- The new lead maintainer of Monero, Alexander “Snipa” Blair, explained that the adaptation of Monero through new business will be the biggest challenge.
- Technically speaking, Blair sees no acute need for improvement.
As was announced a few weeks ago, Riccardo “Fluffy Pony” Spagni has resigned as lead maintainer of Monero. He has been replaced by Alexander “Snipa” Blair, who will take on the role of Fluffy Pony. Nevertheless his predecessor will still be available as back-up maintainer. In a new issue of Monero Talk, Blair, who was previously rather unknown, introduced himself to the Monero community.
Blair describes that it will be a hard and long road until Monero can replace the Fiat money system and cash. However, this is his goal. But to achieve this, Blair says, the adaptation must take a big step forward. People need to see the benefits of Monero (XMR). Accordingly, Snipa also said that this will be the biggest challenge for a broad acceptance of Monero and cryptocurrency in general.
He added that current solutions perform a conversion of the transferred cryptocurrency. In the long term, however, merchants must be prepared to accept Monero directly, rather than converting it into Fiat money immediately after purchase. He continued:
It is still easy to buy things with Bitcoin if you’re not in the United States, but it’s not really in strengthening the cycle of the currency right. You’re just essentially using a third party cut out to hit an exchange versus actually using Manero and keeping Monero’s currency cycle.
When asked what the main weaknesses of Monero are and in what areas he sees room for improvement, Mr Blair said that it is mainly the daemons. Improvements in this area could also promote adaptation:
It’s not very much. These days I run a very large pool […] We are running into some very interesting use cases with Monero. […] We are now running 55 Monero daemons, so we are facing some interesting corner cases. One of our biggest flaws is that we lose entire daemons due to the Monero blockchain reorgs. A daemon literally stops updating itself through the reorgs. This is my biggest concern, because it slows down the adoption process. […] Your wallet, the exchanges, they rely on the accuracy of the daemon.
About the technical details of Monero, Snipa claimed that the team is currently “figuring out” repository layouts and resolving maintenance issues. In particular, Snipa also addressed the Monero supply chain hack:
Certainly, there’s some security to be restored and faith to be restored with people after the hack […] but we want to make sure this doesn’t happen again and so rebuilding that for you that I think it’s going to be a big thing over the next couple weeks.
Snipa is referring to a hack that almost went off in secret. The Monero supply chain hack was carried out by hacking the official website of the Monero project. An attacker planned to steal funds from users’ wallets by secretly replacing legitimate Linux and Windows binaries available for download with malicious versions.
The hack was discovered due to a user comparing cryptographic hashes for the binaries he downloaded from the official website. The Monero team conducted an immediate investigation and confirmed that the GetMonero.com website was indeed compromised. Users who downloaded the CLI wallet between Monday, November 18, 2:30am UTC and 4:30pm UTC may have been affected.
Snipa then also spoke about his views on the future of the crypto market. He explained that there will not be a single coin that is suitable for all use cases:
The idea that a single currency is going to be better than the rest is completely absurd to me […] Certainly, in some ways you can consider the fact that bitcoin is a transparent ledger where you can see how funds are flowing is actually a positive in a lot of use cases, it’s not a positive in every use case which is somewhere Monero shows off.
Below you can see the whole episode:
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