Monero (XMR), a crypto currency which I have been writing about in the recent weeks, has captured the minds, imagination and wallets of many investors. Within the last two weeks Monero has seen a 200% rise in value, mostly due to announcements from darknet websites like AlphaBay and Oasis regarding their work to start accepting Monero as a means of payments.
Monero has much better privacy features than Bitcoin, such as an opaque block chain, ring signatures and true fungibility, all attributes that strongly appeal to users concerns about financial privacy and anonymity.
In addition, Monero is receiving supportive comments from long-time supporters of Bitcoin who see its technical superiority over Bitcoin and the appeal it has towards financially independent users.
When asked about Bitcoin’s anonymity for online transactions, Bitcoin core contributor Luke-JR said, “Only a fool would use Bitcoin as it is today for darknet.”
Roger Ver, also known as “Bitcoin Jesus” made some very strong and supportive comments in favor of Monero on the Bitcoin Forums website. Ver is a very early investor in Bitcoin and has accumulated a substantial amount of capital early on during the growth of the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Ver posted about the viability of Monero and the similar growth curve to Bitcoin, predicting a substantial growth of Monero within the next few months:
“A $500M to $1B USD market cap for Monero in the next few months doesn’t seem unreasonable with these things going on.
Price increases will drive further development of services using Monero, that will lead to further price increases.
It will be a self fulfilling cycle until we bump up against scaling issues.So my wild guess: $500M to $1B USD market cap by the end of the year, even with very few actual use cases at the moment.”
Is Roger Ver right? Will the future bring Monero’s value up ten-fold as it is being adopted by more and more online merchants? The future will tell.
In my opinion Monero has a sound technical implementation, the market is willing to adopt it and accept it as a means of payments and I predict at least a doubling of market cap after AlphaBay operators will finish their implementation of a Monero wallet for their users.
If Roger Ver’s prediction is right, buying Monero now may be the best decision anyone could make from an investment perspective. Better yet, I believe Monero is the currency that may dethrone Bitcoin. It will not happen overnight, but we may see it within a few years.