The Monero Standard #1: 30 January 2022 - 20 February 2022

It's with great pleasure to introduce you the LocalMonero's Monero Standard, a weekly newsletter focusing on Monero and its latest news about price and blockchain, development, community and all things Monero in general. I'm Kivojo, a freelancer who first got into cryptocurrencies in 2016 and mainly focused on localization of free (as in freedom) software projects.

Table of Contents

• Recent News
• Price and Blockchain Statistics
• Fun Facts
• Merchants
• Notable Projects
• CCS Ideas and Proposals
• Meme of the Week
• Study Time
• Donation and Contact

Recent News

• Cake Technologies released Monero.com application in their GitHub repository. Monero.com is a Monero-only wallet, planned by Cake Technologies after community backlashes on Zcash implementation in their main wallet sofware (Cake Wallet) - Currently at v1.0.4. Also brought back the fixed exchange rate ability to their main app at v4.3.5. Check their changelogs here.

• LocalMonero Knowledge Base published three articles about "Usage of Hard-forks For Upgrading Monero's Network", "Remote Nodes Impact on Monero's Privacy" and "View Tags". View Tags is a new feature that can be used to reduce the wallet sync times by more than 40%. Its implementation is expected to go live on the next hard fork (v15).

• CoinCards.com, a gift card selling company which accepts Monero as payment method, published its January crypto usage statistics which shows that Monero took over Litecoin in the 3rd place and it's pursuing Ethereum at a fast pace. Also Monero is the second most-used coin in ShopinBit.com, a cryptocurrency store based in Europe, after Bitcoin.

• Monero's blockchain surpassed 20 million total transactions (source) and its January transaction ratio to Bitcoin was 9.47% with a peak at 17.8% back in July 25, 2021.

• Bitcoinist celebrates "Data Privacy Day" by publishing an article mentioning Monero and trying to educate people about importance of privacy and best practices of hodling Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies.

• Haveno, a p2p DEX based on bisq, submitted the second largest CCS proposal ever (1543 XMR), then withdraw it after community objections, concerning "improving Haveno in a more decentralized manner" and later published a post on their blog clarifying future plans for Haveno for reaching that goal.

• Reddit user /u/PenumbraDEX announced in a reddit post that a Haveno fork called Penumbra with great improvements to Haveno's security (as it will not need an application to be installed - Just Tor Browser) and decentralization (as it doesn't restrict people for running a node) is on its way and its proof of concept will be released in near future.

• Few days ago (Feb 13-16) Monero blockchain encountered a dangerous situation which was about MineXMR.com pool gained the majority of the network's hashpower and was able to attack the network by double-spending the funds.

  xnbya, a MineXMR admin, on reddit stated that:

  "We understand that people are concerned with the large hashrate that minexmr currently has. We have announced an increase to the pool fees and continue to monitor the situation."

  Even sech1, a Monero contributer, rented about 4MH/s on NiceHash.com and pointed the hashrate to a minor mining pool to help settling the situation. Monero community overcome this and minexmr.com currently controls ~38% of the hashrate. No report of double-spending attacks have been reported.

• GiveSendGo, a fundraising service, after denying Ontario's court order to freeze Freedom Convoy's funds and crowdfunding campaign, has been hacked and hackers leaked a CSV file containing all donors personal information and email addresses and posted a video showing a so called "Hall of Shame" of people who donated the most to the campaign. OPP and RCMP stated that

  The Ontario Provincial Police and Royal Canadian Mounted Police are currently investigating cryptocurrency donations being collected in relation to illegal acts falling under the scope of the Emergency Measures Act.

  And asked for any information about transactions to cryptocurrency addresses posted by Freedom Convoy for donation.

  Darknetlive.com published an article about Canadian government plans to crack down on crypto.

  /u/CryptoniteClub posted an ironic video titled "Monero says NO!" which demonstrates that no transaction in Monero Blockchain is observable to prying eyes.

• Next Hard-fork (v15) to the protocol (Fluorine Fermi) has been discussed and planned by developers and the community at the end of January, considering these updates to the protocol

  • Ring Size increase from 11 to 16
  • Bulletproofs+
  • View Tags
  • Fee changes
  • And few potential features...

  You can read this summary about the hard-fork by /u/carrington1859 here.

• Harsh Strongman (LifeMathMoney), Indian crypto enthusiast who was a MoneroTalk guest, added Monero module to Learn Crypto Course, a free course for learning cryptocurrenies.

• CryptoMorpheus, moneroj.net maintainer, in a tweet noted that the annual inflation of Monero, due to rewards paid to miners, crossed below the 1%.

• Kevin Wad, a blockchain developer and Monero enthusiast, posted an informative video on its YouTube channel titled "Bretton Woods 2.0 | How Monero could replace the dollar as international currency".

• U.S. DOJ selected the first director of the newly-created National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team (NCET), an article by Darknetlive.

• P2Pool v1.7 is out.

