Investors are celebrating Monero’s privacy features after a Europol analyst confirmed that transactions avoid detection. | Credit: AlekseyIvanov/Shutterstock.com
Whether people admit it or not, the privacy feature is one of the biggest draws to cryptocurrencies. If there was ever any doubt, those have been erased by Monero’s (XMR) rally in recent days. In the early days of the new year, the Monero price has advanced by 10%, and investors have privacy to thank for it.
Source: TradingView
Earlier today, the privacy coin shot up more than 3% from $45.50 to $47 and has since taken more ground, rising to $49 – a 7% gain in the last 24 hours – as of press time. The rally comes on the heels of a Europol report chronicling what the XMR army could have told you already – that Monero transactions are untraceable. Europol used the transaction activity of a suspect who was able to skirt the authorities to make its point.
A report in Decrypt spotlights a webinar featuring Jarek Jakubcek, a strategic analyst with Europol’s European Cyber Crime Centre. That webinar transcript was then published by a Reddit member.
Jakubcek details how the IP addresses tied to transactions harnessing the one-two punch of privacy-fueled browser TOR and Monero were untraceable, leaving authorities at “the end of the road.” These results differed from a probe of the Bitcoin blockchain, which “was visible” and explains why Europol was “able to get reasonably far.”
Source: Reddit
The Reddit thread generated dozens of responses, many of which cheered the privacy coin for pulling off what Bitcoin could not do.
Source: Reddit
Not everyone, was amused, however. This Reddit member was heckled in the thread for being a “Bitcoin maximalist” after pointing out that the XMR community was basically celebrating a criminal’s ability to “launder funds successfully by utilizing XMR.”
Source: Reddit
Privacy and Regulation
Of course, giving users the control to avoid detection and send anonymous transactions also places a huge target on the back of Monero.
A recent report in Forbes noted that there are nearly two-dozen cryptocurrency and blockchain-fueled bills that U.S. Congress could field in 2020. And while all bets are off during a time of war, and the escalated tensions between the U.S. and Iran certainly qualifies, regulators have already tipped their hand to how they feel about privacy coins.
For instance, we’ve already witnessed a rash of privacy-coin delistings from cryptocurrency exchanges in 2019, including Coinbase bumping Zcash from its UK platform, while OKEx Korea and BitBay have both delisted XMR.
Chief among the concerns of regulators is cryptocurrencies being used for nefarious purposes, ranging from money laundering to terrorist funding. Regulators are looking to strike a balance between catching crypto-related crimes and using blockchain technology for monitoring transactions to their advantage to catch the bad guys.
Meanwhile, the U.S. is falling behind in the tech-innovation race as rival economies including China nurture blockchain innovation and look to tokenize their government issued currencies, as pointed out by Morgan Creek Digital’s Anthony Pompliano.
Disclaimer: The above should not be considered trading advice from CCN.
This article was edited by Samburaj Das.
Last modified: January 3, 2020 3:27 PM UTC
The post appeared first on CCN
