History of Monero
CRYPTONOTE WHITEPAPER – October 17, 2013
The history of Monero begins on October 17, 2013, when a psudononymous author known only as “Nicholas Van Saberhagen” released the Cryptonote Whitepaper, on which the Monero protocol would be based. The Whitepaper described a new decentralized and privacy-focused protocol design for the foundation of a functional digital cash system.
The Cryptonote Whitepaper described several key cryptographic techniques still in use by Monero today such as Ring Signatures, Stealth Addresses, adaptive block sizes, smooth emission curve, and ASIC resistant mining.
READ THE CRYPTONOTE WHITEPAPER
BYTECOIN – March 12, 2014
Then on March 12, 2014, an announcement thread was posted on the bitcointalk forums announcing Bytecoin, claiming the new cryptocurrency, which was based on the Cryptonote Whitepaper, had launched and been operational for two years already, since 2012. Bytecoin was the first implementation of Cryptonote.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=512747.msg5661039#msg5661039
It didn’t take long for people to take issue with the fact that approximately 80% of the Bytecoin supply had already been mined by the time the announcement thread was posted. Some users suspected that Bytecoin was not a two year old project as it was claimed, but rather a pre-mined scam. Some users, including thankful_for_today, propose a fair fork of the technology. Eventually it was decided that “Bitmonero” would be forked from Bytecoin as a fairly launched project.
BITMONERO – April 9, 2014
User thankful_for_today posts the announcement thread on bitcointalk forum for “Bitmonero”, a fork of Bytecoin using the Cryptonote technology to be launched on April 17. The origin of the name is from “Bit” as in Bitcoin and “monero” meaning “coin” in Esperanto. Bitmonero differred from Bytecoin in that it would have a flatter emission curve, it would be launched fairly from genesis with no pre-mine, and a 60 second block-time.
Pretty soon forums members began to discuss concerns regarding the launch such as the 60-second block time which some saw as an issue. The user thankful_for_today was unwilling to make any changes, and was unresponsive for six days prior to the scheduled launch of Bitmonero.
On April 18, 2014 at 10:50 UTC, the Bitmonero network is launched and the genesis block is mined. One hour prior to the scheduled launch of Bitmonero, thankful_for_today revealed that there would only be a Linux mining client available at launch, with Mac and Windows were missing. Other users took the initiative to compile mining clients for Windows and Mac since thankful_for_today failed to make them available. People felt the Bitmonero launch was rushed, and thankful_for_today refused to consider community discussions or suggestions.
“The only community discussion this coin saw (regarding the reduced block time) the developer ignored outright. It was made pretty clear that moving to 60 second blocks was not the best approach and had zero long-term benefit.”
BITMONERO BECOMES MONERO AND THE COMMUNITY TAKES OVER
Discussions continued to take place and Bitmonero users continued to grow unhappy with thankful_for_today’s dictatorial style of project management and final say in decisions affecting the network. On April 25, 2014, the user “tacotime” announced the renaming of Bitmonero to Monero, as well as a doubling of the target blocktime to two minutes. This is the point at which the community officially took over the project and over time it evolved into the Monero we know today.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583449.0
Recap
- Bytecoin was an unfair launch of the first cryptocurrency using the Cryptonote protocol.
thankful_for_today (TFT) forked the Bytecoin codebase into Bitmonero without any input from the community. TFT was dictatorial and unwilling to engage in community discussions. His posts were scarce, posting only every few days.
TFT was desperate to launch Bitmonero, probably to be the first Bytecoin fork and have the “first mover” advantage.
Due to the rush, TFT introuced a few bugs to the Bitmonero code. TFT continues to ignore community suggestions and the community develops doubts of Bitmonero’s future.
Users NoodleDoodle, eizh, David Latapie, tacotime and smooth among others lead a split away from TFT and change the name to Monero, double the target blocktime, and re-publish the announcement thread.
The bugs in Bitmonero are fixed and the community takes over the project as the Monero we know today.
Additional Resources:
Reddit threads on “The Strange Birth and History of Monero” detailed with important quotes.
Monero gets a logo – June 2, 2014
https://99designs.com/logo-design/contests/monero-mro-cryptocurrency-logo-design-contest-382486
Monero evolves beyond Cryptonote
Since 2017 Monero developers have released a series of uptades to the Monero codebase which gradually set it apart from the original Cryptonote whitepaper and drastically improved scalability, efficiency, and privacy.
RingCT – January 2017
RingCT, short for Ring Confidential Transactions, is how transaction amounts are hidden in Monero. RingCT was implemented in block #1220516 in January 2017. After September 2017, this feature became mandatory for all transactions on the network. Prior to RingCT, all transaction amounts were visible on-chain.
Bulletproofs – October 2018
A negative consequence of the introduction of RingCT to the Monero protocol was the increase in transaction sizes needed to hide amounts.
Bulletproofs are short non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs that require no trusted setup. After the bulletproofs deployment, the size of an average transaction dropped by at least 80%, as well as the transaction fees.
RandomX – November 12, 2019
Prior to RandomX, Monero used variations of the CryptoNight mining algorithm which was supposed to be a CPU/GPU mineable algo with ASIC resistance. Unfortunaly ASIC machines were developed which could hash on CryptoNight, and ASIC miners began mining on the Monero network, putting CPU and GPU miners at a major disadvantage.
The answer to this came as a new mining protocol called RandomX developed by tevador, hyc_symas, and SChernykh. RandomX is a strictly CPU-only mineable hashing algorithm based on execution of random code and other memory-heavy techniques. To present day, Monero utilizes the RandomX mining algorithm and no ASICs were ever developed which could mine RandomX.
Dandelion++ – May 23, 2020
Dandelion++ is a protocol that prevents linking an IP address to the sender of a transaction.
CLSAG – September 17, 2020
CLSAG was an upgrade to MLSAG, a ring signature construction mechanism. Compared to MLSAG, CLSAG signatures achieve the same functionality as MLSAG signatures, but at a much smaller size and increased security.
Full-chain Membership Proofs – June 2023 to Present
Full-chain Membership Proofs, or FCMP for short, is Monero’s next planned major update, spearheaded by Luke Parker “kayaba”. FCMP is a replacement for Ring Signatures within the Monero protocol. Ring Signatures have long been known as the weakest link in Monero’s privacy kit. Ring Signatures are vulnerable to several attacks including the Eve-Alice-Eve attack and black marble attack.
FCMPs were first announced by Luke during a Monerokon presentation in June 2023. In March 2024, the Monero network oberved a drastic increase in transactions, going from an average of 25,000 transactions per day up to 150,000 transactions per day at it’s peak. It was theorized that the increase in transactions was an attempt to spam the network with transactions in order to reduce the effectiveness of Ring Signatures and reduce sender privacy. The effort to develop and implement FCMPs into Monero then gained increased traction in order to elmininate the possibility of such attacks and improve Monero’s overall privacy.
Monero developers and the community discussed the available options and two (1, 2) Community Crowdfunding proposals were launched to develop, audit, and implement FCMPs. The proposals were fully funded by community members in record time, and development of FCMP is currently underway. FCMPs are expected to be ready for deployment on mainnet at the end of 2025 or beginning of 2026.