Impreza accepts as a payment method Monero, it is a safe cryptocurrency and much appreciated by those who love privacy. We offer all our products and services and we accept Monero as payment method, know a little more about it:
Monero (XMR) is an open-source crypto-currency, created in April 2014, that focuses on privacy and decentralization. Its goal is to be non-traceable giving greater privacy than Bitcoin.
Like Bitcoin, Monero uses a public ledger (a blockchain) to record transactions performed on the network and uses a mining process to create new currency units. However, unlike Bitcoin, Monero protects the privacy of its users by obfuscating the sender, the recipient, and the amount involved in each transaction. As a result, it is considered a completely anonymous and untraceable currency.
In addition, the egalitarian mining process, which allowed money to be profitable on ordinary computers, made mining possible in a distributed way. This eventually opened up legitimate new sources of revenue (for online content producers).
Architecture
Unlike many cryptocurrencies that are derivatives of Bitcoin, Monero is based on the CryptoNight proof-of-work hash algorithm, which comes from the CryptoNote protocol. It possesses significant algorithmic differences relating to blockchain obfuscation. By providing a high level of privacy, Monero is fungible, meaning that every unit of the currency can be substituted by another unit. This makes Monero different from public-ledger cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, where addresses with coins previously associated with undesired activity can be blacklisted and have their coins refused by other users.
In particular, the ring signatures mix the spender’s input with a group of others, making it exponentially more difficult to establish a link between each subsequent transaction. Also, the “stealth addresses” generated for each transaction make it impossible to discover the actual destination address of a transaction by anyone else other than the sender and the receiver. Finally, the “ring confidential transactions” mechanism hides the transferred amount.
Monero is designed to be resistant to application-specific integrated circuit mining, which is commonly used to mine other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. It can be mined somewhat efficiently on consumer grade hardware such as x86, x86-64, ARM and GPUs.
History
The underlying CryptoNote protocol that Monero is based on was originally launched by pseudonymous author Nicolas van Saberhagen in October 2013.
Monero was originally launched by a Bitcointalk forum user only known as “thankful_for_today” under the name BitMonero which is a compound of Bit (as in Bitcoin) and Monero (literally meaning “coin” in Esperanto). Five days later, the currency’s supporters opted for the name to be shortened to Monero.
In September 2014, Monero was attacked when an unknown party exploited a flaw in CryptoNote that permitted the creation of two subchains that refused to recognize the validity of transactions on each other. CryptoNote later released a patch for the flaw, which Monero implemented.
Monero experienced rapid growth in market capitalization and transaction volume during the year 2016, partly due to adoption in 2016 by major darknet market AlphaBay, which was closed in July 2017 by law enforcement.
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.
Privacy
The Monero blockchain protects privacy in three different ways. Ring signatures hide the sender’s address between outputs of other transactions, RingCTs hide the amount of coins being sent, and stealth addresses hide the address of the person receiving the transaction. As a consequence, Monero has an opaque (not transparent) blockchain, which is completely different from the transparent and traceable blockchain used by Bitcoin. In view of this, the monero is said to be “private, and optionally transparent“.
Monero has two sets of keys, called a “display key” and a “spend key“. The display key can be shared separately, which allows for optional transparency. However, the system is designed to facilitate processing on mobile devices as it is impossible to calculate the wallet balance without having a display key.
