Fungibility
1 dollar = 1 dollar. One ounce of silver is equal to one ounce of silver. This is the essential premise of a working currency and a store of value. Without it, it does not work.
One Bitcoin is not equal to one Bitcoin, one Litecoin is not equal to one Litecoin and one Eth is not equal to one Eth. When you receive these coins, they often have years of history. They have been sent, divvied and mixed over and over for years. And all of this is public on the internet for anyone to see.
In fact, it is common now that someone send their bitcoin, Litecoin, eth or other coin to Coinbase or some other exchange and they notice that the coin has, at some point in its past been used to buy drugs on Silk Road or been involved in some other criminal activity. Then perhaps sent through a mixer, then to an exchange and then after a few transactions, ended up in your hands. Coinbase sees all this and for all they know you are a drug dealer that are trying to clean your drug money. They have to flag the transaction and freeze your account.
Even when you are completely innocent, you can suddenly get a message like this:
“Hello! Since the transaction triggered our KYC’s provider risk scoring system, we have to investigate the matter. Тhe transaction address sender has been reported as connected with illegal activity. That’s why we need more time to investigate this case.”
This only happens because your coins have a long and perhaps tainted history.
The most valuable Bitcoin, Litecoin or Eth is a coin that has just been mined, with no history. People are paying extra for these coins, as much as 20% extra, for “virgin Bitcoin”, because they are untainted by history and there is no reason to freeze spending of these coins, and it can't connect you to a crime.
Ask yourself, if a hacker has stolen 100 Bitcoin and send it to you. Can you spend them just like any other bitcoin? Of course not, you would run a huge risk attempting to spend them. Sending them to an exchange could result in your identity tied to the crime. Even if you mixed your coins, this would be visible and seen as suspicious. So 1 BTC is not equal 1 BTC.
(1 Virgin Bitcoin = 1.2 Regular Bitcoin)
The only coins that have true fungibility, are privacy coins. Coins like Monero mix every transaction with ten other fake decoy transactions. Buy flowers for your mom or drugs online, it is all mixed the same way. For every transaction you make, ten more fake transactions are added and then the next person send Monero and bring in another ten fake transactions and store it on the blockchain. It works, but it is inefficient, takes up a lot of space and all the transactions are still connected and stored publicly on the blockchain, just like with Bitcoin. Close, but not optimal.
In fact, in the past they have found ways to track Monero transactions with an 80% accuracy and since it is all stored forever on the blockchain, all the transactions could be de-anonymized. This specific security has been fixed now, but since the link between transactions is not completely broken, it is always a possibility that we find ways to connect the real transactions at some point in the future and thereby can de-anonymize all Monero transactions.
Bellow is a great talk that explains the flaws in the current “private” transactions by Monero
If you have a computer science background, you can read the technical explanation bellow, with proof that:
“62% of transaction inputs with one or more mixins are vulnerable to “chain-reaction” analysis”
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.04299/
Firo has a much more elegant solution compared to Monero, that completely break the link between transactions. Instead of mixing your coins. You burn them and make them disappear into one big pile of burned coins. A pile that consists of all coins that have ever been burned, not just ten fake coins. You then get new freshly minted coins with no history. Coins that nobody has ever seen before. You can send these to a new address, that nobody has ever seen before. Clean and efficient. There is not a bunch of fake transactions to mix in and sign for. There is not a bunch of decoy transactions that takes up space. There is no past history to analyze. There is no connection between your past transaction and your new transaction. Your transaction is simply one new unused address sending a coin with no history to a new unused address. Clean and simple. Like a “virgin bitcoin” being set for the first time, completely innocent.
So, in conclusion, 1 Firo = 1 Firo.
Firo was also the first privacy coin to implement Dandelion, to ensure that when you broadcast a transaction to the network. You are also anonymous.
This is another critical element in ensuring your privacy, at some point your computer need to publish a transaction to the network. A simple way to figure out who is who on the network, is to simply to see what computer publish what transaction. Dandelion prevent this de-anonymizing attack by randomizing the way transactions are published on the network.
You can watch this short video on Dandelion here:
PS. Firo has privacy on by default, but you can choose not to burn your coins. This would make the transaction work just like bitcoin. This has one big advantage. It makes it very easy for exchanges and wallets that already support bitcoin, to also implement Firo. All exchanges and wallets can easily integrate Firo in this way with very little work.
