FOR THE CRYPTOCURRENCY community, 2016 was a very good year. Bitcoin doubled in price. The far-out Bitcoin alternative Ethereum shot up by a factor of 10. But another, once-obscure cryptocurrency called Monero outpaced all of them, multiplying its value around 27-fold. That’s a windfall not just for cryptocurrency speculators, but for financial privacy advocates everywhere—including a few suddenly wealthy dark web drug dealers.
Over the last year, the value of the hyper-anonymous cryptocurrency Monero grew 2,760 percent, making it almost certainly the best-performing cryptocurrency of 2016.Today each Monero is worth around $12, compared with just 50 cents at the beginning of last year, and the collective value of all Monero has grown to close to $165 million.
Those features have made Monero a budding favorite within at least one community that has a pressing need for secrecy: the dark web black market. In August, the darknet market site Alphabay began offering its thousands of vendors the option to accept Monero as an alternative to Bitcoin. A quick browse through the market today shows dealers of everything from stolen credit cards to heroin to handguns accepting the stealthier cryptocoin.
Monero not only bakes anonymity features into the cryptocurrency itself, but implements a few features that Bitcoin still can’t offer. It uses a technique called “stealth addresses” to generate addresses for receiving Monero that are essentially encrypted; the recipient can retrieve the funds, but no one can link that stealth address to the owner. It employs a technique called “ring signatures,” which means every Monero spent is grouped with as many as a hundred other transactions, so that the spender’s address is mixed in with a group of strangers, and every subsequent movement of that money makes it exponentially more difficult to trace back to the source. And it uses something called “ring confidential transactions,” which hides the amount of every transaction.
Monero isn’t the first cryptocurrency designed to offer a financial privacy panacea: Dash, formerly known as Darkcoin, integrates the “coinjoin” technique that allows bitcoin users to mix their transactions with a few other spenders in what Todd calls a weaker form of anonymity than Monero offers. More recently, Zcash debuted with the strongest anonymity promises yet—it uses cryptographic tricks designed to make tracing a transaction not only unlikely, but mathematically impossible. Zcash has yet to be integrated into dark web markets, though, and still requires wielding the command line to use
More About:
- https://thecontrol.co/meet-the-best-performing-digital-currency-of-2016-monero-e6010768e54a#.ikq66ou5a
- https://www.wired.com/2015/08/crackdowns-havent-stopped-dark-webs-100m-yearly-drug-sales/
Image and Source: https://www.wired.com/2017/01/monero-drug-dealers-cryptocurrency-choice-fire/