Why Monero (XMR) is going to be the next big thing in cryptocurrencies

In the following lines, I will try to explain in several points why I believe that Monero (XMR) will be the next big thing in cryptocurrencies. This article reflects only my personal opinions and should not be taken as a universal truth :)

1) Privacy and Anonymity

Most cryptocurrencies are quasi-anonymous, which means that a wallet address is not directly linked to a concrete person (you), but all balances and transactions are publicly visible. This quasi-anonymity, however, disappears completely the moment you pay for something with such cryptocurrency, while being physically present. For example, if you pay for your pizza in a restaurant, the cashier now knows that the bitcoin (or other-coin) address you payed from belongs to you. He/she now know your balance and can track all your transactions. And that's probably something you don't want.

There are cryptocurrencies which offer the option to make transactions anonymously. Dash (DSH), for example, has an option to send coins via so-called PrivateSend, which is basically an integrated coin mixer. Such privacy-by-option approached might not be very viable option thugh, since just the fact you used it makes your transaction suspicious.

Monero, on the other hand, makes your transactions and balances private by default. Thanks to ring signatures, which is the technology Monero's privacy is based on, the sender, receiver and the amount being sent are undetectable and the transactions untraceable by default, with very strong cryptographic security. Actually, to be more precise, Monero uses three different privacy technologies: ring signatures, ring confidential transactions (RingCT), and stealth addresses.

The anonymity capabilities of Monero are self-demonstrated by the following statement of the officials after the AlphaBay shutdown: "In total, from CAZES' wallets and computer agents took control of approximately $8,800,000 in Bitcoin, Ethereum, Monero and Zcash, broken down as follows: 1,605.0503851 Bitcoin, 8,309.271639 Ethereum, 3,691.98 Zcash, and an unknown amount of Monero." I believe this statement is self-explanatory and shows how secure and anonymous Monero is. Moreover, in development is also another anonymity-related project called Kovri, which will allow to hide all Monero traffic through I2P. In my opinion, Monero is undoubtedly the leading cryptocurrency in terms of privacy and anonymity.

2) Fungibility

Fungibility is a real concern of users of Bitcoin and other "transparent" cryptocurrencies. Imagine someone pays you with bitcoins which were linked to some illegal activity. With the bitcoin ledger being public, everybody knows that your bitcoins originate from this illegal activity and may refuse to accept them, effectively reducing their value. Since all Monero transactions are untraceable, you can be sure that there are never going to be "good coins" and "bad coins". You Monero will thus always have the same value as any other Monero.

3) Scalability

Unlike Bitcoin, Monero does not have any maximum block size hardcoded, which means there will be no scalability problem as we see now in Bitcoin. Although there is a block size limit based on the median size of previous 100 blocks, it will adapt over time automatically as necessary.

4) True decentralization

Thanks to the ASIC-resistant CryptoNight proof of work algorithm, Monero is still being mined on GPUs or even CPUs. It's mining is thus well distributed over large number of miners and the network will never be controlled by a small number of huge ASIC farms.

5) Development

Monero currently has seven core developers working on the project. Although most of them prefer to remain anonymous, thier professional capabilities are self-proven by their previous work. There are, however, many more developers contributing. According to the getmonero.org website, the Monero project has had well over 200 contributors over the life of the project.

6) Community

Monero is well established cryptocurrency, released in 2014. Sine then, it managed to build large community supporting the project and even larger number of users. Over the time, Monero has proven it is not just a random easy-money pump & dump coin. On the contrary, its systematic development and continuous community support made it one of the most recognized cryptocurrencies with market cap of over $745 mil. at the time of writing.

7) Price chart analysis

On top of the above mentioned fundamentals, let's take a look at Monero's 1D (1-day per candle) price chart. There are two patterns immediately visible; the uptrend support line, which if not breached should support long-term rising trend, and a clear spike pattern, repeating itself when the support line is reached. If the pattern persists also in the future, we should probably see a spike in price very soon. This time, however, the trading volume seems to be much higher. I thus wouldn't be surprised if the spike was much bigger that in the previous cases.

I hope you found this article useful and interesting. If so, please upvote and resteem to let more people know about it. Thank you :)

DISCLAIMER: This information is not to be used as an investment or trading advice. I am not a financial adviser nor trading expert. It is solely your own responsibility to do whatever you do with your money. I am also not a cryptocurrency expert. The information above is based on my own survey and my (limited) knowledge about cryptocurrencies.

Image credit: Monero logo from getmonero.org, other images are from Wikimedia Commons and were combined and adapted by me. The price chart is from Bittrex exchange.