Update about.md

This commit is contained in:
dnaleor 2015-10-09 17:05:12 +02:00
parent 7151c2e2fa
commit 33c1e93a6f

View file

@ -11,8 +11,16 @@ attribution: "<!-- Icon is based on work by Freepik (http://www.freepik.com) and
## About Monero
To most people, financial privacy is very important. Yet in recent years, we have seen a staggering amount of big corporations, banks and governments having their records compromised, at every time leaking information about their users, their practices, their balance sheets. The unfortunate but undeniable conclusion is that there is no safe place to conduct private transactions.
There was no safe place to conduct private transactions. Monero provides a place where your financial activities are private.
Monero is one of the leading cryptocurrencies in the post-Bitcoin world, and it is built on principles of privacy, decentralization, and scalability.
There was no safe place to conduct private transactions. Monero provides a place where your financial activities are private. Monero is one of the leading cryptocurrencies in the post-Bitcoin world, and it is built on principles of privacy, decentralization, and scalability.
From an economic point of view, a currency needs to be fungible. Fungibility is a property of money that makes all units "equal". Without fungibility, money flows can be tracked and tainted, making it very difficult to use the digital tokens as money.
Monero is a secure, private, untraceable currency. It is open-source and freely available to all. Its fairly launched on april 18th 2014, without premine or instamine.
The Monero technology already spiked the interest of several established people in the bitcoin development world and cryptography community.
The development is completely based on donations, community driven and with a strong focus on decentralization and scalability.
With Monero, you are your own bank. Only you control and are responsible for your funds, and your accounts and transactions are kept private from prying eyes.
Read on to find out how Monero is helping to solve real problems and limitations of existing cryptocurrencies, and building a more private blockchain.
## PRIVACY
@ -36,3 +44,12 @@ This very characteristic, and more so once it is coupled with @Smart Mining, has
Further, as transactions are private by default on the Monero blockchain, transaction censorship is inherently void.
The Monero development landscape on the other hand, is very much the opposite of a closed or restricted access model. The core branch currently enjoys more than 30 contributors, pushing 1000+ commits over the past year {there has to be better stats to put in there}. The project is happy to take on new contributors and any future plans, long term direction and priorities are openly discussed with the community. Indeed, the policy that governs contribution to the Monero codebase is exhaustingly inclusive - all contributions are accepted into the development branch, where new code can be scrutinized and tested by the entire community.
Most contributors in the Monero development landscape are quite passionate for an open source philosophy, and in this rich creative environment, new projects have sparked to life. @OpenAlias is one notable example, which has seen adoption by (amongst others) a major Bitcoin related software product.
## SCALEABILITY
One of the problems with cryptocurrencies is scaleability. Most cryptocurrencies are derived from the Bitcoin codebase and thus have a "block size limit". This limit has become a big issue in the bitcoin community and lead to fierce discussions.
Monero doesn't suffer from this block size debate, because it has a dynamic block size limit. This limit is automatically recalculated regularly based on a look-back window. A penalty system prevents out of control growth of the block size.
Another issue with most cryptocurrencies is the development of a fee market. This issue is somewhat linked to the block size debate: the narrative is that when you limit the block size, a fee market will eventually develop. But this claim is highly debatable. When the transaction fees are supposed to be the main incentive for miners to secure the blockchain, it is possible the current consensus model will not be sustainable. At the moment, miners still act as they are expected: they mine on the longest chain. When they don't do that, they risk loosing the block reward. But when that block reward becomes small compared to the mining fees, it's possible miners will have an incentive to not mine on the longest chain and start a fork trying to "steal" high transaction fees which were included in the latest blocks. Therefore, monero implements a "permanent block reward". The block reward will never drop below 0.3 XMR, making monero a disinflationary currency: the inflation will be roughly 1% in 2022 and go down forever, but the nominal inflation will stay at 0.3 XMR per minute. This means that there will always be an incentive for miners to mine monero and thus keeping the blockchain secure, with or without a fee market.
## FUNGIBILITY
Fungibility is an important property of any functioning currency. You can try to hide your bitcoins as much as you want, if you tried to mix your non-fungible coins using a mixer, coinjoin or another type of "anonymity enhancing feature", these transactions can still be flagged as "possible suspicious activity on the blockchain", even if you are anonymous. Using non-fungible tokens as currency can eventually lead to blacklisting/whitelisting either by governments or through self-censorship. Some examples of these measures could be payment procssors or exchanges refusing your tainted coins as a payment or deposit or miners refusing to include your suspicious transaction.
Monero will enforce a minimum mixing across the network, so all outputs are mixed by default. Transaction outputs have "plausible deniability" about their state: you can't tell if they are spent or unspent in a certain transaction or not. This leads to an opaque (non-transparent) blockchain making all coins "equal". Fungibility is built into Monero, making it real "digital cash".