Take a look below for some highlights, and at the full post for all the awesome details (and charts!).
2/ One of the most important ways we can deduce what has been happening in Monero is to look at the (thankfully, sparse) blockchain data available publicly.
Let’s start diving into the data:
3/ Transactions:
Monero went from ~10,000TX per day to ~23,000TX per day 👀
There were 5,868,096 total TXs, for an average of 16,076TX per day for the year
Monero’s on-chain usage via private-by-default transactions that protect sender, receiver, and amounts, grew 208% YoY!
4/ Blockchain growth:
The Monero blockchain grew 13.34GB over the last year while transactions averaged 2.38KB in size.
Monero’s blockchain size grew 180% faster YoY while the average transaction size dropped 13.76% YoY (thanks, CLSAG).
Monero’s main subreddit, @monero gained 69,209 followers.
The @monero Twitter account went from 319,884 to 389,093 followers.
Monero’s Twitter follower count grew 21.63% YoY and grew 1,870% faster than the previous year!
9/ Major upgrades:
* CLSAG, a new ring signature mechanism that improves transaction efficiency:
* getmonero.org/resources/mone…
* Monero put out several updates to resolve and prevent network attacks from a prolonged and aggressive attack on the network:
* sethsimmons.me/posts/moneros-…
10/ Something missing?
If you see something missing from this post that was a major highlight of the year, please feel free to reach out via Twitter, Matrix, or email and I’ll work to get it added ASAP:
The best thing for the world would be that Bitcoin wakes up to the threat of a lack of fungibility and takes the steps necessary to protect fungibility and the privacy of its users.
Raising awareness is a huge step towards that, and WBD334 was an awesome beginning.
$207 in fees for a reasonably private spend, LN vulnerable to theft and fund locking attacks due to high fees, and the simplest of transactions costing $16 in fees.
Don’t embrace fee spikes caused by poor design and mining centralization.
Fees are only necessary at a very low level for spam prevention — the real reason Bitcoin needs fees to “pump forever” is because the narrative of a hard-cap has made network security 100% reliant on fees long-term.
If you’re currently struggling with Bitcoin’s usability there is an incredible tool waiting for you.
It’s called #Monero, and you can transact for $0.0248 in fees while protecting both your privacy and that of the recipient, with no extra hoops to jump through.
2/ The blog post essentially says that now they are open to integrating existing currencies once they reach characteristics only available to centralized currencies ATM, but will integrate MobileCoin in the meantime.
Requirements:
3/ It also intentionally mentions Zcash as a future possibility (with speed improvements) without mentioning Monero, who MobileCoin have to thank for their entire privacy protocol.
Not sure where all of this “Lightning Network will destroy all outside of #Bitcoin” is coming from lately, but important reminder that if LN succeeds, it can be implemented on #Monero:
But if all of those issues are able to be resolved (among others), Monero can implement LN on top of a private and scalable base-layer, which would make it *better and cheaper* than LN on Bitcoin.
Bitcoin has proven it cannot iterate, Monero has proven the opposite.
Last month Zcash had 181,568 transactions and only 5,365 of those were fully-shielded.
Less than 3% of Zcash users *actually use* the privacy of Zcash.
Anything less than z2z-only shows disdain for the few users of Zcash.
It’s also interesting to note that this new wallet SDK seems to imply that users will not be able to tell if their transaction will be fully shielded or not, and it depends on recipients wallet.
Which is… incredibly harmful for end-users if I’m understanding that properly.
2/ MobileCoin chose to build their protocol with the entire Monero protocol stack for privacy, while relying on Intel SGX for validation of transactions:
This reliance means that Intel becomes a trusted participant in the network and assumes no backdoor
3/ Unfortunately, even though MobileCoin based their entire transaction protocol around Monero (rewritten in Rust, which is great!) they blatantly ignored the source of the protocol: