What is Monacoin (MONA) Cryptocurrency in Simple Words?

Sergey Ivanov Developer of his own cryptocurrency, trader. ICO expert. Let's get to know each other!

02.05.2019

268

0

In its homeland, Japan, the electronic payment system MonaCoin is being actively popularized. The coin acts as a payment instrument when purchasing offline/online products on virtual trading platforms, the number of which is steadily growing. Transactions take place through the Zaif terminal, which carries out financial transactions in the Land of the Rising Sun involving cryptocurrencies.

Despite the fact that the popularity of MONA spread only within the borders of the island state, the Japanese fell in love with their own product, and government agencies went even further, completely legalizing cryptocurrencies in general; investors and miners increasingly began to pay attention to the “cat coin”. Next, it’s worth understanding what the essence of the project is, its technical parameters, how to carry out mining and whether it’s worth doing it at all.

Basic parameters of MonaCoin

Title (ticker)	MonaCoin (MONA)
Today's rate	$0.92
Current number of coins	68,194,675
Maximum number of coins	105 120 000
Market capitalization	$62,831,542.24
Changes in 24 hours	1.58%
Creation date (first block)	2014 (01/01/2014)
Mining algorithm	Proof-of-work (PoW)
Official site	monacoin.org

Bitcoin and Monacoin: what are their differences?

The main distinguishing feature is security and confidentiality. This is exactly what the creators of the Monacoin cryptocurrency relied on. Unlike Bitcoin, information about monetary transactions and the purchase and sale of virtual currency is not publicly available. As mentioned earlier, for a successful result it is not even necessary to enter your personal data. However, the main difference is that Monacoin today has a very small distribution area, while Bitcoin is among the top 10 most famous and expensive virtual funds in the whole world. Earning monacoins is most common in Japan. But precisely this feature entails another significant drawback - the lack of wallets. Today, almost every virtual currency has its own wallet system. The Monacoin wallet provides only two storage methods - online or on a desktop wallet.

Emergence

The release of MONA (translated from Japanese as “cat”) took place on January 1, 2014 on ni-channeleru - a local network mega-forum (more than 600 announced platforms), which was the first to propose payment with a “cat coin”. After advertising on WBS TV Network Tokyo, keen interest in the first national cryptocurrency spread throughout the country and attracted the attention of investors from other countries.

What is the idea of ​​MonaCoin

The first Japanese cryptocurrency is a fork of LTC (Litecoin) and is a decentralized 2P2 open-source ecosystem. The idea of ​​creation belongs to Mr. Watanabe (not a rare pseudonym in the Land of the Rising Sun). It has not yet been possible to establish the real identity of the author. There is a certain parallel here with the founder of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, who also remains incognito.

The mentality of Japanese citizens who strive to use exclusively domestic products explains the emergence and implementation of the idea. EPS lobbyist Keiichi Hida, well-known in the cryptocurrency world, in an interview with one of the Blockchain news resources, explained the emergence and popularity of MonaCoin as follows: the Japanese have long needed their own cryptocurrency, which can be used to pay for goods and services.

The issue of MONA is limited and amounts to 105,120,000 units. More than half of the virtual coins are already in circulation, namely 68,194,675. The system has the Lightning Network protocol, which increases the scalability of the MONA ecosystem, integrated into the virtual architecture after the creation of block 977,760.

Team developing the project and roadmap

The incognito status of the author of the MonaCoin cryptocurrency is not the only dubious advantage of the project. It is also impossible to determine the identity of the development team. The road map, if it exists, is only for internal use - the developers’ plans remain a secret to the public.

ICO

The process of launching the coin was different from the usual methods today. Since the developers had a specific goal in creating a decentralized, impersonal means of payment, implementation took place with a commercial approach.

Information about the release was distributed through the Japanese mega-forum - ni-channeleru. This conglomerate owns more than 600 message boards of all kinds. They were the first to introduce the offer to pay for purchases using Monacoin.

The representative of Monacoin at the thematic forum on cryptocurrencies was a certain Mr. Watanabe, who remains incognito, like the progenitor of the digital industry, Satoshi Nakamoto. To maintain the network, the PoW (active mining) protocol is used, and users who donate their computing power to maintain the network should regard the mining process as a game, for completing the levels of which (finding blocks) players receive a reward in the currency of the game itself.