• Cryptobie YouTube channel released a video called "What is Monero & How it actually works?" trying to explain privacy features of Monero to public audiences in an animated form.

• Monerujo SideKick, an Android app which is a functional replacement for dedicated Monero hardware wallets, has been fully funded. SideKick tries to fix two major problems with dedicated hardware wallets:

  1. Privacy trade offs when buying a hardware wallets (so governments and blockchain surveillance firms cannot associate a person with holding a huge amount of cryptocurrency)
  2. High costs of hardware wallets.

  With SideKick, you can use an old and spare android phone that anyone probably has one or two lying around as an airgaped wallet that securely stores your private keys and can be used to sign transactions easily.

  

  Their PocketChange feature, one-click creation of extra outputs allowing frequent spending, is also a work-in-progress.

Price and Blockchain Statistics

Price Chart

Hashrate Distribution

Inflation Between Competitors

Fun Facts

Monero's Supply is unlimited (WRONG!)

This issue's fun fact is going to solve a rooted myth in Monero tokenomics which is "Hence Monero's supply is unlimited, it's an inflationary coin and will lose its value in the future". That's not correct, the genius design of Tail Emission that CryptoNote protocol frist introduced back in 2012 ensures that the inflation in CryptoNote-based coins asymptotically will reach zero in a way that it still incentives miners to secure the network by paying them in a fixed size (in contrary to Bitcoin's halving that raised serious concerns when community saw hashrate drops every time a halving happened). There's a website called monero.supply which clarifies these claims by graphs, calculated accurately based on Monero-Bitcoin issuance. Let's break this down by an example: Assume that Monero after tail emission kick in, is going to only-and-only have 20 XMR per year being mined, and the total supply is 100 XMR. In that sense after a year, the inflation to it is calculated by dividing the newly-issued coins to the old supply, that is: 20/100 is 20% inflation. The next year, the calculation transforms to this: 20/120 which is 16% inflation. And it continues until it will reach zero. Currently the Monero's inflation is barely 1% (lower than Bitcoin until 2024) and if we count the lost coins (coins sent to wrong addresses and people losing access to their seeds) a minimal rate of 2-3% of the total supply, Monero's tokenomics is actually deflationary!

Merchants (which accept Monero)

BasedTravel.com

BasedTravel.com is a competitor to Airbnb, currently at pre-register phase, which states its mission on their website:

The Alt Travel Platform. We seek to disrupt the travel industry and platforms such as Airbnb. We seek to create a travel platform for the parallel economy.

They created a poll on their Telegram channel, asking for "Which crypto do people want to be supported the most?" and the results currently are 73% Monero with 1445 votes.

Notable Projects

How to Help Monero

MoneroOutreach.org has a very detailed article for newcomers and how they can help and contribute to the idea and philosophy of Monero, check them out.

COMIT Needs a Maintainer for their Atomic Swap Project

COMIT team no longer maintains XMR-BTC atomic swap project and asking for Rust developers to contribute to the project.

UnstoppableSwap developers are looking for community testers for their UnstoppableSwap-GUI

First alpha version of UnstoppableSwap-GUI has been released and maintainers are looking for community testers, /u/unstoppableswap stated that in a reddit post.

Other

Monero Art Fund is a community effort of artists and designers who try to provide the community with the latest gorgeous designs of MoneroChan, the anime girl becoming the mascot of Monero. If you enjoyed the art, support them by donation to help them continue. We at this newsletter had the pleasure to use their arts because we're too lazy. :)

CCS Ideas and Proposals + Monerujo Funding

CCS Ideas

mj part time coding 2022-03

Monero Afghanistan Expansion Strategy

CCS Funding Required

j-berman full-time development (3 months)

Monerujo Funding Required

none

Meme of the Week

Study Time

Eric Hughes was one of the founders of the Cypherpunk movement which he highlighted its philosopy and stand points in his A Cypherpunk's Manifesto. The first paragraph of his essay notes a critical point about why privacy (anonymity) matters and its difference to secrecy:

Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn't want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn't want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.

And also later in that same essay:

Therefore, privacy in an open society requires anonymous transaction systems. Until now, cash has been the primary such system. An anonymous transaction system is not a secret transaction system. An anonymous system empowers individuals to reveal their identity when desired and only when desired; this is the essence of privacy.

Definitely a worth reading material.

Donation and Contact

This newsletter is one of my dedicated jobs and LocalMonero pays me for writing it, but if you've found it informative and helpful, here is my wallet address:

89gUNDWHpNBD59eqJHcyg9RRfZ9xPBqdXKgVhLiYonhtjFMtmKJDumCRD3EWvmXeogKs5Jh4jfnUhdyif2U3tbT3Liu7F3M

Thank you!

Contact Me

Found anything worth noting? Want to send something to be included in the next issue? Want to chat about something?

You can contact me by XMPP and Email. Contacting by Email is highly discouraged.