Hey Cryptophile boys & girls, we freakin love ya.  Thanks for helping humanity strive to a higher ground!  Free money from the state!

We are late to see the stark, burning beauty of the leading security coin - Monero.  Don't know why - look thru the top fifteenish altcoins, whaddya see - 

ETH, which falls into the same category as XRP, Polkadot, and EOS, building or not the smart infrastructure of the future. Tether and USDC, boring, possibly evil stablecoins broadcasting our whereabouts.   

Bitcoin Cash, along with Bitcoin SV and Litecoin, chitcoins of the first order.  Boring incremental clones of Bitcoin, based on advancements that didn't work, led by zombie teams,  they get 51% hacked for christ's sake, WOULD they please just go away?  Their prominence gives life to the critics of Bitcoin!

Next Binance Coin, BNB looking good building Binance all over the world, in this oversimplified space with Crypto.com CRO MCO whatever, and Cardano, & TRON.  Sitting pretty alone in a category in the top ten -  LINK, providing the oracles to the smart contracts. 

Which leaves us Monero.   Blowing doors off of  ZCASH and DASH in the privacy space.

As soon as we looked at Monero, it sucked us in.  Many critics of chitcoins say that only Bitcoin pulled off the immaculate conception.  Except the rabid Monero fans, of which there are many, say Monero was created by Satoshi his own self, DBA Nicolas Van Saberhagen (rofl!)  Monero was born from people pissed at the initial distribution of Bytecoin.  So, secrecy, and we guess fairness, that's pretty immaculate!    

Seriously, the Monero people bite.  They say Monero is what people think they are buying when they first buy bitcoin - unstoppable, untraceable.  When we ask them how to use Monero to achieve a private bitcoin, they say just hodl Monero, fool!  Hardcore moneroists think bitcoin is not fungible - we could bring home a blood bitcoin to our family, and it could be taken from us. Or it could be refused when we try to spend it.   Or, y'know, the CIA/FBI/IRS could just torture us for a few weeks / years until they figure out we ackshually did not know the evildoer we bought that coin from. 

How do we use Monero?  just buy it.  It has a super coin washer built into itself.  Buy some monero on a DEX, then use monero  to buy bitcoin - no one will know who bought that bitcoin.   How cool is that? (Plus, compare to a regular coin washing service.    Are we not just trading slightly dirty bitcoins for REALLY dirty bitcoins, how do we know?  ) And Johnny Mnenomic, we swear, took over the project from the probable Satoshi - Artic coolness without end.  L-U-F-F spells LUFF and ve are fallink in luff again!!

OK Now the project is run by Fluffy Pony - ok not so cool. But hip or not - most experts think that Monero has taken over from Bitcoin as the money of choice for whatever we call the Silk Road these days - deep dark net, clearly illegal stuff.  How not cool is that ?  The US gummint says it is NOT OK to love Monero !  They are coming after Monero, they put out a 1.4MM prize for whomever could crack Monero (provide a tool to track it.) Feck, RUN FLUFFY PONY RUN LIKE THE WIND!!! 

Monero has a long history of quick, hard forks trying to keep up with the anti-privacy Joneses.  But this one looks tough for Fluffster - think the Feds have already proceeded to initial payments to white hat devs for a cracking tool.  And the feds probably assume anyone buying Monero is a crook.  But hey the price chart looked pretty good lately...we swear we are just buying it to hodl... we never use TOR anyway . :) 

There are consortiums of governments working away to agree to ban privacy coins.   Will it work?  Well, BitMex and McAffee cooling their heels in fed custody might indicate YES!  The long arm of the law grows longer every year.   Moneroists of course say banning monero will be like banning alcohol, ciggies, etc, it's all cat and mouse,  and Monero will never die, just multiply.   Just pay the 15% long term cap gains and sleep at night, we are cool with that.  But hodling anonymous BTC calls like a siren... 

Peace, love, bitcoin and little tiny computers everywhere, 

Dave