XMR workgroup says IRS should study Monero

The United States Internal Revenue Service has better ways to spend taxpayer dollars than offering bounties to break Monero's privacy, a Monero working group says.

After the IRS announced it is offering up to $625,000 to anyone who can break Monero, a major Monero-focused workgroup expressed their take on the matter.

"$625,000 would be better spent by the IRS to hire a few consultants to teach their staff how Monero works and how its features allow users to opt-in to transparency.

The IRS announced its bounty program to trace transactions on Monero and Bitcoin's Lightning Network in early September 2020.

The IRS is not the only institution that wants to break Monero's privacy.

In August, a major cryptocurrency intelligence firm, CipherTrace, reportedly claimed that their crypto tracking tool is capable of tracing Monero transactions.

Previously, Russia's Federal Financial Monitoring Service announced that its new crypto tracking tool will "Partially reduce anonymity" of Monero transactions.

According to a Sept. 15 report by American law firm Perkins Coie, Monero enables users and virtual asset service providers, or VASPs, to disclose certain transaction details associated with a given account to a third party.

Designed to provide a private and untraceable cryptocurrency, Monero is the top privacy-focused coin by market capitalization at publishing time.

According to Monero Outreach, the coin also has the third-highest number of code contributors of all cryptocurrencies, behind only Bitcoin and Ether.