Some might say that because it is technically possible to send a coin in a way that is not private, that this is a bad thing. Personally, I consider it a feature. There are use cases where you want a transaction to be transparent too.
Decentralization
One way to estimate the value of a cryptocurrency is the size of its network. Not the users, not the amount of twitter followers, but the amount computers that run 24/7, that broadcast transactions, keep the transaction records and make the network work. In a way this IS the cryptocurrency, the network it self. Bitcoin has the highest value and has also, by far, the biggest network, with Bitcoin + Lightning, having 19.300 active public full nodes at time of writing.
Many cryptocurrencies with much higher marked cap than Firo, has only a few hundred computers running the entire network. A medium sized school with some printers connected has a bigger network than some of these cryptocurrencies. These networks are often fast, the sales pitch is often that transactions are fast with little to no fees.
But, if you only need to broadcast a transaction or block to a hundred computers, of course it will be fast. And if nobody is using the network, of course it will be cheap. Bitcoin and Ethereum transactions was also fast and cheap when nobody used the network.
The question is, will these networks scale? If the network grows to many hundred thousand computers, are you still able to broadcast transactions to every single node on the network without issues? Will they all be in constant agreement on the transaction history? Or will some miss an update? Sending 1.000 transactions per second to a hundred computers might work just fine, but try doing the same with a hundred thousand computers.
Imagine a highway, with no cars. Of course, you can drive fast, it’s a ton of space and nobody to crash into. Now, imagine a million cars driving on that same highway, all driving at full speed. Are they all still able to drive at full speed? With no crashes?
Bitcoin, Litecoin and Eth has proven over many years that their technology do scale. For over ten years these networks of many thousand of computers, connected across the globe has sent transactions without any issues. In only seconds new transactions and new blocks are broadcasted and seen by every node on the network. Even when you run the software on a cheap raspberry pi with a poor internet connection it works flawlessly.
This has true value, a proven track record of a working decentralized network. An essential part of a cryptocurrency. Firo has a similar system, but it also incentivizes nodes through its proof of stake program. With proof of stake, you can prove that you own 1000 Firo and setup a server running 24/7, this will get you a regular payout of 4.375 Firo about every two weeks.
Many Firo holders make passive income just by holding Firo, while at the same time they secure the network with servers running 24/7. This has led to many people setting up servers, making the Firo network huge. In addition, since you are getting paid to run these servers, most servers are dedicated servers with high bandwidth.
The size of the Firo network rival some of the biggest cryptocurrencies out there, making it one of the most decentralized and secure networks. At the time of writing it has 4,100 full nodes running 24/7 and this is just the masternodes, not the entire network of online computer running Firo.
https://masternodes.online/currencies/FIRO/
If we compare Firo to one of the largest cryptocurrencies, Litecoin. It only has 1,390 full nodes running at time of writing.
Clearly, Firo is heavily undervalued based on this metric.
Instant private transactions
In order to use a currency for daily transactions, it should be fast. When you buy a cop of coffee, it would be pretty awkward to stand there and wait for an hour before you and the waiter can be sure that the transaction actually goes through. Firo has solved this problem too.
Firo has a block time of 5 minutes (this might be reduced in the future). This means that it processes blocks twice as fast as bitcoin. In addition, Firo has a block size of 2 MB, twice the allowed block size of Bitcoin. Making the on-chain capacity 4 times greater in total. There is also likely that if the blocks where to be completely full, this limit would be raised.
This means that blocks are not going to be “full” any time soon and every transaction will be confirmed on the next mined block. It also means that the fees are very low and are likely to stay low for a long time.
Of course, waiting 5 minutes is still a bit awkward, so that is not good enough. Here Firo has another great feature, instant transactions. In addition to securing the network, the dedicated servers running Firo can also be used to provide other features. Including instant transactions.
The servers running Firo, need to behave honestly to continue to receive rewards every two weeks. Therefor it is in their best interest to validate transactions correctly. We can use this to enable instant transactions on the network. When a large number staking nodes agree that a transaction is valid, we can be sure that it will be included in a block and can approve it instantly.
This means that you can send a completely private transaction, get it approved in a few milliseconds by the huge number of computers on the network and pay almost nothing in fees. It sounds too good to be true. This is truly revolutionary and something no other cryptocurrency offer. It is also something most cryptocurrencies can’t offer, unless they make huge breaking changes to how they work, something that will cause chain splits, debate and conflict.
PS. At time of writing, instant transactions have not been enabled. This is a feature that is coming very soon, but need to be tested first. You can look at the roadmap bellow, to see great upcoming features soon to be launched.
Security
Talking about Proof of Stake and instant send. There is another feature enabled by the master nodes that is even more important. Better security.
Bitcoin is secure because of mining; it takes large amounts of computing power to create a valid block. While Ethereum is moving to proof of stake, to secure its network. It will be secure because people stake their hard-earned Eth.
Firo asks, why not use both? This would make the network infinitely more secure. Not only do an attacker need to have more than 50% of the computing power used to mine Firo, he would also need to control more than 50% of the masternodes to attack the network.
This makes a 51% attack impossible.
Honesty and Integrity
The history of the Firo project is one with many challenges. They have experienced critical bugs, FUD, angry investors with large amount of funds attacking the coin financially and 51% attacks on exchanges holding Firo. In these hard times the team behind Firo has acted with honesty and integrity, proving that they will always do the right thing.
When bugs have been detected, they have disclosed them and informed other cryptocurrency projects affected. Even when this has not been in their best interest. Not informing other cryptocurrency projects of bugs in their implementation, could have resulted in one competitor less for Firo, but they choose to do the moral thing and help competing privacy coins.
When the project was 51% attacked, an attacker was able to steal 900 000 Firo (This was before owning over 50% of the master nodes was required to successfully do a 51% attack. Now this attack is impossible). The team acted quickly and was able to lock the funds and prevent the attacker from getting away with the money. In this situation the team could have taken the coins for themselves, but instead they choose to burn them. Again, they proved that they will do the right moral thing, not enrich themselves.
This project has also taken huge risk, developing a brand-new private transaction system. They have done a rebranding. They have spent funds to get it tested by professional security experts.
This not simply a copy and paste coin, build on hype, promising great returns. They have worked on building the best privacy coin, for years, with little to no promotion of the project. Humble in the fact that the project still had room for improvement and should focus on that, not marketing or any form of promotion of the project. Until it was ready.
Now, the project has reached a point where we can safely say, that it is the best privacy coin and the best cryptocurrency. It is time the word gets out.
Great potential profit
Let’s be honest with ourselves and say, we all want to make a profit. Sure, we want to support a great project, that help provide a revolutionary payment system to the world, that is open a free for everyone in the world to join, that is completely private and secure. That has a great team of honest hardworking good people that you can trust. That potentially can help people all over the world transact freely and privately. It does feel good to help such a project.
But, being able to make passive income and invest in something that can potentially make you rich in the long term, is a great motivator too. With Firo you can help the network and get Firo transferred to your account every two weeks, like clockwork, just by owning Firo. This has no risk, you still control your private keys. “Not your keys, not your coins”. You can not lose any of your Firo.
Even if the price of Firo does not move an inch, you are still making an 11% interest every year with staking. That is better then the average return of the stock market. Over the past 140 years, U.S. stocks averaged 10-year returns of 9.2%,
Besides the passive income by becoming a master node owner. There is an even bigger potential gain. Lets look at the market cap of similar project to get an idea of where Firo might go.
Dash has a marked cap of $2,651,025,485, Firo has a market cap of $70,818,099. If Firo was to reach Dash in market cap, it would 37x it’s current price and go from 6.14 usd today, to 230 usd.
EDIT: May 2021. If Firo had Dash’s market cap of $3.9B, 1 FIRO would be worth $330.60, an upside of 23x.
Monero has a marked cap of $3,945,973,541. If firo was to reach Monero in market cap it would 55x it’s price to 342 usd.
EDIT: May 2021. If Firo had Monero’s market cap of $7.4B, 1 FIRO would be worth $623.15, an upside of 45x.
You can check the latest price, in relation to the market cap at page above.
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aKmPzeFmghatjQWVowkY4HYyZAwnMbQwVF
