorer, the warning message that users receive on one of the explorer sites reads as follows:
"Uh-oh, for a moment, it seemed to me that you were trying to take a look at this monero address … it really looks like you were trying, like, to try to check the balance of this guy Well, monero says "no"!
Ring CT's idea originated with a bitcoin proposal titled "Confidential Transactions" proposed by Blockstream's Chief Technology Officer, Gregory Maxwell. The developers of monero then reaffirmed their willingness to work with ring signatures.
However, by improving the confidentiality of the mono channel chain, Ring CT has really compromised scalability.
"The transactions before Ring CT were about three kilobytes. They were also about 10 times bigger than a transaction in bitcoins. Ring CT brought these numbers to around 13 kilobytes, so we multiplied by four or five times more, "Ehrenhofer told CoinDesk.
Bulletproofs
Until now, "bulletproof" – without directly improving confidentiality – is still considered a major improvement of the network.
According to Ehrenhofer, Bulletproofs has reduced by about 80% the volume of transactions and verification time on monero. From 13 kilobytes to 1.5, the size of monero transactions has decreased considerably – although now it remains larger and more difficult to verify than bitcoin transactions.
The technology, released in late 2017, was celebrated as a breakthrough in privacy protection. It was originally created for use on bitcoin by Jonathan Bootle of the University College of London and Benedikt Bunz of Stanford. In the end, monero became the first major cryptocurrency to use technology via a hard range on October 18, 2018.
Nevertheless, Ehrenhofer notes that the verification times on the network remain "the biggest limitation of Monero for the moment".
Ehrenhofer told CoinDesk:
"The most difficult thing to do in monero is not the size of the transaction. This is the moment of verification. We can do monero ring [signatures] huge today … but the verification time would be almost impossible. Even if it does not take much space on your computer, it would take forever to determine what.
As such, Ehrenhofer hopes that the next improvements to the protocol will increase the size of ring signatures to accommodate groups of more than 1,000 anonymous people at a given time.
From Salazar's point of view, another upcoming improvement for monero in the coming months is an upgrade of the UI and Network Experience (UI / UX).
"Many things have been redesigned from scratch, such as individual pages, the transaction history page, the send and receive page," he told CoinDesk.
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