The ubiquity of e-commerce on the Internet has made trade, purchases and sales of goods and services even in the most remote place possible. The advancements of tech will also bring down prices for mobile devices and thereby increase accessibility to those who need to connect online. However, the traditional models of commerce where middlemen in this transaction space take a cut of each transaction and this increases the costs to the parties involved.

This is where cryptocurrencies come in to disintermediate and disrupt this space. The only issue is that it has been the primary medium of exchange on the Darknet in providing security as well as anonymity. Riding behind this paradigm is the blockchain technology that has made all these possible – creating the foundation for decentralisation of transactions through interconnected blocks premised on algorithms to provide some form of protection for the transaction that has taken place. Thus far, the integrity of such transactions have held up well.

Interestingly, three major cryptocurrencies are being highlighted in the public space when it comes to unmasking the transactions taking place on Darknet. They are Bitcoin, Ethereum and in recent times, Monero. In particular, they provide the necessary algorithmic protection that entities on the Darknet are looking for in terms of security and legality. In that world, the risks involved in transactions are much higher, and those entities are willing to trade off quite a bit for the matter of security. Of course, speed of transactions do matter too and how a token is able to upgrade its features whilst retaining the price in relation to fiat is also critical. The last thing Darknet entities want is to see their “dark-earned” money plunge to zero!

Of these three crypto tokens, the increasingly popular one is Monero because it goes the additional step in providing transactions that are both private and untraceable. This completely masks the identity of the user and cloaks them with anonymity. Such complete privacy is not seen in Bitcoin nor Ethereum.

The upgrading of the features on Monero are constantly done but what is unique about it is its minimum ring signature that is the privacy feature in hiding the transactions that follow. This also includes a mixing up of payer and payee addresses along with their transactions, which obscures location. The powerful part behind is that Monero can be mined with a low-end CPU as opposed to the wizardry and gadgetry required by Bitcoin.

This would mean entities mining Monero will not incur as large an electricity footprint on the grid to be discovered too.

Do you think this token will have a future in public space instead of being "hidden" in an obscure manner behind the dark world of the Darknet?