For Japan, such approaches to various marketing issues are more than usual, which is why Monacoin has been actively developing and growing for some time. A large number of online stores accept it as a means of payment; moreover, quite a few ordinary retail outlets are equipped with terminals for crypto-payment.

go

MonaCoin blockchain technology

As a fork of LTC, the MonaCoin cryptocurrency is based on the Litecoin electronic architecture blockchain. Technical parameters of Blockchain MonaCoin are presented in the table:

Parameter	Brief Explanation
Block generation time	1.5 minutes
Reward for miners	25 coins for each new block generated. The reward is doubled approximately every 3 years or after every 1.051 million block is generated.
Difficulty finding a block	Regulated by the Dark Gravity Wave (DGW) algorithm, which complicates the generation of each subsequent block in the Blockchain EPS chain
Hash algorithm	Originally Scrypt. After generating 450,000 blocks, the Lyra2RE(v2) algorithm, which is not available for ASIC chips, is integrated into the electronic architecture
Consensus Protocol	PoW (Proof of Work) - proof of work. Provides reliable protection to the ecosystem as a whole

Monacoin (MONA) rate

If you look at the chart of the Monacoin cryptocurrency, you can see very frequent jumps in this cryptocurrency. These jumps very much depend on the attention of the media, for example, once the growth of cryptocurrency was more than 200%, after one of the authoritative programs told the news about how a Japanese man bought a plot of land for Monacoin, and then the rest of the Japanese began to buy this digital assets.

You can watch the rate and analyze the Monacoin chart on exchanges such as Bittrex, Bitbank, Livecoin. MONA coins are primarily traded in pairs with Bitcoin, with the majority of trading volume occurring on the Bittrex exchange.

How to mine MONA

Despite its popularity in Japan, the MonaCoin cryptocurrency remains rather exotic for the rest of the world. There is no excitement around the TOP 10 cryptocurrencies, led by Bitcoin. As a result, MONA mining is available at home, but the Lyra2RE(v2) algorithm is not suitable for ASICs. Therefore, mining is carried out on a PC processor (CPU) or video cards (GPU) manufactured by Nvidia and AMD.

Practice has shown: in relation to the “cat coin”, it is advisable to use mining farms from Nvidia GPUs, since they show a better hashrate than AMD GPUs. Software for Nvidia video cards – CCminer. However, solo mining, even with state-of-the-art computing devices, is not a competitor to pooled power.

The best pool for cryptocurrency mining

Pooled capacities are communities, or pools, of miners, within which cryptocoins are mined with the subsequent distribution of rewards based on everyone’s share of participation. Despite the geographical isolation of the “cat coin”, pool MonaCoins are represented in large quantities. Here are some of them:

• supernova;
• aikapool.com;
• me/monacoin;
• org/pool/mona;
• miningpoolhub.com.

When deciding on a pool for MonaCoin mining, you need to pay attention to the terms of reward distribution: in some communities, most of the bonus goes to the miner whose equipment performed the last calculations to generate the block. You should also find out how often payments occur and the amount of commission fees.

The complete register of reputable MonaCoin pools can be seen on the bitcointalk.org forum. The profitability of Mona mining can be calculated using the WhatToMine online calculator.

How and where to buy Monacoin cryptocurrency

The coin’s quick entry into the ranks of popular means of payment in Japan led to a guaranteed entry into key crypto exchanges in the Asian region. At the time of writing, Monacoin is traded on 10 trading platforms. The TOP by turnover includes:

• Bitbank - MONA/JPY;
• Zaif - MONA/JPY;
• Bittrex - MONA/BTC;
• QBTC - MONA/USDT;
• Livecoin - MONA/BTC;
• Bitbank - MONA/BTC;
• Upbit - MONA/BTC.

The main turnover on the upper two platforms occurs using the Japanese yen. By the way, exchanges trading this pair freely accept JPY as a means of payment. The total capitalization of the currency, at a price of $3.75 per 1 MONA, is $278,000,000. The peak price reached a little over $17 during the general growth of the cryptocurrency market since the beginning of autumn 2020.

