 Welcome to the Daily Decrypt. Wow, what a great day to talk about currency competition. I'm your host Amanda and today's episode is brought to you by BitShares. The world of cryptocurrencies is diverse and growing more diverse all the time. One such creature is Monero, a currency not based on Bitcoin like many other cryptos, but rather based on an entirely different protocol, one called Crypto Note. And it's this protocol which has given Monero some unique properties which are geared specifically toward those who value privacy. To find out more, I've reached out to Monero core developer Fluffy Pony who also goes by Rick. First I wanted to know who's behind the currency. Monero has a core team that consists of seven people. Individually as members of the core team, we can and most of us do also contribute to the actual code development. But our role as a core team is stewardship of the project. How did the currency get its start? Rick told me that in May of 2014, a user in the Bitcoin Talk forums with the name of Thankful For Today released the code base of Monero and started to gain a following. Within just a month however, this Satoshi of Monero and his followers began developing different visions of where the currency should go. He ended up taking a decision or putting a decision to vote for the community and the community voted for a particular path. He disagreed with the community's votes and decided to go with his way instead. Suddenly we were seven people that were shoved into a chat room and got involved in a chat room in IRC and went like, hey, this is not cool, let's fork the project. And so we did. And everyone kind of gathered together behind us and said, you go guys. So what is Monero good for? Why does it attract those interested in privacy? Monero does a couple of things in terms of offering and improving financial privacy. The first is that transactions are unlinkable and the second is that transactions are untraceable. So that means all your outgoing transactions are safe in terms of anyone being able to look at the blockchain and figure out where they went. The other aspect to it, of course, is that your incoming transactions have many possible senders and each of those possible senders have the same chance of being the true sender. It's one thing for Rick to tell you, but it's another thing for me to show you. Let's examine what is and isn't publicly visible about any Monero transaction on one of its block explorers. Here's a Monero web wallet which I owned. From another account, I'm tipping myself half a Monero, which is worth about 25 US cents today. I want to see what other people could determine about my transaction using a block explorer. So I copy and paste my Monero address into one such explorer. I then receive an error message in return. The Monero blockchain, it does not even allow the looking up of balances or histories based on people's addresses. At most, I can use the transaction ID of the payment to see a sort of proof that a payment did take place. But even then, the blockchain won't tell me which address was the sender or which address was the recipient. Certainly this level of payment obfuscation is sufficient for Fluffy Pony and his band of night riders. Apparently not. And what we're doing now is we're adding two things to further Monero's privacy. We have a scheme called Ring Confidential Transactions. It's based on Greg Maxwell's Confidential Transactions work in Bitcoin. And what we did is we took that and we built on top of it. And we'll be adding that to Monero so that at some point in the future, transaction amounts won't even be visible. And there's more. And then the last thing we're doing is disconnecting the IP address that first broadcast a transaction on that actual transaction. Instead of going through normal TCP IP, normal internet traffic, we'll go via IP instead. And then no one will tell where the transaction came from. Rick then said that despite these layers of payment obfuscation, if users want to reveal their full transaction histories of any given Monero account, they still can if they choose to. So Monero has something called the view key. And basically this allows you to reveal all the transactions that have ever occurred on your account and never will occur. So how are Fluffy Pony and his team of six paid? So we're not paid. Monero is an open source project, which I mean, obviously it has its own challenges. We would love for somebody to come and say, oh, hey, you know, he has $10 million go wild. But the reality is open source projects that have any sort of commercial backing like that, especially when it comes to something that, you know, like Monero or like Bitcoin, that can be viewed as a little bit subversive. The minute there's commercial backing, it also means there's leverage that an attacker can use. But certainly the labors of Monero developers don't come free. What we've done is we've created a little funding system on the Monero forum where people can pitch ideas. They can somebody can come along and say, I'm going to do this. They can set milestones. They can set amounts against those milestones and then the community funds it. Monero's most recent intra community fundraiser garnered about 18,000 Monero, the equivalent of about $9,000 to complete its first graphical user interface wallet or GUI. Until that software is released, however, those interested in trying Monero can do so from its command line wallet or a much easier option from the web wallet at mymonero.com. Today's episode is brought to you by BitShares, a delegated proof-of-state currency which offers a fiat on-ramp to its ecosystem through the exchange CCEDK. BitShares also seeks to attract developers by offering dividends on features created for the currency via its feature backed asset tokens. You can learn more about the currency's governance features and incentives by visiting bithares.org. I hope you had a great old time today and I'd like to use a metric to try to measure that. YouTube has just released a new feature allowing me to conduct a poll with you, the audience. So click wherever you see the pop-up appearing now to give your answer to the Daily Decrypt's very first poll question. Thank you.