History of monero

[Niko]

History

In 2014 Bitcointalk forum user known as thankful_for_today forked the codebase of Bytecoen into the name BitMonero, which is a compound of Bit (as in Bitcoin) and Monero (literally meaning "coin" in Esperanto). [2] The release of BitMonero was very poorly received by the community that initially backed it. Plans to fix and improve Bytecoin with changes to block time, tail emission and block reward had all been ignored, and thankful_for_today simply disappeared from the development scene. A group of users lead by Johnny Mnemonic decided that the community should take over the project, and five days later they did while also changing the name to be Monero. [5]

Due its privacy features, Monero experienced rapid growth in market capitalization and transaction volume during the year 2016, faster and bigger than any other cytocurrency that year. This grew was motivated by its uptake in the darknet market, where people used it to buy stolen credit cards, guns, and drugs. [2] Two major darknet market were shut down in July 2017 by law enforcement. [10] From the beginning, Monero has been used by people holding other cryptocurrency like Bitcoin to break link between transactions, with the other cryptocoins first converted to Monero, then after some delay, converted back and sent to an address unrelated to those used before. [7 ]

On January 10, 2017, the privacy of Monero transactions were further strengthened by the adoption of Bitcoin Core developer Gregory Maxwell's algorithm Confidential Transactions, hiding the amounts being transacted, in combination with an improved version of Ring Signatures. [11]

After many online payment platforms shut down access for white nationalists following the Unite the Right rally in 2017, some of them, including Christopher Cantwell and Andrew Auernheimer ("weev"), started using and promoting Monero. [12] [13]

The operators behind the May 2017 global ransomware incident WannaCry converted their proceedings into Monero. [1] In June, The Shadow Brokers, the group that leaked the code used in WannaCry, started accepting payments in Monero. [1]

Malicious hackers have previously embedded Monero mining code into websites and apps seeking profit for themselves. [14] In late 2017 malware and antivirus service providers blocked a JavaScript implementation of Monero miner Coinhive that was embedded in websites and apps, in some cases by hackers. Coinhive generated the script as an alternative to advertisements; a website or app could embed it, and use website visitor's CPU to mine the cryptocurrency while the visitor is consuming the content of the webpage, with the site or app owner owning a percentage of the mined coins. [15] Some websites and apps did this without informing visitors, and some hackers implemented it in that way drained visitors' CPUs. As a result the script was blocked by companies offering ad blocking subscription lists, antivirus services, and antimalware services. [16] [14]

As of May 2018 Monero was led by 7 members, 49 developers and 3 researchers, with the unofficial figurehead of pseudonymous Luigi1111. [17]

In the first half of 2018, Monero was used in 44% of cryptocurrency ransomwareattacks. [18]

In July 2018, Change.org implemented a Monero miner on their screensaver to raise funds for the Change.org Foundation. [19]