Monero is a decentralized and secure cryptocurrency, in which the sender, the receiver, and the amount of Monero sent is impossible to view by anyone else. The history of Monero leads us back before the fork when is was a project know as Bytecoin. Bytecoin was a good effort at an anonymous cryptocurrency, but there were a few issues with its initial distribution; it turned out that 77% of the coins that would ever be mined were already in existence. In 2014 a number of developers forked the Bytecoin blockchain and the new currency would be known as Bitmonero, which was eventually shortened to simply Monero.
The main thing that gives Monero is its privacy features. No one can link you to a Monero transaction, no one can even see how much Monero is on your balance. This makes it a favourite currency for those who are concerned with privacy for a variety of reasons. With that said, Monero can be considered as one of the most privacy-focused cryptocurrency on earth.
Algorithm
Unlike many cryptocurrencies that are derivatives of Bitcoin, Monero is based on the CryptoNight Proof-of-Work algorithm, that origins from the CryptoNote protocol. Monero is designed to be ASIC-resistant, that is commonly used to mine other cryptocurrencies, as it surpasses GPUs efficiently in many times, and therefore it may potentially centralize the network to perform a 51% attack. The CryptoNight algorithm itself is vulnerable to attacks by ASIC mining and due to that, Monero developers keep forking its coin every 6 months to upgrade the protocol with the latest features to maintain ASIC-resistance. And its current algorithm is RandomX.
Mining
Since there's no ASICs in the network, you can still mine Monero with a CPU. However, it obviously wouldn't be as profitable as with a GPU. Even though you can mine Monero with a GPU of 2GB memory, it most likely wouldn't worth the effort, therefore it's recommended that your GPU has least 3GB of memory in order to make some profit. For more details, see our quick step-by-step guide on how to mine Monero on Nanopool.
Useful Links
- Monero official website - getmonero.org
- Monero on GitHub - github.com/monero-project
- Monero blockchain explorer - moneroblocks.info
- Another blockchain explorer - chainradar.com
- GPU hashrate list - miningchamp.com