How to Buy Monero

Back in May 21, 2014 you could easily scoop a Monero coin for $1.41 apiece. As I type this -and assuming you want to own one, you would have to part with more than $300 excluding exchange fees. But this is nothing compared to $410 when most cryptocurrencies were at peak back in December 2017.

From simple calculations, you can see that prices are up 15X. Not many coins manage such feats unless of course they are a special product guaranteeing a win-win for the investor and the team behind the scene.

What is Monero?

For beginners, we can say Monero, XMR is an upgrade of Bitcoin. Yes, even though Bitcoin is the grand dad, the pioneer of cryptocurrencies, it has its own flaws. Bitcoin is increasingly becoming a store of value rather than a means of exchange and is also pseudonymous. Monero on the other hand serves the same purpose as BTC but is actually anonymous using CryptoNote protocol for encryption.

What is attractive about Monero is the flexibility, malleability and ease of network improvement. For anonymity, Monero uses ring signatures, stealth addresses and RCT capabilities at protocol level meaning users operate in a secure and untraceable environment.

Ring signatures are what protect the sender while Ring Confidential Transactions (RCT) hides the transaction amount. Recipient protection is possible because stealth addresses makes virtually impossible to link transactions to the user’s wallet.

How to Buy Monero

Evidently, Monero goes a step further to protect user privacy and that is what gives this coin value.

There are 61 ways of buying Monero according to coinmarketcap data. In fact there are more than 10 different exchanges where you can exchange liquid coins as ETH or BTC for XMR. In high volume exchanges like BitFinex, you can easily convert fiat as USD/EUR for XMR, the ticker symbol for Monero.

Despite everything, we always recommend buying from an exchange and while it will take a couple of days before fiat deposit reflects, fees are often low.

Assuming you own some ETH/BTC in a wallet, you can simply transfer them to your BitFinex exchange wallet and save time.

This is how you buy Monero from BitFinex:

• Set up, verify and login to your BitFinex account
• Fund your account by linking your bank account with BitFinex exchange wallet or sending some ETH or BTC from an external wallet.
• Under Trading, click on XMR and XMR/USD or XMR/ETH or XMR/BTC depending on the type of funding currency.
• Specify the amount or size of XMR you want to buy at prevailing market rates and click “Exchange Buy”
• After trade execution, BitFinex will deposit XMR into your wallet.

How to Store Monero

Once you make a purchase, play safe and move your coin to a secure wallet. So far there are two hot wallet the community trusts: The Monero official full node-which is available for download from the official Monero website-and of course, MyMonero.

There are no hardware wallets that support Monero but there are plans for Ledger integration sometimes this year