Bitcoin Is Basically Useless | Long Live Monero
According to Satoshi Nakamoto, who is Bitcoin’s original creator. Bitcoin was supposed to be a:
A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.
And while Bitcoin does live up to this, it’s still not lived up to Satoshi’s dream of the perfect digital currency. According to one of Satoshi’s old forum posts, posted back in 2010, he was looking to add more security features into Bitcoin.
When looking at the post above, there is one main pattern emerging. A lot of security features that he was looking to implement were never put into Bitcoin, but another cryptocurrency called Monero.
What is Monero?
According to Monero’s official website, getmonero.org, Monero is a:
Private, decentralised cryptocurrency that keeps your finances confidential and secure.
As stated above, one of the key differences between Bitcoin and Monero, is that Monero keeps your transactions fully private. This means that nobody can see how much you have, whether if your are receiving or sending coins, and the Monero nodes can’t even see what is being sent.
Why is that better?
If you look at cryptocurrencies as an investment, these features might seem less important to you. But, cryptocurrencies are not supposed to be investments, they are supposed to be currencies. And because it is a currency, the same general consensus should apply. In the same way that you wouldn’t tell everyone how much money you had, what you were spending your money on, etc, a good digital currency should not be designed in a way that makes it easy for ANYONE to look that information up. That is where Monero and other private currencies differ. If we lived in a society where Bitcoin is the main currency, everyone would be able to know how much money you make and what you spend your money on. Whereas if we lived in a society where Monero is the main currency, we would receive all of the benefits of having a borderless, decentralised currency, without having to worry about bad actors analysing our spending habits and tracking where you go throughout the day.
Conclusion
To conclude, Monero is one of the only cryptocurrencies that could actually be used as a currency that exists. If we want to build a future that doesn’t revolve around surveillance and meticulous tracking, it is crucial that we implement the best technology we can that will respect our privacy and change the world for a better.