Privacy Crypto Monero Celebrates Its 5th Birthday

"Monero is very committed to its decentralized, grassroots structure meaning we took no premine. We don't take a percentage of the block rewards. There was no" monero contributor Diego Salazar told CoinDesk.

From the start, monero aimed to obfuscate fund sources through what are called "Ring signatures." Through ring signatures, transactions are signed by one member of a group of participants, but with the goal of making it difficult to know who among the group actually contributed a particular digital signature.

Monero researchers realized that with a large enough number of users not obfuscating their transaction sources, the privacy of other users risked being compromised.

It effectively added an additional layer of privacy to ring signatures by obfuscating monero transaction amounts.

The activation of RingCT meant that outside of not being able to identify transactions to a source or an address, Monero now made it virtually impossible to find out the transaction amounts being transferred.

"Uh-oh, for a moment there it seemed that you were trying to peek into this monero addressIt really looks like you were, like, trying to check out this dude's balance. Well, monero says 'No'!". The idea for Ring CT originally came from a bitcoin proposal called "Confidential Transactions" proposed by Blockstream CTO Gregory Maxwell.

Ring CT in improving the privacy of the monero blockchain actually made a substantial trade-off to scalability.

Bulletproofs, according to Ehrenhofer, reduced transaction size and verification time on monero by about 80 percent.

From 13 kilobytes to 1.5, monero transaction size has dramatically decreased in size - though at present it still remains larger and more difficult to verify than bitcoin transactions.

"The hardest thing we have to scale in monero is not transaction size. It's the verification time. We can make monero ring [signatures] enormous todaybut the verification time would be almost impossible. Even thought it wouldn't take up that much room on your computer, it would take you forever to figure out what's what."