Bitcoin Alternative Monero Accepted by AlphaBay
March 17, 2017
As institutions like banks and law enforcement come to grips with the flow of Bitcoin, another cyber currency is suddenly gaining ground. Bloomberg Technology reveals, “New Digital Currency Spikes as Drug Dealers Get More Secrecy.” The coin in question, Monero, has been around for a couple of years, but was recently given a boost by the marketplace AlphaBay, one of the most popular destinations for buyers of illicit drugs on the Dark Web. In the two weeks after the site announced it would soon accept Monero, the total worth of that currency in circulation jumped to over $100 million (from about $25 million the previous month). Writer Yuji Nakamura explains why a shift may be underway:
Bitcoin, the most popular digital currency in the world with a total value of $9.1 billion, also allows users to move funds discreetly and uses a network of miners to verify the authenticity of each trade. But its privacy has come under threat as governments and private investigators increase their ability to track transactions across the bitcoin network and trace funds to bank accounts ultimately used to convert digital assets to and from traditional currencies like U.S. dollars.
Monero similarly uses a network of miners to verify its trades, but mixes multiple transactions together to make it harder to trace the genesis of the funds. It also adopts ‘dual-key stealth’ addresses, which make it difficult for third-parties to pinpoint who received the funds.
For any two outputs, from the same or different transactions, you cannot prove they were sent to the same person,’ Riccardo Spagni, a lead developer of Monero, wrote by e-mail. Jumbling trades together makes it ‘impossible to tell which transaction, of a set of transactions, a particular input comes from. It appears to come from all of them.
Though Monero has yet to withstand the trials of AlphaBay-level volumes for long, its security features received praise from investor and prominent digital-currency-advocate Roger Ver. As of this writing, Monero is ranked fifth among digital currencies in overall market value. Click here for a list of digital currencies ranked, in real time, by market cap.
Cynthia Murrell, March 17, 2017
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