I would like to know why bother making Monero at all ?
wasn't 999 coins enough ?
did we really need a fork of Cryptonote ? (whatever the fuck that is) lol
An excellent question!
Implementing ring signatures in Bitcoin
is possible, but it would also be extremely clunky. Combining stealth addresses + ring signatures in Bitcoin would not only require a soft fork (possibly a hard fork if you're rejecting tx's on broadcast), but also seems somewhat incompatible with Bitcoin's current positioning and stated goals. It is unlikely this functionality will ever be added to Bitcoin. Even if it was added to Bitcoin, the reality is that an output that used a ring signature group of >1 would potentially be compromised when used as an input on a transaction with a ring signature group of 0, and this would invalidate the entire effort.
Thus, it has to be done outside of Bitcoin. So, then, the question becomes: do you fork Bitcoin and add stealth addresses and ring signatures? You could, of course, do that. The problem you'd face is that you'd forever be chasing your tail trying to merge upstream changes to implement bugfixes and features, some of which are incongruent with the design goals of a private, untraceable cryptocurrency. You'd constantly be trying to shoe-horn functionality in (SPV-style thin clients, for instance), and chances are you'd end up doing more harm than good and unwittingly compromising users.
Therefore, knowing that it can't or won't be done inside Bitcoin, and forking Bitcoin is a pretty bad idea, the academics behind the CryptoNote protocol were faced with an interesting prospect. "What else is potentially deficient with Bitcoin?" I can imagine them asking. They set out to create an alternative cryptocurrency that had the stated aims of privacy and untraceability, whilst fixing other parts of Bitcoin they thought could do with improvement. For instance, they theorised and then built a PoW that reduced the performance gap between CPUs, GPUs, and ASICs. They also created an emission schedule that is constantly and slightly decreasing rather than halving at a particular point. All of these improvements, along with very detailed mathematics for the private and untraceable transactions, are detailed in the CryptoNote whitepaper:
https://cryptonote.org/whitepaper.pdf. If you are academically inclined, you may prefer to look at the raw annotations our mathematicians and cryptographers created during their peer review:
http://monero.cc/downloads/whitepaper_annotated.pdf and follow that up by reading one of our mathematician's review of the whitepaper:
http://monero.cc/downloads/whitepaper_review.pdfAs to why Monero, specifically, exists: the reference code for CryptoNote was originally delivered in the form of a cryptocurrency called Bytecoin (not the Bytecoin you may be familiar with, a "new" one). Unfortunately for the CryptoNote developers, when this was made available publicly in March of this year, 82% of the coins had already been mined under the guise of it being launched "on the dark web" 2 years ago (
which is disputed by some people in the know). Given the nature of this ninja mine / instamine / premine / whatever situation, thankful_for_today took it upon himself to fork this CryptoNote reference code and create Monero. He has subsequently left and things have blossomed, leaving us where we are today: a 7 member core team, as well as a whole host of contributors. There is no premine or instamine with Monero, we are completely supported by donations.
Monero has since diverged from the reference code, and we are constantly and continually improving the codebase. It is the first cryptocurrency that I am aware of that uses an Electrum-style, 24-word, mnemonic seed, making backups as simple as writing down that seed when you first create your wallet. The excellent design decision to keep the daemon separate from the wallet has allowed us to maintain a CLI wallet (simplewallet) as well as a wallet specifically designed for automation / merchant systems / exchanges (rpcwallet). Multiple wallets can be run on the same machine, with only one daemon keeping in sync with the network. We are completely unencumbered by Bitcoin's monolithic design and historicity, which means we can reinvent things and improve on things as and when it is possible.
That is why we bother making and continuing to make Monero. And that is why we won't be "vanishing" regardless of Monero's valuation - price is irrelevant to our continued ability to improve Monero, because we're out to build something useful and useable. If these are not a "damn good reasons" I don't know what is.