There’s too much cool stuff to list here but have a look at the official website at https://getmonero.org. https://monero.garden is another introductory website. If you want a beginner friendly book that goes into depth about how monero works, have a look at mastering monero (you can download the pdf for free).
As for what the value is based on, the same as bitcoin: basically nothing. Just what people are willing to pay for it.
Besides privacy, the community is small but extremely dedicated and tight nit. Monero is also interesting because can be mined on CPU and is currently a good mining currency. The mining algorithm that it uses is cool because it works best on CPUs and makes ASICs unprofitable for now preventing centralization of mining (which has happened to bitcoin due to asics unfortunately)
Interesting. So since there is no ASIC, does that mean there is some kind of kernel bypass implemented in software?
It’s funny you mention that because there’s other hardware I’ve seen this happen to. Removing the reliance on an ASIC and doing it mostly in software (leveraging kernel bypass/user space since forwarding in kernel is slow), and using the CPU more heavily, especially the cache.
To the other points, thanks! I’ll check it out
While I’m not really sure how mining interfaces with the kernel, I do know that xmrig (the best RandomX miner) runs faster as root because it can change kernel CPU and memory paging settings. The RandomX hash algorithm is specifically designed to run best on CPUs, so that anyone trying to make an ASIC would basically have to make a pseudo-CPU which is very expensive. These ASICS do exist but they thankfully don’t get better efficiency over the best CPUs yet from what I’ve heard.