US and European exchanges trade MonaCoin only against BTC and, in very rare cases, against USDT. This is due to the fact that for everyone except the Japanese, the coin remains a dark horse. Basic information and news on it are published only in Japanese and in most cases are not translated into English and beyond, so that a larger number of interested network participants can join in its use.

go

Wallets for MonaCoin

To store and carry out the necessary financial transactions, the owner of the “cat coin” must create a MonaCoin wallet by downloading it from the official resource of the project. Here the user is given a choice: you can download “heavy” wallets to your own PC that support the operating systems Windows, Linux (32- and 64-bit OS), MacOS or the “light” version of Electrum Mona; there is also a mobile version for Android – Coinomi.

Using software “heavy” MonaCoin wallets requires more than 2 GB of free space on your hard drive. The process of installing a wallet on a PC is as follows:

• download the appropriate version of the software storage and unpack it into a folder;
• we launch the monacoin-qt utility, and then wait for the Blockchain to synchronize - the procedure will take more than 2 hours.

When the MONA wallet is installed on your PC (the wallet file is created automatically), you need to make a backup copy and encrypt the electronic money storage. The MonaCoin wallet interface supports, among others, the Russian language and is intellectually understandable, similar to wallets of other cryptocurrencies.

Wallet Monacoin

Advantages and disadvantages

The history of the coin is noticeably different from most of its kind, therefore the list of positive and negative points about it will be different from the usual picture.

Let's start with the advantages:

• Safety. A peer-to-peer basis with a cryptographic component, based on the PoW protocol, allows you to transfer information from participant to participant directly.
• Anonymity. For many users, this is the key factor when choosing cryptocurrencies as a means of payment. In Monacoin, anonymity is absolute, but network participants can disclose incognito at their discretion, for example, when constantly selling goods through trading platforms, in order to gain a reputation as a reliable partner.
• There is no minimum commission for transfers. This moment played in favor of the developers by increasing the number of small operations. The minimum queue for execution forces participants to indicate a large commission in order to complete the transaction faster.
• Low mining difficulty. Although the CPU level has already been overcome, quite a few users are mining the coin with GPU-powered gaming/work PCs. The coin has a future, and if the developers competently translate all key documents and services, at least into English, the cost and demand for MONA will increase significantly;
• The rigor and simplicity of the platform allows transactions to be carried out instantly, and the mining speed is increased compared to similar coins.

Now about the negative aspects:

• Mining is low profitable. This factor is relevant for many popular cryptocurrencies. Mining on one GPU brings frankly small profits and is used only as an auxiliary process. Farms that require investment bring more income.
• Lack of support. Many cryptocurrencies released in recent periods are derivatives of real assets, which provide liquidity and value. There is no such support for Monacoin, but the fact that the bulk of coins are mined and used by representatives of one country with similar values ​​supports the value of the currency on exchanges.
• There is no option to cancel the transaction. It is for this reason that some trading platforms require sellers to reveal the identity of the holders of wallets for which payment is accepted.
• There is no verification of the correctness of the recipient's address in the system. This problem is quite rare among cryptocurrencies, but due to the venerable age of Monacoin, it is relevant. It consists in the fact that when sending coins to an address with an error that did not previously exist, such an address will be generated and MONA will go to it. Refunds will not be possible.

go

The main news recently

One of the latest news about MonaCoin: the largest chain of Japanese stores, Ark Akihabara, began accepting payments for its products (household goods) in MONA, strengthening the position of the coin, at least in the Land of the Rising Sun. And the news about the launch of the Segwit protocol pleased all cryptocurrency holders - now the national crypto coin is not inferior to the smart contract Ethereum, DASH or Monero.

Monacoin mining pools

To mine the coin in question, it is better to join existing capacities than to try to compete with them. Surprisingly, there is a choice for MONA, but there are many Japanese pools on the market. If we do not take into account sites where even an avid miner and Google translator can “break their legs,” then at the time of writing the material, the services that support Monacoin mining are as follows:

• mona.suprnova;
• aikapool;
• pool.n-engine;
• monacoin.miningpoolhub;
• coinfoundry.org;
• l8nit3-miners;
• asicpool.info.

The sites have proven themselves to be competent and profitable in many key and exotic crypto areas, and every user minimally familiar with mining has at least heard of most of them - for example, supernova or ASICpool.

go