Monero [XMR]’s Riccardo says that he chose Monero because it is not based on the Bitcoin code

On a recent episode of Whatbitcoindid, Riccardo Spagni, a core team member of Monero, spoke about the privacy aspect of Monero. The interview covered a wide range of topics which included the importance of privacy and the similarities between Bitcoin [BTC] and Monero [XMR].

Riccardo spoke about his decision to choose Monero. He stated that one of the main factors which drove him towards Monero was that it is not based on the Bitcoin code. He said that this alone was the reason for him to give Monero a “second look”. He said:

“Simply cloning Bitcoin or forking Bitcoin generally leads to things that are not terribly interesting. You are taking a foundation that is solid, that has nearly a decade of proven history and you are fudging around with the incentives, you are slapping some lipstick on a pig or adding functionality that doesn’t create certain incentives and that to me is not interesting.”

He further said that Monero was “new” even though its code base was not a “very mature code”. Riccardo also said that the privacy aspect of Monero was another important reason for choosing Monero. He stated that Monero was doing “something concrete” for privacy and has pushed the privacy barrier ahead.

He also spoke about a part of the Bitcoin maximalists community frowning upon all the altcoins, which they refer to as shitcoins, except for Monero. Riccardo stated that this is because everyone who got involved with Monero and Bitcoin in the initial period had to face similar problems. He further added:

“…at the beginning we didn’t get anything handed to us on a platter, we didn’t get a slick mobile wallet that someone else had written that we could fork and change the name and change the logo and go, hey! look we made a Monero mobile wallet. Everything had to be done from scratch”

Riccardo stated:

“when I first started using Bitcoin, the experience was certainly not smooth. The wallet looked like it was something out of Windows 95”

According to Spagni, individuals who were earlier involved with Monero had to deal with CPU mining, a command-line wallet, and the entire database was stored in four to five gigabytes of RAM for the first six months. Riccardo said:

“all of the nasty stuff that we had to deal with at the beginning, Bitcoin will find familiar with or atleast Bitcoin maximalist are familiar because they understand that that’s the stuff  Bitcoin is had to go through at the beginning”