How to Buy Monero (XMR)

The Monero cryptocurrency has given back good gains to its investors in previous years, helped higher by bullish moves in the crypto market. However, one of its biggest strengths is also its biggest drawback holding back substantial gains in the XMR price.

Regulatory concerns surrounding Monero’s privacy have prevented it from being listed on many leading cryptocurrency exchanges. This reduces liquidity in the crypto coin considerably, challenging the Monero price from rising as high as its peers during bullish cycles in the market.

On a positive note, however, the XMR enjoys a large market cap and is considered an attractive cryptocurrency among those who value their privacy. The XMR price statistics could enjoy support from an uptick in the adoption of the crypto among enthusiasts looking for a completely anonymous way to transfer payment around the world with low transaction fees.

Both Monero and Bitcoin utilize proof of work consensus mechanisms to secure their infrastructure, although there are several differences between the two cryptocurrencies. The following are some of them:

Primary Use Case

Bitcoin, the original cryptocurrency, was designed to enable faster and cheaper payments using blockchain technology. However, Monero takes the concept further, letting users conduct anonymous, ring confidential transactions using its infrastructure.

Having been around since 2009, several investors consider BTC a store of value, both retail and institutional, due to its steep price and fixed supply of 21 million coins. The lower XMR price makes it a more accessible cryptocurrency for smaller investors.

Popularity and Availability

Although the Monero price is far lower than that of Bitcoin, its privacy concerns limit the number of exchanges it is listed for trading. On the other hand, Bitcoin is listed on almost every cryptocurrency exchange and is also available for purchase via several different avenues.

Monero launched officially in April 2014 on the Bitcointalk forum, although a previous version launched a month prior, known as Bytecoin. Bytecoin ran into controversy almost instantly as its supply was 80% pre-mined. Bytecoin was forked into BitMonero, which underwent another fork to become the Monero project.

September 2014 saw Monero recover from a spam attack, followed by the release of Monero Research Lab Papers. Version 0.8.8.6 of the project was released in December 2014.

Over the years, the developers actively released several upgrades to improve the cryptocurrency, increasing its user privacy features and effectiveness. Over time, the minimal ring size continued to grow, the consensus mechanism became more robust, and XMR transactions got faster.

One of the most notable recent developments in Monero was the launch of atomic swaps between Monero and Bitcoin in August 2021. Looking ahead, the team of developers plans to make Monero even more versatile with plans to launch Layer 2 solutions to increase the speed and scalability of the ecosystem.

Monero can be mined using CPUs as its hashing algorithm RandomX uses lesser computing resources and has a far lower mining hashrate than Bitcoin. This makes Monero mining far more affordable to perform. Here’s how you can mine XMR:

1. Invest in reliable mining hardware and install Monero mining software applications on the system. You can choose to perform solo mining or participate in pool mining, so pick your software based on this.

2. As a solo miner, you can keep all the rewards you earn for your efforts, but you may not get an opportunity to mine Monero frequently.

3. On the other hand, joining a mining pool can increase the frequency of your contributions, although you may have to part with a percentage of the block rewards you earn to the pool.

4. You also have the option to perform cloud mining, which involves computing resources hosted on the cloud to mine Monero. In this option, you can pay a fee to the hosting provider, utilize the computing power and earn block rewards for your efforts.

4. Select the right mining software based on the option which is most convenient for you.

5. Connect your Monero wallet to the mining software so that the block rewards you earn can be stored.

6. Configure the application and start generating XMR coins.