A Beginner's Guide: How Monero Works

Bitcoin is the Facebook of cryptocurrencies.

It came first and since everyone know about it and uses it, it’s pretty clear it’s not going anywhere.

This is a symptom of the network effect.

Monero is like Snapchat.

It looked at the weak points of Facebook and decided to do it better.

The main problem being privacy.

Snapchat didn’t need to beat Facebook, it just needed to survive long enough to prove that it could be more useful in a specific area - to send short videos that are deleted after 24 hours.

Monero is a privacy coin, which means that the only other way it’s similar to Snap is that it makes it hard for people to find stuff after the fact.

Bitcoin is like the Titanic in that every time you make a transaction, there is a serious leakage of vital information.

And the only “fixes” that Bitcoin has proposed are similar to throwing a life vest under the Titanic to preserve it from Davey Jones’ Locker.

Monero instead is like a submarine that has a hermetic seal.

Users flock to Monero because they know that privacy is of the utmost importance, and is a feature that Monero will never compromise.

Monero sets intense privacy as a standard where other cryptocurrencies describe it as something you “should” do.

If you’re a non-tech savvy person, then it’s nice to know you can sleep at night knowing Monero’s “always-on” feature is keeping you protected.

Always-on is key because it means even the newbie users who aren’t up-to-date on the latest security and privacy techniques will strengthen the network by virtue of using Monero.

Another innovation Monero has pioneered is their mining.

Mining Monero is more attractive than ever before to the casual miner.

Imagine you needed a Ph.D. in computer science to even begin setting up a mining rig - well that’s what it’s like for many cryptocurrencies.

Monero makes it easy for the casual miner to whip out their laptop in a Starbucks or at home and (especially if they rent) turn an electrical connection into cold, hard... well - Monero.

That’s the key.

Mining is the process of dedicating some of your computer’s computational power to verifying Monero transactions.

Each time you verify a transaction, you get a small amount of Monero.

This has created a new model where anyone can take the laptop their aunt bought them at Christmas and start mining Monero!

That’s progress!

Not only that, once all these Starbuckians and really anyone with a decent laptop are earning Monero as part of a “side hustle” - then they can tell all their friends about.

Network effect in action again.

As you can see Monero has intelligently aligned incentives to make privacy profitable for everyone.

They’ve become the Facebook of privacy cryptocurrencies.

As long as Monero stays true to their founding principles of privacy, then just like Facebook we’ll all wake up and check our Facebook news feeds again because “that’s where Sally posts her cute baby picks” and “it's just too much trouble signing up for that new site anyway, isn’t it?”