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<h3>**Now that I have a nice portfolio of cryptocurrencies, I feel the only thing I was still lacking is a good privacy coin. I've chosen Monero (XMR) as my privacy coin of choice. Let me tell you why!**</h3>
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<h3>PRIVACY VERSUS PRIVACY</h3> Monero is well known, and is actually the top choice as a privacy coin together with Dash (they are more or less the same market cap of about $6-7 billion USD currently). I chose Monero over Dash, and others, for a variety of reasons but primarily because Monero is _entirely_ focused on privacy whereas Dash simply offers privacy as an extra feature, which has it's downsides.


Contrary to several other privacy coins, _every_ transaction on Monero is completely private. With Dash, only those transactions set to private are anonymized, but this makes the total number of private transactions relatively small for a mixing pool to properly obscure all funds. With Monero _all_ transactions are mixed and scrambled which not only increases privacy significantly, but also introduces a plausible deniability feature - no one can prove you intentionally tried to mix your coins, as this feature is always-on. With a coin like Dash it would be suspect to determine a private transaction on somebody's address, because that would indicate a concious choice to anonymize the transaction.

Monero mixes all the holdings at a very deep level. Even if you're simply hodling your XMR and not doing anything with it, on the background your coins will be constantly mixed and tumbled with other XMR's on the network, including those from transactions. This is because Monero mixes transactions with non-transactions. Your coins are essentially moved a few times, to obscure the original transaction that somebody entirely unrelated to you is making. There's no way from the outside to detect which transaction is a real one, and which are fake.

Monero has other well thought-out mechanics at play as well. Not only are transactions privatized, but each transaction uses a brand new generated address and is unlinked from the address it was spent from. That means I can send from address A to address B and from the outside there would be no way to detect that address A and address B are linked in any way whatsoever.  Only the owners of address A and address B have a special 'stealth' private key with which they can see the transaction details. 

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The Monero team is now working on increasing privacy even more through so-called RingCT signatures, which further increase anonymity by not only scrambling and mixing transactions but also _hiding_ the _amount_ that was transacted from anybody but the sender and the receiver. All that will remain visible is that 'a transaction was made that was confirmed.

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Other improvements on the horizon for Monero is Project Kovri, which adds a whole new deeper layer of security to using Monero by hiding your internet traffic. Right now it is possible to link IP addresses to Monero usage, but project Kovri also hides these details by using a  sort of Tor-network routing known as I2P (Invisible Internet Project). This makes it impossible to detect if you're even _using_ the Monero software or not, further increasing absolute privacy.
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<h3> THE FUTURE</h3> With Monero being the most established, and the one having it's privacy concerns as the number 1 priority, makes it a good bet for the future. There will be an increasing demand for privacy features. Not just for criminals and money launderers, but private citizens and corporations also. Nobody wants their entire spending-history made public the moment you spend something. Right now, if you transfer some Bitcoin to me, I will be able to trace your _entire_ transaction history  and see what products you bought, what subscription payments you've made, etc. This makes Bitcoin pretty unhandy as an actual payments system. Yes, there are privacy features and solutions upcoming for other blockchains also, but at the core Bitcoin will always remain Bitcoin - open and transparant. It may be possible to obscure transactions in some regard, by mixing them, but it will likely be possible to see that your address has _made_ a private transaction. It's not really a secret if everybody knows you've got a secret..

I believe there will always be a market for untraceable money. Be it the darknet, or people trying to evade taxes, or simply people and instutions with concerns over privacy such as Wikileaks. With Monero's unique blockchain architecture which is fundamentally different from the Bitcoin code upon which most blockchains are built, I believe it will continue to provide value to people, also in the future. As long as cryptocurrency as a whole keeps advancing, I believe Monero will continue to have an integral role in the cryptocurrency sphere. 

Once people start actually _using_ cryptocurrencies for payments, instead of speculating and keeping them on exchanges, the demand for anonymity and privacy willbecome obvious again.

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It may not be the most flashiest and exciting project per se, but I feel Monero is one of those 'safe bets'  you can make in cryptocurrency. Forgoing the 10x for what feels like a guaranteed 2-3x. Yes, I do see Monero going to $1000. Don't you? Dash was only $200 not too long ago! It's for me, the one that got away. But I've learned from that: I'm not letting Monero get away to $1000 before I have some!

The only concern I have is the possibility of governments one day banning the usage of completely private cryptocurrencies such as Monero. But, it being decentralized, it will be impossible to completely stop it. Regardless, I am hesitant to make Monero a large part of my portfolio because of this risk. But still I feel like to make my portfolio complete I should hold _some_.

So lately I have been using some of my SBD profits to get some Monero. I feel like I should own at least 1 XMR. And besides, in the future... it can't hurt to have 'a few thousand' stored in something completely untraceable. It's like that old sock where you put money in, just in case for a rainy day. Except digitalized on Monero.
<center><h2>[>> Click here to visit the Monero website <<](https://getmonero.org/)</h2></center>

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<center>[![footercartoon new5.png](https://steemitimages.com/DQmRMndUYFqxoxwcTkTR4JAADzH6o43QhSS1WM17wP8uD1C/footercartoon%20new5.png)](https://steemit.com/@pandorasbox)</center>_(Art by [Roy Lichtenstein](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Lichtenstein))_