I know I am highly biased. But I still think XMR might actually be the most undervalued ALT in existence.
- defacto standard privacy coin
- one of the few truly decentralized alts
- 3rd largest dev community after BTC and ETH
- ONLY blockchain other than bitcoin with a growing real world use that is not synthetic (like weather data on BSV)
- RandomX effectively purpose built to define the CPU as the Monero ASIC. I will opine on this below
- Growing transaction volume
- Growing hashrate (presumably w/o ASICS)
I think RandomX has surprised me the most. I felt like chasing ASIC resistance was becoming a very costly goal. The bi yearly forks were a net negative in my humble opinion. I was glad the consensus was to stop them after the final try at RandomX. And that we felt the need to call the hard forks "network upgrades" was sort of proof that we knew we were doing something that is anti-decentralization for the tradeoff of defeating ASICS. As much as I loved taking out bitmain on that first algorithm tweak, it was a bit of a defeat to keep doing that.
But RandomX is an ENORMOUS security upgrade for the network. It makes mining centralization much harder to achieve. And it sets monero apart as the truly CPU mineable coin with the newer AMD chips being the closest thing to an ASIC.
Monero is really the single coin with such a robust set of unique values. I see some folks (and I know there are some here too) that still expect Monero to displace Bitcoin. I have enjoyed watching @_the_archer on twitter opine about how Monero will eventually flip Bitcoin.
And I agree that Monero is what everyone thought Bitcoin was at the beginning, but not only do I think Monero cannot flip BTC, I have always said I think XMR is a compliment. We NEED a transparent ledger, and an obfuscated one. Also XMR is even less scalable. It will end up being somewhat costly to use if it continues to grow. Either that or the full nodes will become centralized.
Anyway... I sure hope the promise of Monero is realized to some extent before I shuffle off this mortal coil.
Even though I still see BTC as the better "store of value" I think Monero's transnational value makes it far more valuable than it's current price reflects.