About Monero (XMR)

Monero (XMR) is an open-source cryptocurrency created in April 2014 that focuses on privacy, decentralization, and scalability[citation needed] that runs on Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, and FreeBSD.[not in citation given] Monero uses a public ledger to record transactions while new units are created through a process called mining. Monero aims to improve on existing cryptocurrency design by obscuring sender, recipient and amount of every transaction made as well as making the mining process more egalitarian. The focus on privacy has attracted illicit use by people interested in evading law enforcement. The egalitarian mining process made it viable to distribute the mining effort opening new funding avenues for both legitimate online publishers and malicious hackers who covertly embed the mining code into websites and apps. Unlike many cryptocurrencies that are derivatives of Bitcoin, Monero is CryptoNight (64-bit CPU-only) PoW hash algorithm based on CryptoNote protocol and possesses significant algorithmic differences relating to blockchain obfuscation.

By providing a high level of privacy, Monero is fungible, meaning that every unit of the currency can be substituted by another unit. These units are indistinguishable from one another. This makes Monero different from public-ledger cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, where addresses previously associated with undesired activity can be blacklisted and refused by network members. In particular, the ring signatures mix spender's address with a group of others, making it exponentially more difficult to establish a link between each subsequent transaction. Also the "stealth addresses" generated for each transaction make it impossible to discover actual destination by anyone else but the address owner. Finally, the "ring confidential transactions" mechanism hides the transferred amount. Monero is designed to be resistant to application-specific integrated circuit mining which are commonly used to mine other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. It can be mined somewhat efficiently on consumer grade hardware such as x86, x86-64, ARM or even consumer grade GPUs.

Source: Wikipedia